Introduction ⇑ ⇓

Dot	The early 1970s were an exciting time for Jack Chick. Chick Publications had just taken off in earnest, competent artist Fred Carter had just been welcomed into the fold, and Chick himself was in the midst of a productivity high, having churned out six whole tracts in 1971, a Personal Best he would almost double in ‘72. Now all he needed was a spicy topic for his next tract. Luckily for him, The Gays had just invented homosexuality, so he had something to rail against. And rail he did, getting himself all hot and bothered until finally he was ready to thrust himself onto the scene and whip out his five-inch…booklet about how very cross he God is about gays existing. Understandably, there was something of a fallout, something Jack Chick had never experienced before. Not only was his office getting angry phone calls from gay activists (Really, what do you expect, handing out hate literature with your phone number on it at a Pride parade?) but he found himself getting turned down by the televangelists whose shows he used to be able to plug his tracts on. Plugging Christian comics on national TV was one thing, but expanding out to open and direct homophobia would obviously fall foul of the Fairness Doctrine and nobody wanted to fuck about and find out with that shit. Luckily, Jack learned his lesson and never did anything controversial ever again.
Jessica	This really was Chick's first foray into addressing the Christian bug-a-boo of homosexuality. The seminal event in the genesis of the gay rights movement in America, the Stonewall Riots, had just taken place three years prior. Gays and lesbians were beginning to push back against long standing cultural efforts to keep them in the closet and prevent them from being recognized and participating in wider society, and demanding things like the right to marry and the right to not be arrested for existing in public. Chick obviously felt that they were getting far too uppity for their britches and that this simply could not abide. It's a well he'd return to several times over the next few decades, and we've previously covered some of his more odious attempts in the past. Given that modern Christians seem to have the same bug crawl up their asses as of late, and once again in honor of Pride Month, we present here for your consideration: The Gay Blade.

Cover / Page 1 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	Oh boy. I can already tell just from the cover art that this tract is going to contain incredibly fair, balanced, and not at all insensitive depictions of gay people.
Dot	Oh it gets even better when you know who the cover model is.
Jessica	Ah, yes, the limp-wrist salute. Timeless emblem of the Gay Rights movement. The lambda symbol… not so much. Kind of interesting Chick didn't opt to replace that on the cover in the revision given that it significantly decreased in prominence during the 90's. So, I gotta ask… who exactly was the cover model? Because from this angle, it kinda looks like one of those silhouette portraits of George Washington.
Dot	They got a guy at the Chick Publications office to pose for it. His name? Jack T. Chick. Not even kidding. According to Art of Jack T Chick author and professional Chick bootlicker Kurt Kursteiner, one of the things that David W Daniels told him when he met with him and Chick that one time was how Chick posed for various Carter drawings. Specifically he mentioned the evolution wallchart, pictures of The Devil in Light of the World, and the absolute masterpiece above. One can only hope they made him wear the baggy shirt and flares that the silhouette implies and all. Oh, and following up Jess on what you were saying about the dated imagery on display, I was about to chip in with a snarky comment about how it's not like Chick ever did research ever again after this one tract, but every decade since has had him push out at least one tract where he tries to be topical in his homophobia, and he STILL doesn't really come back and change much when he came back to revise this one. On the one hand, I quite like having these little snapshots of where his brainworms were feasting at any given time. On the other, it means that to this day he's got WATCH OUT FOR SCARY LAMBDAS long after they've fallen out of use in much of the queer community. I guess the colour format doesn't really allow him to use a pride flag, and I imagine if he'd lived long enough to see the newer versions the sight of it would have killed him instantly.
Jessica	It's very interesting indeed. Generally he just goes and shoe-horns in stuff related to AIDS. You can see a similar situation over in That Crazy Guy! Before the AIDS crisis hit the scene, old-school bigots like Chick had to settle for half-assed “moral” arguments against homosexuality instead and rely heavily on STI's like Gonorrhea and Herpes, which aren't nearly as scary (and thus far less persuasive) than AIDS ultimately proved to be. Turns out a fatal epidemic was the best thing to happen to homophobes in the last 50 years or so (ick), especially considering how a lot of them fared in the face of the more recent one.
Erin	The lambda here is so distorted it looks more like a hammer to me. Or maybe an overachieving, skewed tau? In any case, the differences between the ‘72 version and the republished one are minimal, so I won’t be commenting much on them. Chick mostly just changed a few panels and cleaned up the typesetting.

