Sterotypes and Stuck Rubber Baby

I'm really happy you chose to focus one week of the semester on stereotypes, because I think as a culture it is one thing we are acutely aware of in some areas, and in others I think we cling to them because it fits in our nice, safe worldview. Obviously it is a complex subject matter, and comics is probably one of the last places most people would see as being a problem area for cliched stereotypes to exist. We've discussed a lot in class about the obvious stereotypes that exist about comic readers, fanbases, and particularly gender in relation to readership, but I think there are a lot of unaddressed stereotypes being represented within the community that are also causing a limitation of readership. Women obviously being a large demographic that have a hard time navigating through all the impossibly chested, sexually charged superheros to find something actually believable. Though the market has opened up quite a bit for women comics authors, and as a result I feel the general market in original comics has shifted towards a more ambiguous subject matter and more realistic scenarios within the stories. However, the majority of the readership are still young adult males, and america being a capitalistic society it is going to market the majority of the content towards the demographic that can make the most profit.

To tie this tangent into my reading of Stuck Rubber Baby, I feel the LGBT community, while obviously having made a ridiculous amount of progress towards social acceptance in the last 10 years, is a demographic that is still incredibly stereotyped within the media. While there is a significant presence of LGBT characters on many tv shows and movies in todays world, I would challenge how many of them really break any new ground in regards to their depiction of said characters as actual people. Even a show like Modern Family, which sheds a largely neutral light on two married gay men raising a girl, still relies on incredibly old character archetypes to depict them in a way that is both funny and still palatable to the majority of white, conservative americans. And if you've ever seen the documentary "The Celluloid Closet" or a similar film, its easy to see these character archetypes are grown out of decades and decades of the same characters showing up in films, most of which depict them as harmless humor devices, or truly disgusting villains to be reviled. This is the exposure that the majority of older americans, particularly the baby boomers, grew up with and it is something that will probably not change for most of them.

I think that was why I was drawn to Stuck Rubber Baby and its depiction of a man growing up in the midst of the baby boomer generation and dealing with the cultural-wide repression of sexuality, racism, and incredibly insensitive stereotyping. Obviously as a member of the LGBT community, I identify with the challenges the character grew up with, however I think a lot of the issues he was facing were incredibly tied to growing up in the time and place which he did. While it is harder for me to relate to that, I think it is important to see a fairly accurate depiction of the incredible repression someone in that environment would have faced. I also find it interested from its fairly unpleasant and ugly depiction of a time period most people of the same generation regard as paradise. Though the sexual repression of the 1950's is a common topic of depiction amongst most media, there is still a kind of witholding that I think draws from a nostalgia most people still hold towards a "simpler time". I did thoroughly enjoy the rather blunt depiction of the time period for the main character, especially since he wasn't aware of his sexuality in the midst of it. So he didn't really face any of the direct prejudices an openly gay man, or a black person would have faced at the time, but he was very honest in his observation of the prejudice he did see. As we discussed in class, I do think the importance of this release in the comic world has diminished over time as  more honest depictions of gay characters in media has increased, and this work is definitely dated in a lot of ways. However, I do think it is a good reference point, and a very interesting study of a time period that is so overly sentimentalized its almost impossible to find an accurate depiction.