If you’re a gay man who tends to date transgender men, are you gay enough? Artist Bill Roundy has been tackling sex and identity politics for years, but his latest comic “The Orientation Police” has struck a chord and gone viral as a result.
David Grossman
Bill Roundy's first customer of the day is a middle-aged mom. She's drawn to Roundy's postcard ads which feature a Dr. Who TARDIS, a common selling point at the New York City Comic Con. Roundy has a half a table to sell his books, mostly zine-style stapled comics, at the Geeks OUT! booth, a queer nerd group that dots the table with stickers bragging "I'm Going to Skip Ender's Game." There's one comic of Roundy's that everyone has been looking at recently, and soon enough the mom is looking at it too. It's titled "Orientation Police" and features two men making out on its cover and the titular policeman, with trademark mustache, declaring "Nope. Doesn't count. Not gay enough.
"Is this your journey?," she asks. Her daughter has been going through "a thing," she tells Roundy. Her daughter is bi. Or maybe she's not bi, maybe she's queer? The mom isn't sure but she knows her perception of her daughter is changing, and is trying to learn and adjust. Roundy has a friendly, energetic nature, eager to explain. Although he isn't the type to the use a word as epic as 'journey', yes, he responds. "Orientation Police" is true life, not so much a narrative story as it is an explanation of Roundy's preference for dating transgender guys and the various reactions he's gotten to that. So this book might not be specifically helpful. She buys a copy all the same.
"I follow [the cartoonist] Kate Leth, Kate or Die, on Tumblr, and my own comic came up on my dashboard," Roundy says, remembering the moment he knew "Orientation Police" went huge. "At that point, it had ten thousand notes. I didn't put it there, someone I still don't know put it up. But there was a link to my site, and I was like, 'Okay, I'll put this on my own site'. It went from 10,000 to 20,000 [notes] in about five hours. Last time I checked, it was up to around 70,000." "Orientation Police" struck a powerful chord online although its origins are in a book that's not even out yet, an anthology titled Anything That Loves.
It's worth noting that Roundy has tackled this particular issue, dating transgender guys, a few times before. Years ago, in a vastly more simplistic style, he released "Man Enough," a fictional story about a trans guy and a cisgender guy going on a first date. Having not actually dated any transgender guys at that point, Roundy cops science-fiction language and calls "Man Enough" "speculative fiction." Having drawn almost exclusively autobiographical comics since 2003—"it's my wheelhouse" Christensen also points to two "Adventures" comics that were direct influences on "Orientation Police."
Neither of those comics drew any sort of attention beyond the e-zine circles they for which they intended, especially compared viral sensation that "Orientation Police" has become. Roundy describes the feedback as "85 -15", the scale leaning heavily towards the positive. Like the unhappy families at the beginning of Anna Karenina, people have been have been negative for a variety of reasons. There have been the predictable homophobes, of course— "[w]hen I found the comic appearing on a white supremacist site, I had to make sure they weren't being sarcastic."
"Orientation Police" was supposed to be twelve pages initially, but time constraints halved it to six. It's a story that "challenges readers to stop clinging to and enforcing categories of gender and sexuality", says Zan Christensen, editor of Northwest Press and the Anything That Loves anthology. "Orientation Police" is friendly yet authoritative— it explains how three out of Roundy's last four boyfriends have been transgender, and discusses the reactions to that fact. It's strictly personal with an eye towards the universal—it uses cutesy policemen and an ex-boyfriend as stand-ins for vast cultural debates, the type last publicly seen when Chelsea Manning revealed her identity: Who gets to be called a man? Can gender ever be separated from sexuality?"