Page 2 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	I imagine the grooms aren’t even looking at the priest, they’re just staring ahead with dead-eyed neutrality.
Jessica	Perhaps it's just two department store mannequins wearing tuxedos they lifted from a local Men's Warehouse? That was probably the only way they were going to get two gay men to actually participate in this ridiculousness… I guarantee it.
Erin	Even in the reprint, his posture is crooked and hesitant. It’s like he’s recoiling from them, or has a weird itch in his collar. Already signaling gay = filthy and to be shunned before he’s said a thing.
Dot	Chick and Carter are distorting reality hard to GET this image of the priest being all hesitant and put off by the whole thing too. This is the first of many things Chick lifts wholesale from a Life Magazine article from their 1971 Year In Pictures issue. Far from being a reluctant participant, the ceremony depicted in the article was officiated by Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, author of ‘The Lord is My Shepherd and He Knows I'm Gay,’ and co-founder of Christopher Street West, organizers of the first ever Gay Pride Parade, a year after the Stonewall riots. He would perform marriage ceremonies for gay couples, even though they had no legal backing whatsoever at the time, because weddings are nice and people who want them should be allowed to have them. Dude was at the absolute forefront of queer activism and Carter draws him like he's been forced into it. Note also how Carter exaggerates the hell out of the receding hairline of the darker-haired man. Classy, Fred. Real classy.

Page 3 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	I can't tell if Carter is just really bad at drawing human faces or if he's intentionally tried to make the happy couple look absolutely miserable. Also I love how we have two pages depicting a gay wedding, with absolutely no context and then we're hit with a rhetorical question out of nowhere. What's he referring to? Gay marriage? Marriage in general? Tacky “Just Married” signs? Also whose arm is around who in the second panel?
Erin	I’d say the one on the right is reaching over. The lighting looks like it’s his sleeve. At least he’s not throwing as much shade as he usually does; nothing about the panel jumps out as negative to me… until the line.
Dot	It's great because there's such a different context between reading this in 1972 and reading this in 2024. In 1972, two men getting married was an impossible hypothetical scenario, completely illegal in all fifty American states. Gay marriage ceremonies such as those officiated by Perry were performed, but not legally recognised, and a photo of two men getting married, or indeed, showing any kind of romantic affection towards each other, is provocative in any context. Meanwhile in 2024, we look at an image of two men getting married like “Yup, that's a wedding all right.” Chick lost. It's ceded ground now. We've still got a long way to go but gay people are pretty much normalized in society, and by damn we're here to stay.
Jessica	Is that Alberto Rivera throwing rice there?!? That is the absolute last cameo I'd expect here… especially since Chick wouldn't fall in with that con man for another seven years or so.
Dot	Clearly this is a prequel comic, where Alberto is still doing Nefarious Catholic Things. You know how much those Catholics LOOOOVE those gays. *sarcasm detector explodes*

