Queering Art Therapy’s Lineage: A Comic

Abstract

The chapter leverages the comic form to challenge conventional politics of art, memory, and kinship by connecting LGBTQIA+ clients across a cultural continuum of queerness. It explores LGBTQIA+ art in diverse spaces—streets, museums, bookstores, and bars—celebrating these as gateways to queer worlds of possibility. In the art therapy studio, I advocate for practicing cultural memory as a form of queer world-building, introducing and linking clients to their inherited queer ancestors who used art for social transformation, like Keith Haring, Gran Fury, Nicole Eisenman, Alison Bechdel, Rupert Kinnard, and David Wojnarowicz. Comics and zines have historically been vital tools for LGBTQIA+ activism, protest, and community care, blending words and images to create accessible narratives about health, rights, and liberation. This chapter demonstrates how comics can be used in art therapy to explore the politics of cultural production and censorship. By combining scholarly analysis with comic narrative, the chapter intentionally queers traditional boundaries of writing and visual storytelling, much like queer and trans individuals have redefined gender norms. I created this queer comic to underscore the political nature of queer identities and therapeutic practice, addressing current battles over gender-affirming care and LGBTQIA+ rights while celebrating the creativity, resilience, and joy of our radical community.