REMEMBRANCE
Howard Cruse, Seminal Queer Cartoonist, Dead at 75
Creator of “Wendel,” “Stuck Rubber Baby” remembered as a pioneer and a mentor
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
Howard Cruse, a groundbreaking
cartoonist
who pioneered LGBTQ
themes four decades
ago, has died at the age of 75.
His husband, Ed Sedarbaum,
said Cruse, who lived in Williamstown,
Massachusetts, was diagnosed
with lymphoma in August
and passed away at the nearby
Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfi
eld on November 26. The couple
moved to western Massachusetts
in 2003 after living together in
New York City for 34 years. Here,
the couple were active and respected
members of both the arts
community and the LGBTQ rights
movement.
Cruse’s website at howardcruse.
com offers a panorama of the enormous
volume of creative work he
produced over more than half a
century. His greatest fame came
from his “Wendel” comic strip recounting
the adventures of a gay
man, his lover, and their friends
and families, which ran in The Advocate
from 1983 until 1989, and
from his 1995 graphic novel “Stuck
Rubber Baby,” which drew on his
own struggles as a young closeted
gay man during the heyday of
the Civil Rights Movement in the
South of the 1960s. The work was
hailed for its insight into issues of
race and sexuality in that era.
Cruse was born on May 2, 1944
in Birmingham, Alabama, the
second son of a photojournalist/
Methodist minister and his wife.
Sedarbaum told The Berkshire Eagle
that his husband was raised to
be “mild mannered,” “very sweet,”
and “really considerate,” but that
Cruse was not himself religious.
No scolds, his parents were very
supportive of his artistic passions.
As a precocious teenager of
sorts in 1959, Cruse created a
comic strip “Calvin” for the St.
Clair County Reporter, the local
newspaper in the family’s hometown
of Springville, Alabama. A
cartoon art contributor to national
humor magazines as well, Cruse,
at 16, was invited to New York to
meet the famous cartoonist Milton
Caniff, whose strips “Terry and the
Pirates” and “Steve Canyon” were
syndicated nationally.
Cruse demonstrated more eclectic
arts inclinations when he attended
Birmingham Southern
College, where he became involved
in the theater program — acting,
designing sets, playwriting, and
directing. For the campus literary
magazine, he wrote a satire of the
John Birch Society, the most signifi
cant far right organization of
the time. The magazine’s faculty
adviser okayed its publication but
insisted on appending a full-page
disclaimer.
After college, Cruse worked as
an art director for a Birmingham
television station. For two years,
his “Tops & Button” cartoon appeared
in a Birmingham newspaper,
and then for a decade he
produced “Barefootz,” a favorite in
the underground comic world, admired
for its subversive tone.
Two years after moving to New
York in 1977, Cruse met Sedarbaum,
and like so many couples of
that time they enjoyed an extended
engagement until they were able to
legally marry in 2004.
In 1980, Cruse founded “Gay Comix,”
an anthology series for LGBTQ
cartoonists. His own work for
the series often explored the complicated
challenges of growing up
gay in the pre-Stonewall South.
“Gay Comix” quickly resonated
nationwide, among both aspiring
young queer cartoonists and other
youth, many of them still closeted,
who had never seen representations
of their lives before. Cruse
mentored younger artists and contributed
his work pro bono to gay
rights and AIDS groups. In 1985,
he created a safe sex poster for Gay
Men’s Health Crisis.
While creating “Wendel” for The
Advocate in the 1980s, Cruse was
also a frequent contributor to The
Village Voice. Sedarbaum told The
Berkshire Eagle that his husband’s
work in that decade “was an avenue
to LGBTQ cartoonists to talk
ED SEDARBAUM
Howard Cruse, 1944-2019.
COURTESY OF MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS
Howard Cruse was the founding editor of “Gay Comix.”
➤ HOWARD CRUSE, continued on p.9
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