Page 4 ⇑ ⇓

Dot	Couple of interesting things to note about this pic here. First of all, Carter has based this drawing off another photo in the Life Magazine article. Given how much this one article is gonna come up, I’m gonna go ahead and assume it’s the entire basis of Chick's research into gay culture here. Second of all, he's changed the man's t-shirt from “Gay Liberation” to “Gay Revolution”. A subtle but important change in wording there. Third, the original photo also has the mother and child, but the child is a baby in a pram and the mother is giving the gay men a dirty look. Chick once again changes this to make the gay men look like more of an existential threat to The Children Won't Somebody Please Think Of The Children simply by existing outside. I swear that man would not have been able to handle harnesses, leather daddies and pup hoods.
Blake	So I went and looked at the photo that the first panel is based on, and it looks a lot like Carter has given the person with the Bouffant a distinctly predatory leer that they definitely don’t have in the photo. Subtle Fred.
Erin	“To most people, it’s a big joke…” Yeah, you can tell the original tract came out 50 years ago. Also, “gay militants”. Right out of the gate with the negative framing.
Jessica	I don't know if it could really be said that anybody thinks of Gay Rights as “a big joke”. To people in the GSM community I'd say it's usually as serious as a heart attack, especially given how much it's come under attack in the last 5 to 10 years. To bigots, it's considered a grievous attack on public decency and family values. Nobody really writes it off as a joke, and even if some people did in 1972 they sure as hell had stopped by 2000.
Dot	It's interesting how much emphasis Chick is putting on the lambda as a queer symbol because it's certainly not one that's endured to the present day. I suppose it lines up with stuff like Chick reframing the peace symbol as a Spooky Thing in other tracts at the time, but it's not even a thing I recall seeing much in older videos about the history of gay culture and protests. Unless it turns out that The Gays know where all the secret caches are in Half Life 2.

Page 5 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	Not gonna lie, aside from that last line this makes being gay sound kinda badass.
Erin	The guy on the right from last panel is back on the far left hand side of this one. And yeah, I’ll agree with Blake. So far the gays don’t look all that unsympathetic. Their faces are drawn to be kind of ugly, and the narration clearly isn’t positive, but that’s it.
Jessica	“Shadowy”? That sounds a bit hyperbolic to me. They use a rainbow as a symbol for crying out loud. And the “agony of rejection”? Clearly, Chick wasn’t at all aware of just how hopping gay bars and nightclubs can be. He should have asked Fred… something tells me he might have had at least a clue.
Dot	Their tragic lives? Gosh, is there something about our society that is making their lives tragic? We're all trying to find the guy who did this. In fact, fuck it! I'm going off on one. Queerphobic shitfucks just LOOOOOVE to point to angry gay activists and go "oh i thought gay was supposed to mean happy but you lot sure are angery hurrrrrrr!" YEAH AND WHY DO YOU FUCKING THINK THAT IS?! It cannot be fucking emphasized enough that gay rights movements of the 70s stemmed DIRECTLY from the riots caused by violent police attack after violent police attack after violent police attack on queer spaces and bodies in the previous years. You treat us like animals long enough? Fine! We'll treat you like abusive zookeepers! And this is BEFORE we get into all the stuff that happened since this tract's first publication. Before the assassination of Harvey Milk. Before the AIDS crisis. Before Section 28. Before DOMA. Before the murder of Matthew Shepard. Before Fred Phelps and Steven Anderson cheering on our murderers. Before the Pulse massacre. Before the MASSIVE escalation of transphobia on both sides of the pond. Before the bombardment of Bathroom Bills and Don't Say Gay laws and whatever the fuck JK Rowling decides to tweet tomorrow. Before the murder of Brianna Ghey. You're goddamn right we're not all rainbows and yellow brick roads. You bastards keep killing us! And all Jack has to say to that is "lol u mad." Fuck him.
Jessica	I'm sensing a wee bit of hostility here. Somebody angry, indeed. But you know what? She's absolutely correct. I believe the Chick-types would call this “righteous anger”, and I'm all for it. So, go on with your bad self, girl!

