by Aharona Ament
Tony Breed is always in a good mood; at least, every time that I have seen him. He is always smiling, and today is no exception despite the biting cold. I’ve known Tony for a while. I was a fan of his radio show on WLUW, and we are both volunteers with the Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP). I met Tony at a local coffee shop near his home in Chicago to talk about his web comic “Finn and Charlie Are Hitched,” gay marriage, and why every gay man must own a Madonna album.
Cul de sac Magazine: One aspect I really liked about “Hitched” is that you show scenes of domestic bliss between Finn and Charlie. You show them being affectionate a lot. A lot of heads on laps.
Tony Breed: Well, I’m trying to convey what to me just normal life is, which is a gay couple that’s affectionate and in love and just sort of the things that you do when you are in love with someone, which is that you sit around together and cuddle.
CM: “Hitched” is a catchy name for a comic.
TB: The reason I call it “Hitched” is because I wanted it to be about marriage, and Hitched says marriage. I was trying to find a way to say marriage without saying marriage. I wanted it to be short, one name, and I ended up not being happy with that so I started using the longer name which is “Finn and Charlie Are Hitched.”
CM: Because it is a web comic about (gay) marriage.
TB: Right, exactly. And I wanted it to say these people are not “just friends,” not just in a relationship; they are hitched.
CM: They’re not “roommates,” they’re not–
TB: Friends with benefits, fuck buddies.
CM: Right. They are married and committed to each other.
TB: And yet they are not married because it is not legal, but they are hitched.
CM: How long have Finn and Charlie known each other?
TB: I think I put it at 17 years once.
CM: Wow, that’s a long time!
TB: That is a long time. I’ve been in my relationship for, well, I guess it has been 17 years now. Since I was 20. I really don’t want the characters to be stand-ins for me and my husband. I don’t really want them to be us. I sort of consciously tried to have them have their own personalities, but at the same time the relationship is a parallel to my own.
CM: So, who wanted to wear the macaroni jewelry? That was one of your first comics.
TB: The macaroni jewelry story never really happened. There are things in there that really did happen. Sometimes there is an element of autobiographical-ness to it. But I was trying to take some personality traits that I have being sort of the goofball and my husband being the misanthrope, but in most cases it ends up being both me, my misanthropic side and my goofy side. The macaroni jewelry was building on an idea. I do make my own jewelry, but they are not made of macaroni.
CM: You had a wedding. Seeing as how gay marriage is not yet legal in the US, do you consider yourself married, or “married”?
TB: We had considered ourselves married since 1997 when we had a wedding! It is confusing at times because I would say to people that I am married, but I would still have to put that I am single on my tax forms. A lot of people are not following the issue because it doesn’t matter to them, and they will say, “Oh yeah! You can do that somewhere right?” And I would say, “Well, you can do it in Sweden, but you have to be Swedish.” I can’t even remember what the state of the world was in 1997, but you couldn’t do it here.
CM: What about Vermont?
TB- Vermont you can have a civil union. In New Jersey, you can have a civil union. In Connecticut and Massachusetts, you could get married, and up until recently, you could do it in California, too. But it was Canada that said you can come in from anywhere and get gay-married. We were in Canada and met this older man in his 50’s saying that h[e] and his boyfriend were thinking about getting married and asked if we were getting married. I had to tell him that we, meaning me and my partner, can’t get married because we’re Americans, and we don’t have the same rights in our country that you have in yours, which is a weird feeling because you usually don’t experience going to another country and realizing that they have freedoms that you don’t have. As an American, we are not supposed to have that experience. This is the land of the free. The upshot of it all is when it became legal in California and we were planning a trip to California, and I said, “Hey, while we are here let’s get married again.” So now we have a piece of paper which may or may not be annulled by the government, and it is all a mess with what is going to happen with Proposition 8, but we have a copy of it, and I have that piece of paper and I can say now that I have legal marriages that are not recognized in my home state or in my country, but it is recognized somewhere.
CM: Wow, that sounds frustrating.
TB: The thing about getting married is that you can only do it once, unless you get divorced. You can’t get married after going to Vermont to get a civil union, you can’t get a marriage after a civil union. You have to dissolve the civil union and then get married, and it is supposed to be the same thing, so you don’t get a second chance at it.
CM: In the very first “Hitched,” Finn asks Charlie if he ever wonders if our culture—and I am assuming he means queer culture—is heading towards collapse. I have heard gay people oppose gay marriage because they feel that the progress might mainstream the culture so much that our ideals and history will disappear along with the progress. It was a sponge that a female coworker refused to touch after she spilled some coffee that brought this question on. What was the significance in the sponge, and is our culture on the verge of collapse?
