Saturday Morning Cartoons: Little Things

Welcome to Saturday Morning Cartoons, a segment where four artists take turns delighting you with their whimsy, facts and punchlines on Saturday mornings! Our esteemed cartoon critters are Cameron Glavin, Anna Bongiovanni, Megan Prazenica and Yao Xiao. Today’s cartoon is by Cameron.

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Cameron

Cameron is an illustrator hailing from Ohio. When she’s not drawing, she’s probably very, very quietly having loud thoughts about: queer things, her eventual shop, what to watch next on Netflix, food, names for her future pets, and tumblr.

Cameron has written 76 articles for us.

64 Comments

    • Dearest Anna, I love your mullet so much. So much that if I were to grow my own, it would be like worshipping a false idol. I can’t commit that kind of blasphemy.

  5. aw yay :)

    I wanted multi-colored hair for decades and never did it b/c I didn’t want the queer label. *sigh*

    These days I look according to my own internal preferences — it’s still painfully uncomfortable to see the shift in how people relate to me, but existing as actual me on the outside, in the real world every day, has been worth it. Long way of saying comic was relatable and made me happy for both of us. *mini high-five*

    • “—it’s still painfully uncomfortable to see the shift in how people relate to me” – this this this. But I am working on it.

  6. Yes, this. Lately I’ve been straddling(if you will) the line between Gay Enough and Too Gay. Like wearing a necktie and skirt to the store–great frame.

  10. Holy crap I identify with this comic so much. Also, the mullet thing?!!? My freshman year of college, I couldn’t afford to get my hair cut so I started getting a mullet. This bugged my roommate so much that she basically said “we need to kill this fucking thing”, so she took a disposable razor and some old hair-cutting scissors to the back of my head/neck and got rid of it. Easily one of the most terrifying moments of my life.

  14. This is so good. SO GOOD. Camp was definitely the moment when I shifted from “too gay?” to “gay enough?”

    • So. I was thinking when I wrote it that I really wanted that shirt. So I’m going to make that shirt. And presumably if I can do that I can probably figure out how to make a pin? I’ll keep you updated.

      • Cameron, this comic was very relatable and I loved all of it, but my first thought was totally, “I’m going to make that shirt!!!”

        So when I make that shirt, I’m going to send you a picture, get ready. :)

  18. I worried over the tiniest things — not even stereotypical behaviors — like if the way I worded things sounded lesbian or if people thought my sister and I were lesbians. Once I came out, there was no being closeted. It did take quite a while for me to evolve into being visibly queer, and like almost everyone commented, there’s never enough o that!

  19. I hesitated to get a pixie cut for so long, even tho so many women I knew were getting them (I’d have to say they were all probably queer women), because I was afraid I would look “gay” and I wasn’t out yet. I came out to my parents about a month ago, and yesterday I finally got a really short pixie cut because DAMMIT WHO CARES WHETHER PEOPLE THINK I’M GAY OR NOT! (And I have sensory issues and the hair touching my neck was bugging me)
    Also I do kind of want to look gay to…other gay women, because how the hell do we identify each other if not for things like haircuts, clothes, etc?

  21. This is so good. I don’t know if it’s just that it resonates so much – not in the specifics for me, but in the tenseness vs the easy joy of the two sides – but I think there’s also really high quality comicing going on here. It is so good.

  22. This is so good! Lately I’ve definitely found myself more and more in the “is it gay enough?” mind frame as regards haircuts, clothing.

  23. Wait, wearing your hoodie over your butt makes you look like a lesbian? Oh good, I’ve inadvertently been sending the right signals. :P

    Lovely comics, like every week :3

    • You know, I didn’t think that was a thing. I still don’t think it’s a thing. Despite that, I totally internalized it the exact moment I overheard it in the hallway in middle school.

      Mostly because I thought maybe I was that person’s particular source for that totally not real stereotype? Even though I hadn’t come out and at that point still didn’t know I was queer? Closet logic.

  24. This is perfect! I spent years trying to stay “under the radar” and I was absolutely miserable. Giving myself my first buzzcut the other year finally snapped me out of all that silliness though, and I can definitely say I’m happier for it. :)

  25. Memories flashing back. Sleeping on the floor when friends slept over and wearing oversized hoodies while all the while hiding who I was inside. Then the last line hits hard: “Only to realize that my best self is the person I was most afraid to become.”

  26. This is so my life. Except since I’m trans, it was me going overboard never to appear girly. I even pretended not to like pop music for so long just because I thought people would perceive me as being too feminine.

    I was friends with a boy in elementary school who loved the Spice Girls movie and I was kind of a jerk to him about it even though I secretly loved watching it with him multiple times. And then in high school, this other guy was talking about how much he liked “Toxic” by Britney Spears and in my head, I was like, “YES, I LOVE THAT SONG,” but I stayed silent. It made no sense! I wouldn’t even allow myself to be myself around people that definitely wouldn’t have made fun of me for it!

    And now I’m sitting here listening to Kylie Minogue and wearing an Agent Carter t-shirt. So, take that, younger self!

  27. I definitely relate to having spent years being afraid of things that would have made me happier…

    • This right here ^^^ is how we know or society’s twisted!! It makes us fearful of becoming happier, that’s so hard to wrap my mind around.