Page 6 ⇑ ⇓

Jessica	Chick's main complaint in this section seems to just be with the fact that gays and lesbians exist and are visible in public. Oh the horror… You get this sort of deranged thinking with the whole “But, but… what about Straight Pride Month!?!” See… it's not so much about specifically celebrating being gay per se, but rather about celebrating all of the shit they've had to go through and put up with because they're gay. They're proud of having survived your persecution. Straight people don't get a Pride Month because nobody's ever told them they aren't really people for being straight. Or… you know, just straight up killed them for it.
Erin	Why are lesbians not in scarequotes? To be fair, the original version doesn’t seem to have them. There’s not much else to say here except… “Militants boast.” Not much of a student of history, but I don’t think LGBT+ activists were BOASTING about their identity. Beside that, I don’t detect much actual hostility. That’s probably gonna have to wait till after the next few panels.
Jessica	We went ahead and tracked down recordings of the episode of The David Susskind Show mentioned here… because we go the extra mile for you, dear readers. It's actually quite an interesting footnote in the history of gay rights, and I suggest you check them out if you've got a spare 90 minutes or so. However, they seem to be bringing it up here to make it seem like they were featured on the show to paint lesbians in a sympathetic light. But in actuality, the host is rather condescending to the guests, and cites religious tradition as justification for his opinions. Neither the guest panel nor much of the audience are particularly amused with his behavior, though.
Dot	Can we just take a moment to appreciate the fact that in his own special way, Jack Chick is now directly responsible for the stories of these women continuing to be told. This is an absolutely delightful piece of lesbian history here that I’m now aware of thanks to the fact that Jack decided to talk about it in his shitty little comic.
Jessica	I don't mean to keep prattling about this, but there's one other thing I want to mention before we move on. If you look at Carter’s illustration of the two women flanking David Susskind in Panel A, you'll notice he drew the lady to the right of the frame as wearing dark glasses. This is supposed to be Lyn Cupferman who was one of the panelists. However, as you can see in this archival photograph (or watch the videos of the actual broadcast) it was actually Barbara Gittings to the left who was wearing the glasses. This was confusing to me as Carter obviously drew this from a photo reference (a technique his “protege” David Daniels would make a whole career out of decades later) as is evidenced by the preciseness of their posture and clothing. But how could a detail this obvious be drawn incorrectly? Then it occurred to me, Chick just showed Carter the low quality reproduction of the photograph from the Saturday Review article he cites, and the contrast there is so poor it does kinda look like the wrong person might be wearing glasses. It's also probably why Ms. Gittings sort of looks like she might have been stung in the face by a bee. This just goes to prove that neither of them actually saw the broadcast they're criticizing here, but are just railing against something they heard about second-hand. Color me surprised. …and the lady in Panel B is Barbara Love speaking to the New York Lions Club in Yonkers on Page 69 (nice) of the Homosexuals in Revolt article from Life Magazine that's cited. OK, two things then.

Page 7 ⇑ ⇓

Jessica	The Gays engage in all sorts of vile and dastardly behavior… for example, holding jobs! And not hiding who they are!!!! And perhaps worst of all, cheerfully cavorting below a ridiculously oversized American flag. Is this supposed to be at the Capitol building or something. I'm fairly certain it isn't the Gays you should be concerned about hanging around there.
Erin	“Their identity for the most part is carefully hidden” HMM I WONDER WHY?
Dot	This has got to be one of the juiciest bits of recycled art in the whole of the Chickiverse. In the reprint, we've got a reused panel from Sin Busters, and here it's only been VERY slightly edited so that the two boys are holding hands. We don't even need to point out the homoerotic tension in Carter's art. Chick does it for us.
Jessica	Ah yes, “Women's lib organizations”. If there's one thing Chick and Co. were as opposed to as Gay Rights, it's Women's Liberation.