TB: That is an interesting question, partly because I had not read the comic that way. The “our culture” was meant to be American culture and the idea that we live in a culture where a person is not willing to clean up after themselves because they don’t like to touch sponges or whatever reason. If they are letting their manias get in the way of them being a good citizen, then are we on the verge of collapse? That’s sort of a joke there, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, meaning sometimes the joke is a lot simpler than you think.
And you bring up a really good point because the moment I began to admit to myself that I was gay, I was in college and I was like, “Okay, I have to admit that this thing that has been bugging me for years is that I’m gay.” That this is how I am, and I had to admit it because I had a date with a guy the night before. But bringing it back to the actual question, we don’t have to define ourselves by our “otherness.” I think that drag queens and leather daddies and open relationships are all fabulous, and everyone should do what they want, but I don’t feel like I should be pressured to be that if I don’t want to. So, no, I don’t think we (gay culture) are on the verge of collapse. In a way, I guess its like an integrating, and there is always an element that you feel like you are losing a special outsider identity if you integrate too much, but it doesn’t bother me.
CM: You have been writing “Hitched” for almost three years.
TB: Wow.
CM: Right? What progress has the strip made since you have been writing it?
TB: Progress is a complicated word. I would say that there have been changes. If you keep things exactly the same, it doesn’t make for a good comic. On the other hand, it is only three panels once a week, so things could move slowly and no one would know. There have been changes recently. I started to bring in more outside characters and to try to really create these characters because I felt that I am reflecting a little bit of my own life.
CM: How do you do that?
TB: I went to the Windy City Comic Con last year and I thought that maybe I could be broadening the comic a bit and making it not just about gay marriage, but having that be a component, and like Joe Solmonese, the President of the Human Rights Campaign, said, “You show your relationships to people and so it becomes more and more normal to them,” and I thought that maybe I should shift the strip and make it more public interest and I am not sure if I really should do that, I’m thinking now that maybe the people who read it, what they really like about it is the sweet depiction of a gay marriage, so maybe I should keep it that way. But anyway, what I am writing now is that Charlie is going to start volunteering at a radio station, bringing a little more of my own life in to it. And meanwhile, Finn just got fired and that is what is going on in my office right now, and that is what is going on with some of my friends. I was debating on whether or not to do it, and I thought I can’t ignore this giant issue in the world.
CM: There are so many issues to be explored. Do you feel that you can express everything you want to in a three-panel strip?
TB: No, and that’s what makes it interesting. I could properly express more of what I wanted to in a three-panel strip if I were writing more often.
CM: Do you think you’ll expand the length?
TB: I think about it. Right now, working in three panels is a limitation, and it’s like writing a sonnet or a haiku. More like a haiku, except a funny haiku because your are constraining yourself to a format, and you have to work within that format, and you [need] to remind yourself that if someone comes in and reads the joke and they don’t know the background, is it still funny? Did you put in enough to make it clear that there is some kind of background there? You have to cut out so much text. I’m writing smaller now so I can fit more in, but still you really have to edit down. You have to be concise there are a lot of little verbal text and stuff like that that I have to pull out unless I think it is absolutely vital to the pacing of the joke or the characterizations.
CM: So, you have to be your own editor.
TB: And I do find that interesting. If I had more time in my life, I would produce more comics in a week. I have an immense amount of respect for the web cartoonists who do even three comics a week because it’s a lot of time. You have to write it and then you have to draw it, and both of those are difficult processes.
CM: A lot of cartoonists talk about how time consuming the process is…
TB: I would like to do a graphic novel someday. It wouldn’t be a Finn and Charlie graphic novel properly, but who knows?
CM: What cartoons, web comics, graphic novels do you like?
TB: I have a fondness for obscure and intelligent humor. I like Goats, which has long, epic stories. It’s obscure, it’s bizarre. There’s like a homicidal chicken who worships the devil. I just discovered a web comic called Nedroid. I’m a big fan of Cat and Girl, which is an intelligent comic. I could go on for hours about what I like, but I have to say that the best graphic novel that I have read in a long time was Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.
CM: Totally. That is one of my favorite graphic novels to date. Are there any gay-specific web comics that you like?
TB: I haven’t found any gay web comics that really speak to me.
CM: Do you identify as a gay comic creator or a comic creator who is also gay?
