I had a friend from a visible minority come up to me on the weekend, andask why I didn’t have any Brown characters in the strip. My defense (though the question didn’t make me defensive) was that the characters were based on 5-6 of my closest friends – even down to their appearance – and none of them happened to be non-white. I have wanted to mix up the palette a bit, but realized I’m not entirely comfortable speaking from a point of view I have no direct experience with. I’m not real comfortable speaking for a group I’m not part of – and this has been reflected with my inclusion of the lesbian, Dez, a few years ago. Though I love drawing her, she hasn’t shined much on her own except for being “one of the boys”. I have to say it’s because I have no lesbian stories of my own to tell, besides of that variety. So, there she stays for now, sort of in character limbo because I don’t have the skill to imagine myself into another minority’s head. Without the ability (or right?) to tell a minority’s story, I feel that their inclusion would really be tokenism. I could be convinced otherwise, but for now, it’s how I feel. The more I considered the idea, the more I realized that the gay community is ghettoized by race. Sexual discrimination against Asian guys is entrenched, and the ethnic groups tend to glom together. This then is the resultant cartoon. If I failed to do the message properly, I was trying to say that the cartoon is largely based on truth – fantastical as it may appear at times – and that a rainbow of gays hanging out just doesn’t happen in our day-to-day. If I could start the cartoon over, yeah, I would have made one of them other than white, but for now the five main characters I have have far too many stories they need to tell.