Page 8 ⇑ ⇓

Erin	Not familiar with the “city of Gezor”. Looked it up and it seems like he’s referring to the Tel Gezer site, which WAS excavated several times by R.A Steward MacAlister. However his reports on his findings are several hundred pages long each (there’s three). Frankly I wasn’t going to dedicate the time to skimming them. I did Ctrl+F the words “sodomy”, “indecency”, etc. to try and find any reference to homosexuality and came up empty-handed, to use a physical metaphor. In any case, now the hostility knob gets turned to 11.
Jessica	Great minds think alike. I pretty much did the exact same thing, except I fed it into an AI and made it skim the relevant parts for me. MacAlister's book is about as dry as a loaf of pita bread that was actually dug up from Gezer (and yes, Chick spelled the name wrong), and while he devotes an entire chapter to discussing the “Iniquity of the Amorite”, Erin is absolutely correct that there is no discussion of any form of homosexuality whatsoever. Their altar contained a pretty decent number of human skulls buried with cow teeth, and the author suggests it contains a sacred stone pillar that may have been captured and transported there from Jerusalem as a war trophy. There were signs that human (even child) sacrifice took place as evidenced by a number of small skeletons that were found dismembered, decapitated, and/or burned; but there's nothing on the level of perversion to suggest he'd been driven to nausea by the findings. In fact, he mentions just how similar a lot of the features of the temple are to similar Israelite findings due to their common Semitic origins, and specifically mentions parallels with the Judeo-Christian story of the Binding of Issac. So the suggestion that they found cave murals depicting coprophagia or something equally beyond the pale is just complete fabrication and innuendo.
Dot	Honestly though, even if they HAD unearthed an entire tableaux of ancient gay smut like the picture suggests, what the hell archaeologist of ancient cities is gonna be fazed by ancient gay smut? We find ancient gay smut ALL THE TIME. Hell, we find ancient straight smut all the time. A few years ago I visited Pompeii (a family favourite, judging by all the kids visiting), where the paving slabs have dicks carved into them pointing to the nearest brothel.
Erin	Because gays ICKY GROSS EWWWWWWWW!

Page 9 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	Something I’ve noticed throughout this tract, but it’s especially noticeable in this panel, is the fact that in the revised version there is a distinct drop in image quality and the contrast appears to have been bumped up. It looks like a poor quality scan of a photocopy. In the original, Sodom is much more recognizably a city.
Dot	This is common in almost all Chick art. It doesn't help that the official scans are rubbish, but even in physical copies there's a noticeable drop in quality and an increase in artifacts. I think a lot of it comes down to shoddy digitizing.
Jessica	Yeah… the “wickedness” of Sodom had nothing to do with homosexuality. It almost feels like beating a dead horse by this point, but the story found in Genesis 19 (and that we're going to get a summary of over the next few pages) has been stretched and misinterpreted to intentionally deride gay people by inventing biblical justification for modern bigotry. It's a strategy that isn't even all that old in terms of biblical history.

Page 10 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	This panel is also a good example of the drop in image quality between the original and revised versions. I like the way it says “...to remove Lot from the city.” like he’s being a public nuisance.
Erin	Okay… maybe I’m missing something but Sodom doesn’t feel very sodomistic in this panel.
Jessica	This is very tame as far as depictions of Sodom goes. Chick went whole hog with that infamous hairy pederast he put in Doom Town. It looks downright quaint here.
Dot	Once again, there's a couple of pretty great details that are lost a bit in chick.com’s shitty scans. Like, you've got those two guys with their arms over each other, and that other guy that's absolutely vogueing in the archway. Overall though this is just a poor showing from Team Bigotry. Usually the queer-coding is camped up to eleven in Sodom Scenes, but this is a two, maybe a three tops. Everyone's just vibing and doing, like, zero sin.

Page 11 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	You’d assume the angels know the town is crawling with sexually aggressive homosexuals, which makes me wonder if they have some ulterior motive for wanting to hang around the street all night.
Dot	“No thank you, Lot. We thought we'd swing by the toilets in the park for a while. Incidentally, a very nice man gave us these colourful handkerchiefs on the way in. Could you recommend which pocket we should be keeping them in?”
Jessica	The thought of these two hunky, chiseled angels getting into a greasy tangle with the residents of the city makes Lot's head light up like a fucking lightbulb.
Erin	Our man Lot is deadass melting. Or having a major stroke.

Page 12 ⇑ ⇓

Dot	Nice addition of “scare quotes” around the”gay” there, Jack.
Erin	These “gay” men seem oddly organized for a spontaneous mob, having one frontman only calling for the homeowner.
Jessica	They were “well practised”, eh? Well, practice makes perfect if you ask me. On that subject, it's also very weird you decided to switch from the British to the English spelling of “practi(s/c)ed” there. Typically you tend to go in the completely opposite direction instead.