TB: I identify first as a cartoonist. Someone asked me about creating gay comics and asked if I wanted to ghettoize myself. I said no, but that is exactly what I did. Finn and Charlie were created because of a friend of mine, Justin Hall, who is a gay cartoonist. He was trying to put together a book that got me going. He said “Hey have you thought about getting back into making comics?” And I said, “Yes! Okay! I’ll do it!” Then I had to try and come up with something, and of course it seemed like it should be a gay topic, and I felt like I had to address that. I put together all these weird ideas of a morbid comic that was going to be called Gay Bunny and the Walrus, which is a really awesome name, and I enjoyed drawing the walrus, but it just didn’t work and I was like write what you know. On that principle, I came up with [Hitched]. But the problem with writing what you know is that people always ask or people don’t even ask, they just assume that it is autobiographical. My roommate in college wrote a short story that was made into a book that was made into a movie
CM: What was that?
TB: Boy Culture. And the main character in Boy Culture in the original version, not the movie, was a student at the University of Chicago and put himself through by being a prostitute, and people always ask him, “So, were you really a prostitute?” And it’s like, “NO! I’m just a guy who wrote a story!” So, I am constantly aware that when I write this comic that if I put anything too weird in it that my parents are going to be like “Did this really happen?”
I got involved in the Windy City Comic Con last year, and I wasn’t thinking, “Hey, I want to do a gay cartoonists panel. I want to do a web comics panel.” It wasn’t like I want to be with my people, the gay cartoonists. It was like I want to be with my people…the web comics!
CM: What about the gay web comics panel?
TB: You know, there are millions of web comics out there. I keep finding new stuff. But if you try to find big names in gay web comics, you wouldn’t get very far, so I don’t think anyone is a big name yet except for Alison Bechdel, in the sense that you can read her online.
CM: She started in print and then moved her strip Dykes to Watch Out For online. She also shows her characters going to real life events like pride or the Dyke march or whatever is going on that she sees relevant. Do you think Finn and Charlie will go to a DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) protest in the near future?
TB: When the whole Prop 8 thing was going on, I did send Finn and Charlie to California to get married and also because I had done it in September. And then I had Finn and Charlie do it in October as soon as we got back. I couldn’t wait until after the election because what if it went the wrong way, which it did. So I wanted to write it because I knew it was going to be a weird story, because Justin Hall performed our ceremony in front of City Hall in San Francisco dressed as the Green Lantern. It was awesome, and if you’d ask me if I would do a goofy wedding, well I don’t think I would ‘cause you know you only get to do it once. But hey, I got to do it twice! I had the church wedding, pastor, family, the exchanging of rings, lighting the unity candle.
CM: Unity candle? What religion are you?
TB- I don’t have one, so we can do anything we want. Oh, but the politics of it all! I have been to a DOMA protest, but I am not going to send Finn and Charlie to the DOMA protest. It’s not that there isn’t a political angle because the personal is political when you show people living a normal life, which i[n] gay married life is political enough in itself.
CM: You are also involved in the local music scene. What kind of music do Finn and Charlie like? If you made a Finn and Charlie mix, what would that sound like?
TB: Oh god, I should totally do that! Man! I did make a mix! I used Finn and Charlie as a fundraiser for CHIRP (The Chicago Independent Radio Project) on my website. I did commission drawings of Finn and Charlie with a mix for CHIRP. I kind of think they would like what I like, but I did think that I should have relationship songs. If I could be incredibly sappy for a moment, the song by The Magnetic Fields—“Sweet Lovin’ Man!” It’s about how great it is to be in the arms of your sweet loving man! Other than that, just songs about relationships and more stuff that I like…The indie rock, the show tunes, the vocal jazz…
CM: Anything that your husband would like?
TB: Oh, we like the same stuff!
CM: Awwwww!
TB: It’s useful because you don’t have to fight about what to put on. I think that Finn and Charlie have a few Madonna albums.
CM: Isn’t that like a gay male ordinance?
TB: It is kind of like an ordinance!
CM: Any advice you would give to other comic artists gay, straight or other?
TB: I would say just do it. It’s a discipline, and if you are putting it out there on the web, you will get a small audience eventually, even if you don’t publicize. I told myself that I needed to draw more with a sketch book, and I never did that. But when I told myself that I needed to do a comic once a week, I did that and now I am sketching more often, and I’m thinking I have to draw this next week and what are the people going to look like and I have to start thinking about what a squirrel holding a fork would look like.
CM: Like The Sea and Cake t-shirts with the squirrel holding the bottle opener?
TB: Oh, I should be so lucky to do a T-shirt for The Sea and Cake.
CM: I’d buy a Finn and Charlie Sea and Cake T-shirt!
You can keep up with Tony Breed and “Finn and Charlie are Hitched” at http://hitched.tonybreed.com/comic/