  29. Oh man. This really took me back. Even before I new that I was gay, I was always so paranoid about being perceived as a lesbian. I didn’t have that “Oh shit, I’m gay.” moment until I was 18. So, there were a lot of situations that I was with friends and I slept on the floor while they all piled in bed together. I legitimately wouldn’t even HUG girls, not even my best friends. Any time my mom would refer to one of her friends as “girlfriend” I would get so uncomfortable and tell her not to do that. Now that I have been out for a few months I am scared that my friends from high school think that I had feelings for them, when in reality I was waaaaay too deep in the closet to even consider it.

    • I feel all of this.
      Also, you just gave me an ah-ha moment. Where I realize why I hated hugs. My closetqueerbrain was 1) not really used to physical contact as affection 2) not desirous of man hugs, 3) maybe too desirous of some particular lady hugs? because affection and wow soft and they smell nice and oh god stop juststopyou’renotgayokaynomorehugsever

      So basically my “personal bubble” as I called it was really just my shame chamber.

      My shame-ber.

      • Oh my gosh! I totally had a shame chamber. Friends would lean in for a hug, see me tense up, and go “oh, I forgot you don’t like hugs.” And I did like hugs. I just…

        I didn’t know I was queer. I just knew I was different and awkward, and that whatever expressions of affection that my friends made, I had to scale mine back a few degrees to be “safe.” (Safe from what?) Where they’d sign “love” at the bottom of a note they passed me in class, I’d sign with “hugs.” (I still sign greeting cards like that to this day!)

        Thinking back to that time makes me really, really grateful that so much has changed. Those horrible, stuck, shameful secret feelings of intense friendship that I could never figure out, feelings which my friends never seemed to suffer from in return? Turns out once you grow up and come out, those go away. Now my friends are my friends, and my crushes are my crushes, and they both have their lovely appropriate places where they get to breathe and thrive and be fully understood.

        Thank our lord Vanderwhal it gets better!

        • I relate to all this SO MUCH. I was super worried that friends would find out how much I cared about them and think I was creepy or clingy or desperate. Somehow I knew that when I said “I love you” to a friend it meant something different than when she said it to me.

          Thinking about this makes me wish I could go back in time and give past me a giant hug. That was not a fun mind-space to live in.

    • It’s so strange how, in retrospect, it’s like we all knew before we really knew. All the clues were there, but it’s like we’re a puzzle we had to piece together first. A big ol’ queer puzzle.

      • Right? I somehow simultaneously knew I was in love with my best friend, daydreamed about spending my entire life with her, felt like I had to hide how much I cared about her… and also really thought I was straight. As Cameron said in a previous comment: closet logic. I’m totally going to steal that phrase.

      • This! When I finally came out to myself (after the initial freakout) I was like “No fucking duh!” My favorite show was Queer As Folk and when I would talk to friends about “what I look for in a guy” I would say things like “I really want him to be a feminist, is into spoken word poetry, and look like a lumberjack but doesn’t really go outside, really I just like flannel, I guess.” I said that so many times to myself and totally believed that I was straight.

        I think of it like Erica Hahn’s realization on Grey’s Anatomy. When she had sex with Callie it was like finally getting the glasses she needed as a kid. Paraphrased: “I needed glasses as a kid, I was fine without them I thought. But then I got glasses and those green blobs I had been seeing my entire life were leaves. On trees. I just needed glasses. I wasn’t broken.” I SOBBED. Because I had never heard anything that articulated how I had felt to a T before.

        I’ll probably write a piece at some point about that episode and submit it to Autostraddle for funsies. Man, this life really is one big queer puzzle.

      • Yes, this thread! Everyone raise your hands if you thought you were just a weird person with weirdly intense feelings about your friends and worried you were going to grow up to be some sort of strange stalker!

        And then grew up to be a totally normal well-adjusted queer person!

        :-D

  30. Umm, yep. This could be my life (except for me it was thumb rings, not hoodie woes). On point, as always.

  32. Oooh, I was always the one who could spot other queers through their layers of conformity armor. Of course, younger me had the subtlety of a sledgehammer and would just be like “bitch, you’re gay and you’re hot, lez make out.” That was not the most empathetic tack to employ and thusly I got defensive responses to what I perceived as a… liberating statement. But I just really wanted to make out.

    • ROFL. I kind of wish someone had “sledgehammered” me like that. It might’ve saved a lot of years of grief ;-)

        • We should totally make it a thing. I swear I waited about six years for someone to do it to me! When they didn’t, I had to do it myself, damnit ;-)

  34. I loved this cartoon. Thanks Cameron!

    To quote the artist from another reply in this thread, “Closet logic” sums this up so accurately.

    It would be amazing to have an accompanying article about this. It’s fascinating, tragic and at the same time comforting to recognize all this stuff. And that for so many of us it happened at a sub-conscious level, before we were even aware of our queerness.

    In fact I am headed to the suggestion box right now!

  36. This is amazing and did things to my heart!

    Tbh I have been Defiantly Queer since I was 11, but this is still a feeling I can understand and relate to – I was, for a time, afraid to show my defiant queerness outwardly, and then as a lazy femme just never got read as queer, until I said, “Fuck it,” and shaved the side of my head about six months ago. (Best decision, in case anyone is on the fence about this and still reading these comments.)

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