The ‘Gaily Life’ of Wendel: Queerness as Communal Identity in Howard Cruse’s Comic Strip

Howard Cruse’s Wendel comic strip was the first of its kind when it began publication within The Advocate in early 1983. Here, for the first time, the LGBTQ+ community could see comics representations of ‘gaily life’ – depictions of queer people as parents, friends, colleagues and lovers, gay men who were, in Cruse’s own words, “people not penises”. In this paper I argue that these revolutionary depictions of gay men enabled Cruse to build a storyworld that, to quote Michel Foucault, presented queerness as a “‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex”. Using archived letters between Cruse and then editor of The Advocate, Robert McQueen, I show how Wendel’s recentring of queerness as a communal identity came out of Cruse’s fears over making humour out of casual sex in the face of AIDS. The resulting focus on queerness as a “way of life” also mirrored the ways in which the AIDS crisis united many queer men and women, engendering heterogeneous LGBTQ+ communities built on shared aims and values. Wendel’s depictions of queer communities therefore not only came out of the AIDS crisis, it also reflected how AIDS was reshaping LGBTQ+ identities to be both sexual and communal.