Born May 2: Howard Cruse, Lorenz Hart

In 2011 Rizzoli published Howard Cruse's 80's comic strip The Complete Wendel with an introduction by Alison Bechdel who said, "It's a little shocking to me as I re-read Wendel from this vantage point to see the extent to which my own cartoon characters took their cues from Howard's." Bechdel also praises Cruse's professional coming out in a hostile time with the path-breaking annual anthology Gay Comix and his Wendel strip, "a radical act that both paved the way and set the bar for successive generations of queer cartoonists." Born and raised in Springville, Alabama in 1944, Cruse didn't get to New York until 1977, where two years later he met his husband Eddie Sedarbaum. In 2003 they said goodbye to all that and moved to North Adams, Massachusetts. In 1995, a few years after Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer for Maus, Cruse published Stuck Rubber Baby a graphic novel about his growing up and coming out in the South of the 1960s. The book has won the top graphics prizes in the US (the Eisner and Harvey awards), as well as similar honors in the UK (Comics Creators award), Germany (Luchs award), Spain, and France. When The Comics Journal compiled their list of the 100 Best Comics of the Century, they included Stuck Rubber Baby, ranking it five spots above Alan Moore's Watchmen. He released uncollected work in The Other Sides of Howard Cruse. Today, he's 70.

Super songwriter and private wreck Lorenz Hart partnered with Richard Rodgers to create dozens of classic showtunes from the late 1920s to early 1940s: Isn't It Romantic?, Blue Moon, Falling in Love with Love, The Lady Is a Tramp, and Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered are among their biggest. Gay audiences didn't have to dig deep to find double meaning in Hart's contrarian, gender-free lyrics to songs like My Funny Valentine. His severe alcoholism and weeks-long binges are part of the reason Rodgers dumped him and moved on to collaborating with Oscar Hammerstein II. Even more of a mess after his mother's death, Hart increased his drinking and died of exposure and pneumonia at 48. Read Gary Marmorstein's A Ship Without A Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart.

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