Page 13 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	“...that we might know them (sexually)”. I like to imagine that the (sexually) is delivered with a wink as a cheeky aside to the audience.
Erin	I don’t know why but the sense of timing in this entire Sodom sequence feels vaguely comedic. I can’t help but read the final line as “Send them out that we might know them. SEXUALLY.”
Dot	This whole pair of panels is comedy gold. From Chick having to clarify THIS IS A SEX THING (sexually), to the original print citing the same bible verse twice for absolutely no reason, to Carter apparently deciding that nine dudes is plenty for a THE ENTIRE CITY sized mob.
Jessica	This is the crux of Chick's point in this tract, so you really can't fault him for the repetition in his effort to drive the main thrust of his argument here (sexually).

Page 14 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	So if I’m understanding the logic here (and admittedly I’m an unsaved Homoqueer of Satan™, so I might be completely wrong), raping young girls is preferable in Chick’s eyes to homosexuality?
Jessica	Actually, you're spot on. See, whereas if his male guests were to be assaulted by this violent mob, it would be considered a violation of both hospitality and common decency. Them doing the same to his female daughters? That would be considered a property crime instead. You see the same kind of thought-process at play in the story of the Levite's Concubine over in Judges 19, and we all know how well that turned out for her. Sexual assault of a man is a transgression against a full-fledged person. Sexual assault of a woman is a transgression against her owner.
Dot	Ugh, god, the story of the Levite’s Concubine. It takes some doing to be a serious contender for Most Fucked Up Story In The Bible but it's certainly up there. I'm honestly surprised how much you DON'T see it brought up in relation to Sodom and Gomorrah, considering how blatantly both stories are written to mirror each other.
Erin	Dude offers his two daughters up to them and is all “PLEASE DON’T DO THIS GREAT WICKEDNESS!” Also notice how much grodier the Sodomites (is that the right demonym) became in these two panels. They were drawn a little sleazy before but now they’re all 50s Wolfmen.
Jessica	Isn't it “funny” how every time someone like Chick brings up the story of Sodom to make some point about how abominable homosexuality is they always seem to conveniently leave out the part that comes immediately after it? Homosexuality is a crime worthy of death on a city-wide scale… but incestuous rape is a-okay? I know you guys like to cherry-pick your bibles, but that is also specifically mentioned as being pretty unacceptable. Any reason we need to focus on the gay stuff in particular?

Page 15 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	“The angels blinded the men with blindness” just makes me think of “It’s the worm!!”
Dot	I think it might be the basis of Thomas Dolby's lesser known hit, “She Blinded Me With Sodomy”.
Jessica	Why is Lot's house shaped like that? Does he have a little patio out back we can't see from this angle? Seems like a pretty stupid waste of space if you ask me (sexually).
Dot	Lot’s an egotistical bloke. He really wanted to make his mark in the city by building a house shaped like his own initial.
Jessica	We can all appreciate the benefits of an easily distinguishable house, can't we?
Dot	Well, that or it represents the massive L he took by moving here in the first place. Who knows.

Page 16 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	When someone turns the club lights way up.
Erin	When you’re at the bronze age dilf rave and the ecstasy kicks in.
Jessica	I dunno. I think at least a couple of them would still be able to find their way to Lot's door just by virtue of sheer numbers, you know? …and did they stay blind and just keep stumbling around the city until they all get asploded a few hours later (Spoiler Alert), or did it slowly wear off while Lot and company got the hell out of Dodge like when you accidentally look into a flash-bang grenade or something?

Page 17 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	And that proves… what exactly? At most you could make the argument that the Sodom and Gomorrah story in the Bible was based on oral traditions of a cataclysmic event. Making the leap to “this proves that homos are yucky” would require evidence that god exists and is a genocidal homophobe.
Jessica	The guy found some salt and a bit of sulfur… and that's enough for you to make the leap all the way to “God incinerated the gays”? Maybe they were running a really popular health spa, or perhaps they were just ahead of their time when it came to providing proper nutrition to their livestock? Or maybe (just maybe) their city happened to be located right next to the GODDAMN DEAD SEA?!? You think that might be a reason for all of the salt, you absolute abortion?!?

