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 Praz and Yao Xiao. Today’s cartoon is by Megan!
Megan Prazenica is an animator/artist from Pittsburgh, PA. She now lives LA and life has been interesting ever since. When Megan isn't making art comics, or video games, she can be found wrecking havoc on the ultimate frisbee field as her alter-ego, "Bacon." Catch up with her on her website, her tumblr or tweet @MeganPraz.
Megan has written 42 articles for us.
<3
Heartstrings, man.
This is beautiful. Thank you.
Love your comics, Megan! Keep on keeping on!
Oh Megan. I feel this!
Oh, this gave me the ugly cries. I’ve had these feelings before. It’s not fun. *hugs & love*
Perfectly nails it <3
THIS is so real. Thank you for expressing it <3
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Been thinking about these same experiences, about the violence that I’ve internalized against myself. Every time I worry I look too gay for work/family, every time I censor myself to maintain the illusion of straightness, I do it to keep myself feeling safe. So mad about it, but this comic makes me feel much less alone.
This is literally my life! Thank you for putting it into words.
Perfect<3
You get me!
Perfect comic is perfect.
So much this. Amazing. Thank you.
This is perfect. It left me all teary eyed because it’s so true it hurts
Where does the self preservation ends and the internalized homophobia begins? How do you know when you’ve crossed that line?
I think that would make for an interesting round table with the team. Just a suggestion
Would love to read this. Internalized homophobia is such an important topic and personal for me also. Difficult questions are best shared.
i could talk about internalized homophobia for dayyysssssss
Please do! :)
Can you? please?
This is such a good question! I think about it a lot. And yeah a round table would be the best :)
Ugh I do this all the time – not exactly related to having a girlfriend but in other ways.
Although I did outright lie about a date I had recently – saying it was with a ‘guy’ when it was actually with a girl.
Yes. The internalized homophobia that has kept me from mentioning my wife in certain contexts. It has made her upset and I’ve tried to explain that it in no way means that I don’t love her. That it is me working through my own issues.
One of my reasons for going to A-Camp this year was to work on being more out and proud, more comfortable in my queer skin. And I do think it helped. On the way back home to the midwest the woman on the plane by me asked what kind of camp I had attended. I only paused for a minute before saying it was a queer camp. She looked confused and I explained that it was a lbt camp and then we chatted about it for a few minutes. It was fine.
Now back in my small town I do more often and more confidently mention my wife, though there are still some contexts where I censor myself. It’s tricky. But I am so grateful for Autostraddle for creating this online community of discourse and support in addition to the wonder that is A-Camp!
I struggle with this so much. I really feel it isolates me. Super hard. Diffucult to talk about. Thank you for this comic.
<3 I know that feel.
I’ve been having an especially bad time for the internalized homophobia lately, so this is super timely. Thanks for writing this.
Yup.
This was beautiful. So many feelings. Especially when I feel so much guilt from the fundamentalism of my childhood and young adult life. I hated it and I hated myself, but I still participated in it. Sometimes I wonder if I ever drove anyone to suicide with my comments. It haunts me. Sometimes I just want to be invisible. I’ll bat away my wife’s hand because I’m afraid of how people might react. I feel so bad and tell her later I want it as much as her, I’m just afraid of someone being violent. Afraid, guilt… words that keep buzzing in my ears like obnoxious mosquitoes.
It fed into my self-hatred for years. It started as a child, being told I was an evil, terrible sinner that deserved hell. That sort of thing stays with you. On my knees, sobbing so many late nights and into the early morning as a teenager because I had “queer feelings” or “thoughts” and begged God to “fix me”. Any kind of failure or letdown in my life kept adding to it. At last, my loved ones finally did an intervention this year. Telling me I needed to learn how to stop hating myself and let go of the anger.
It’s all so much more toxic than we realize. It’s easy to ignore or brush off.
I feel this. I was working at a Walmart doing a one-day product demo with the sweetest little old ladies in a military/agro-industrial town in Oklahoma and we were talking about how I would be moving to France soon after.
“Be careful, you might meet a nice fella and never come back home.”
**silence while I don’t tell them that I am moving back to France to live with my girlfriend
“That’s what happened to this nice local boy. He went off to Iraq with the army and now he lives in England.”
“Oh, he met an Englishwoman in Iraq?”
“No, he met an Englishman actually, but it doesn’t matter as long as he’s happy.”
I felt like such a jerk for not being honest and assuming that because she was 70+ and in rural Oklahoma that she would be the one to judge me.
Aww, Rachel… *hugs*
Oh man. 100% me.
Damn, this hit me right in the feels, and reading this comments really got the waterworks going…
~FEELS~
Saaaame, minus the girlfriend.
wow. This gave me all the feels. The last few panels and wondering if it’s all in your head is something I struggle with a lot.
The feels because it took me years to hug or vaguely PDA with ANYONE I’m involved sexually or romantically to in public.
This was so real !!! Great one
This made me teary. <3
I feel this so hard. I’m always torn between wanting people to know I’m queer and wanting to just blend in and be accepted. Moment to moment, I never really know which side of myself is going to win out.