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 The term “gay strip” has many meanings: a physical location, like a gayborhood; a naughty, burlesque activity; or, the one Clevelander John Forgetta would prefer, a welcome change.
Forgetta is the creator and writer of The Meaning of Lila, a comic strip about the lives of a working girl and her gay best friend that appears in 20 mainstream newspapers across the country. In fact, Lila is the first strip to feature a gay ongoing, main character — a groundbreaking feat with local ties.
However, waving the rainbow flag in a black-and-white comic strip hasn’t always been easy. Forgetta’s had to endure hate mail from the Heartland and faces a decline in newspapers that seems to get worse each day. But despite these challenges, one thing’s for sure: The funny pages have never been so fabulous.
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Although he’s only been authoring the nationally syndicated strip The Meaning of Lila for about five years, John Forgetta’s been writing cartoons for as long as he can remember.
“I used to draw comics as a kid and then give them out to my neighbors, whether they wanted them or not,” the New York native says. “I left it in their mailboxes, copied on colored paper and tied with a ribbon. Why I had to come out to my mother, I’ll never know.”
Forgetta landed his first professional comics gig at a small newspaper in Boston shortly after graduating from college. The strip, Speckled Eggs, which followed the adventures of a snarky Dalmatian and a naïve turtle, won a national award but was never picked up by other papers. He created a few more titles, but it wasn’t until he conceived The Meaning of Lila that he signed his first syndication agreement.
“Lila is probably the one [creation of mine] that’s closest to my life, so that saying must be true,” he says. “‘Write what you know.’”
The strip features three main characters: Lila, a Cleveland State alumna who works as a customer service representative for MetroMart, a pastiche of a Midwestern conglomerate; Boyd, Lila’s best friend, who came out while a teenager and who also works for MetroMart; and Drew, an affluent yet compassionate citizen of Rocky River. The characters are illustrated on a rotating basis by local artists Justin Raines, Tony Calabro and Jackie Gentile.
Since its launch Lila has developed a strong base of fans — and enemies. The latter, however, is a small price to pay for doing what Forgetta sees as diversifying the bland newspaper staple that the comics page has become.
“So many [strips] are about married couples or little kids or families,” he said. “I think that’s why I wanted to get mine out there. Comics pages are the straightest places on Earth. They’re like Cracker Barrel restaurants.”
Amidst his busy schedule of juggling a day job and his writing duties on Lila, Forgetta took a few minutes to chat with me, making sure — as any good comics writer should — that each of my questions were answered with a punch line.
 Tim Marshall: Tell us about The Meaning of Lila. From reading a couple months’ worth of strips, it seems like one of the most accurate depictions of 20-somethings — gay and straight — that I’ve seen in popular media to date.
John Forgetta: People have often compared Lila to Sex and the City or Will & Grace, but really, Lila and Boyd are very ordinary folk. They’re not successful career people or sophisticated urbanites. They’re just regular people with very regular jobs who are trying to find meaning in their regular lives. Hence, the name.
TM: Let’s chat about the characters of Lila, Boyd and Drew. On your blog, you’ve stated they are all actually aspects of your own personality. How so?
JF: I’m apathetic and self-centered like Lila, I’m cynical and highly-critical like Boyd, and to make sure I don’t take the fast lane to hell when I die, I try to have a softer, kinder side like Drew. All three of them are truly “pieces of me,” to quote the lip-syncher Ashlee Simpson.
TM: So, then, I assume the characters sometimes speak on your behalf. Do your friends’ lives ever pop up in the strip?
JF: Always. Isn’t that why people write? Otherwise, I’d have high blood pressure from keeping everything inside. I basically write to avoid a stroke.
TM: Is Lila a fag-hag?
JF: Am I the only gay man who thinks that expression is insulting? I never refer to my female friends that way, even though I know fellow gays use it in good humor and with endearment. I mean, really … who wants to be a hag? So, no, Lila is not a fag-hag. I’d also say she isn’t in that Boyd mostly goes out with her to straight bars and not the other way around. So, in a sense, Boyd is a hetero-hag.
TM: Boyd’s gay and Lila is, well, culturally queer; however, the strip isn’t called The Meaning of Boyd. Yet you broke ground by having a main character who is gay in a nationally syndicated strip — even though he’s not the “star,” as it were. When do you think we’ll have a strip whose main protagonist is gay?
JF: Mainstream comic strips have never had a gay [ongoing] character. A few like For Better or Worse and Doonesbury had gay story lines and they were hailed as ground-breaking — which is why I was so shocked by the negative response I’ve been getting with Lila. It’s fine showing a token gay once in a while, but apparently heterosexuals are just not comfortable seeing a gay character every day on the comic pages.
When Boyd compliments a co-worker’s baby, he’s called a pedophile. If he goes out on a date, he’s called a sexual deviant. The strip has been referred to as a disgrace, as trying to convert children to homosexuality, and as having a subversive agenda. This response has made me realize that even with shows like Will & Grace and advances in same-sex legislation, gays are truly an extremely disparaged and discriminated group of people in America. And believe me, if I wanted to be subversive, I’d be much more clever.
The same comic pages that publish or don’t publish Lila feature a drunk, unemployed womanizer in Andy Capp, a misogynist barbarian in Hagar the Horrible, an abusive boss in Blondie, and a death-loving child in Lio. But the minute Boyd tells Lila he met someone in his interior design class, hate mail comes pouring in about the downfall of society and the breakdown of family values. It’s either homophobia or people really feel strongly about interior design!
Check out Part Two of Tim Marshall's interview with John Forgetta here.
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