He says he likes the idea of other stories being able to exist in the same universe, and he wants to continue to expand inclusivity in the series, with “not just other aspects of the LGBTQ spectrum but also other aspects of identity. Glass is obviously excited to continue The Pride. So that’s something which I think should be explored.” In future episodes of The Pride, he wants to explore the idea that queerness needs to be perfect: “There are aspects of the queer community that are actively attacking other aspects of the queer community. Glass wants to include more queer villains in stories. I’m just like, no, that’s not true… we should have queer stories which are broader.” They can’t ever have anything awful to happen to them. It has to always be a superhero, or a positive protagonist, or they can’t ever die. “It’s very bizarre to me, this idea that if we to have good queer representation, it has to be only a certain kind of queer. Glass says the push for more representation in media has put so much emphasis on positive representation that it has limited how queer people can depict themselves, almost turning into a modern version of the old Hays Codes.
Aevee Bee’s 2016 piece “Against Representation” captured this well: “The marginalized who take risks in representing themselves must be taken seriously even when we do not agree, because the opinion of one of our own we disagree with is worth infinitely more than the bland asset of someone with no skin in the game.” The idea that queer creators need to moderate their stories to satisfy some abstract idea of “good representation” is unfortunately neither new, nor getting better. Because it’s something that continues to harm us.” If was a straight character who slept around, they’d laud it as a machismo super awesome dude, but if you have a gay character do it, they’re a stereotype.” Glass wonders, “Why are so determined to make a gay guy shut up? And the fact that it comes from within our community just feels like something we have to continue to explore and discuss. And I find that so odd because… look at a character like Tony Stark. “We have this kind of animosity toward the idea of a camp gay man, or flamboyant gay men, or all the stereotype ideas of gay men who sleep around and don’t necessarily follow heterosexual notions of what a relationship is. Glass explains, “It got to the point of realizing that I was out of the closet, but I was still holding a wall around myself and still not being honest about who I was as a person.” He says people who see him at comic cons now, covered in glitter, would never imagine what he used to be like. ‘Covering’ is the term often used here – hiding aspects of your identity to appear more palatable to others. Glass describes entering the comic industry with Davis, Montgomery, and artist Gavin Mitchell as being “like bulls in a China shop.” They group worked together on Stiffs while Mitchell was still in university, and after they encouraged Joe to work on The Pride, the group thought, “yeah, Gavin can work on two comics while going through university.” Glass notes, “that didn’t quite pan out,” but the group learned from its mistakes and these creators were successful at self-publishing both Stiffs and early editions of The Pride.Īrt by Gavin Mitchell, Kris Carter, and Mike Stockįor many queer people, this will sound painfully familiar.
Glass says some of the delay came from “not being sure that anyone wanted this besides me.” Then, he worked with Drew Davis and PJ Montgomery on the comic Stiffs, and they read one of his scripts for The Pride and encouraged him to go forward with making it into a comic. He started working on the initial concept for The Pride when he was 15, and it took 10 years for him to publish the first issue. The writer’s queer superhero team, The Pride, is seeing its big omnibus release from Dark Horse Comics today, and, as Glass explains, The Pride came out of his own desire to see queer people like himself in comics. Today, the landscape has evolved, with no small thanks to Joe himself. The writer later learned there were queer characters in comics, but they were either rarely appearing side characters, or their identities were “masked so strongly that, without understanding the cues and codes setup to communicate that someone was queer,” they passed him by.
When he was 13, Joe Glass was a “massive X-Men fan,” and while there is said to be an obvious analogy made between the plight of mutants and queer people, he didn’t see any at that time.