Page 18 ⇑ ⇓

Jessica	Jeezum Crow! There's a lot to unpack here. They shaved the gay guy's head, gave him a Tom Selleck mustache, and made both his speech and demeanor a helluva lot more aggressive (sexually). Also, what “new laws” are you talking about? Same-sex marriage wasn't legalized in America until the year before you died. Are you referring to civil rights laws that say you can't deny queer people jobs or housing? How's that encouraging them to “take the offensive”?
Dot	The “Amplified Version” Jack? Dabbling in Satanic Counterfeits, are we? Tsk tsk. Very interesting that in the pre-Todd and Alberto days, Chick is happy enough to cite an alternate Bible version if it's more explicitly homophobic. Note that when he's forced to use the KJV he has to keep adding brackets to clarify that Paul's talking about The Gays.
Erin	This is probably the most major change between the ‘72 and 21st century versions, come to think of it. In both the gay man is portrayed as an aggressive sleazebag but the second one makes him a wild-eyed, buzz-cutted lunatic to emphasize the BADNESS.

Page 19 ⇑ ⇓

Jessica	Here I am, absolutely wracking my freaking brain trying to figure out how to tell a woman swings the right way so I won’t offend them or make an ass out of myself when I ask them out on a date (sexually) and here the answer has been staring me in the face for the last 50 years… lesbians don't wear sleeves. How did I not put this together???
Erin	Call me sexist but I’m surprised Chick actually decided to take such a direct swing at lesbians, it’s not usually the done thing for anti-homosexual rants written by men.
Dot	That's your typical homophobe for you. Writing angry screeds about gay men with one hand, and doing… uh… something else about lesbians with the other hand.
Erin	Who are these two in Panel A supposed to be, anyways? It feels like some weirdo just leaning into this blonde’s room and ranting at her so he can squeeze in his main message: “Coming To Jesus cures all!”

Page 20 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	In the updated version, where Chick has added stats about AIDS, it almost sounds as if he’s lamenting the fact that it didn’t reduce the life expectancy of gay men any further.
Erin	Hold on a minute – gay men getting venereal diseases? That’s not exactly a common thing to get from other… well, men.
Dot	I guess we shouldn't be surprised that Chick doesn't bother to cite a source for his claims about the average life expectancy of gay men, because…well, it's bollocks. A bit of surface level research (well, looking up the Wikipedia page about LGBTQ life expectancy) brings up studies showing that the life expectancy of gay men was obviously dented by the AIDS crisis, but by the time Chick was publishing this revision, those studies had long since been rendered obsolete by improvements in prevention and treatment. Even then that doesn't knock the numbers down as low as 42 or 39. I don't know WHERE he got THOSE numbers. Homophobic politicians threw around 43 as the life expectancy of gay men in the late 90s but THAT was based on a completely rubbish survey of ages listed in obituaries that also happened to mention the sexuality of the deceased, and completely ignored the ages of alive gay people. I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of this flawed methodology is being used to fudge the numbers going around more recently about the average life expectancy of trans people.
Jessica	I feel obligated to point out that The Bible itself does actually spell out rather explicitly what the real problem was with Sodom (Hint: it didn't have anything to do with butt stuff).

Page 21 ⇑ ⇓

Blake	I wouldn’t have picked Carter as a Rotting Christ fan. I feel like not all of those ‘sins’ are exactly comparable. This is some Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking shit.
Dot	It’s so true. ALL of us are guilty of SOME kind of sin. I mean, who among us has never eaten shrimp? Let he who is without polyester in his wardrobe cast the first stone.

Page 22 ⇑ ⇓

Jessica	Try Jesus™ today! He gets your whites whiter, and will make not just your shirts, but all of your laundry just as good as new!!!
Blake	I love how the Great White Throne Judgement scenes establish God as the final boss of the Chick Universe. He’s like a reeeeally boring Orcus.

