Review: Homo Patrol

It’s always rather chilling to see that a topical story published almost twenty years ago is still very much relevant. This is certainly the case with Homo Patrol. Written by Tom Roberts and drawn by his brother Ken Roberts, the 1989 64-page graphic novel is a collection of one-page episodes drawn between 1988 and 1989, telling the too-close-for-comfort story of a town where concerned citizens decide to form a “Homo Patrol” to round up those damn faggots who spread disease and bad morals. Concentrating on two of the volunteer “patrolmen” who prowl the city trying to catch gays, the story unfolds little by little, using dark humor as well as very realistic behavior from officials and politicians.

The art is for me strongly reminiscent of some underground style: it’s aggressive and doesn’t try to pretty up the characters, which make it well-suited to the kind of story told here.
I must admit that until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard of this work. I found a reference to it on the Gay League timeline, managed to find a copy, and I don’t regret paying a bit much for it (Amazon seems to sell copies, too). If at first the concept might seem absurd, the reader is quickly convinced by the way the writer makes it all believable, partly through a nuanced portrait of the characters involved, and partly, as I said before, by the use of gallows humor. This is not a book for everybody, I suppose, but I think it deserves a place of choice in the pantheon of good gay-themed comics.
That, and we have to remember that rounding up gay people, especially AIDS victims, was an idea in the air around the time the story was written.

Nowadays, that idea would seem repellent to most people, but it’s not as if HIV-positive people have an easy time in society, and we still have supposedly moral references like the Pope calling gay marriage an “eclipse of god” – frankly, I wouldn’t mind seeing a permanent eclipse of religion.
Writer Tom Roberts wrote a number of small press zines in the 80′s, and in the 90′s, worked on a satirical strip with artist Jim Siergey called Cultural Jet Lag. He died in January 1999 of complications related to muscular distrophy, according to an article in the Comics Journal #210.