To Support Queer Artists, You Actually Have to Know Who They Are

A discussion came up in on of my comic subreddits about the Marvel Pride issue coming out this month. There were a lot of good-natured jokes about Daken’s yassification on the cover and the nature of rainbow capitalism and how they pull these characters out once a year, then place them back on the shelves. All very valid critiques of the art in question.
Then someone came in with “don’t buy this, buy directly from queer artists instead.” There was more to it than that, but this is where I felt a bit more nuance was necessary.
The majority of the writers and artists working on the Marvel Pride anthology, specifically, are LGBTQIA+. Are they not also deserving of whatever support we can give them?
Because I’m coming at it from the perspective of an artist (a voice actor and writer). We all have that “evil corporation” moment at some point in our careers. You’re looking at a project. You know it’s going to come with a lot of extra corporate baggage. But it pays and is gonna be a great line-item on your resume. So you do the job and leverage it into a better position for later while you still consistently chip away at improving the industry for everyone.
So from a “a rising tide lifts all ships” perspective, if I give my money to a big company for a gay comic written by gay people, maybe they hire those people back to work on more gay titles. Maybe those gay writers get to say “look, I not only wrote for this big company, I sold a lot of copies.” Even in a work-for-hire situation, showing you can pull numbers has some advantages. If none of that happens, then my local shop got five dollars.
And this isn’t a pr0-“always buy from big media companies” sort of argument but rather a practical examination of what it can look like on the back side for the creators involved. You can’t ignore those effects.
Further comments revealed one of the major problems underpinning the whole conversation, however. This commenter said they didn’t “queervestigate” the writers and artists in the Marvel Pride issue.
Here’s the thing: I didn’t need to “queervestigate” shit.
I was already following three of the creators working on this issue because I liked their work in other comics (Anthony Oliviera and Pablo Collar on Avengers Academy and Al Ewing on a number of different things.) When Oliviera announced he was going to be in the anthology with Collar, he tagged all the other creators, and I followed them. All the information I needed was right there in their bios. It wasn’t super deep investigative journalism.
This person I was in comment conversation with fully admitted to being new to the comics space, especially the queer one. A big company was literally handing them a list of creators that might be part of the queer community, and they didn’t do any additional digging to see if these were people whose art they might want to follow. That is the one thing Rainbow Capitalism is supposed to be doing for us: exposure.
And it raises the concern that if we’re going to start designing hierarchal approaches to which queer artists to support in which circumstances, you have to actually know who those queer artists are. You have to know what their work looks likes.
Doing that means actively following them and not treating supporting queer artists as a zero sum game.
There is obviously the practical limitation of how much expendable income and time you have. Clearly. But you can throw five dollars at a queer comic from a big company while still buying other queer comics throughout the year. All other ethical concerns being equal, these are not inherently mutually exclusive. There are inherent benefits to supporting queer artists via all avenues available.
So when it comes down to the moment where do you have to decide which direction your support is going to go for whatever reason (whether ethical or financial), you can only do that effectively when you actually know what the playing field looks like.