Conclusion ⇑ ⇓

Erin	Wish I had more cutting analysis to give, but there’s not much to this one beyond the obvious. He takes 14 entire panels to get to the actual message of this one and it’s a fairly standard “Sodom tells us gay is bad, turn to Big J and you’ll get saved from The Gay”. About as deep as a kiddie pool.
Blake	Doom Town did it better I think (in a relative sense).
Dot	As we mentioned at the start of this dissection, this was Jack Chick's first REAL brush with controversy, and the fact that “respectable” Christian outlets started to drop him seemed to stick with him. Of course, he would certainly land himself in MUCH hotter water with future work, but he'd often bring up Gay Blade as where his woes began, going as far as comparing himself to singer and orange-sucker Anita Bryant in one of his audio tapes. The obvious contrast of course is that where Anita Bryant chucked her career in the bin for the sake of her bigotry and ended up bankrupting herself as a result, that same bigotry is ultimately how Chick found his niche and made his fortune. Honestly, as far as the homophobic tracts go, this is pretty tame by Chick standards. Carter doesn't really draw anything particularly spicy compared to later tracts and there's really nothing to match the kind of inflammatory bile present in the likes of Home Alone or Uninvited, with Chick mostly just hoping that “homosexuals icky” is enough to sell his argument. Where this tract REALLY shines is as a historical snapshot - as an illustration of the snap reaction to the only-recently-mainstream gay rights movement, from the point of view of the bigots who made the protest of Pride necessary in the first place. It's a reminder of how much things have changed since it was written, and of how much things have stayed the same, and of how much we could lose again. A lot of anti-gay rhetoric of yesterday is laser focused on trans people today, and in many places around the world, being gay is still punishable by death. For all the progress we've made in the 52 years since this tract was released, we still have a long way to go. But still, a very Happy Pride to you all, a happy Wrath Month too when it finally comes, and have a wonderful day (sexually).
Jessica	I think that is perhaps the most important take-away from not only this tract, but Pride Month in general. It's been more than half a century since this tract first rolled off of Chick's acrid presses, and despite all of the advancements that have been made for LGBTQIA+ people during that time, we still find ourselves here. The Jack Chicks and Anita Bryants of yesteryear are dead and buried (or at least, their careers are). But today, they've been replaced by the Steven Andersons and Joanne Rowlings we're “blessed” with in modern times. The people change, but the arguments (and the bigotry and hate that underlines them) remains the same. Like a multi-headed, wafer-eating hydra, every time one of these people gets discredited or slips into irrelevance, five more spring up in their place to spout the same tired, debunked arguments their parents were throwing around. They've taken several “L's” over the years, what with the spread of gay marriage and the advances in trans visibility and queer rights in general. But they aren't about to give up. And rest assured… once they've been able to completely outlaw trans people, they'll go after gay people to push them back into the closet once again. And once they've accomplished that, they'll take up the time-honored tradition of persecuting Jews. Then they'll move onto bringing back racial segregation. Then they'll work on forcing women back into the kitchen. As hyperbolic and alarmist as this might seem at first, people who think like Chick did are presently working towards all of these things right now. So, if you don't happen to be gay yourself, or through some statistical anomaly happen to not know any queer-identifying people, don't think that this ends with homophobia. This kind of thinking needs to be fought against anywhere and everywhere that it crops up… whether that is at the dinner table, the water cooler at work, the local school board meeting, or at the ballot box. Because although they might not be coming after something that is important specifically to you right at the moment, don't think that it will stay that way for long. Even if you are a fundamentalist believer who somehow happened to stumble your way in here (how did you get past the guards, I might ask?) and you think this growing Christian Nationalism is going to be just awesome… think for a moment about what things are really going to be like when the official, legislature-backed religion just happens to not be your specific religion. Trust me, everybody loses here. That's enough of my soapbox. At the very least, we can laugh at how ridiculously dated this all was, even in the reprint. Until next time, dear readers… and a Happy Pride Month to you and yours.

Further Reading ⇑ ⇓

Other Reviews & Commentaries ⇑