Rupert Kinnard

Rupert Kinnard
Born	Rupert Earl Kinnard 1954 Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	American
Area(s)	Cartoonist
Pseudonym(s)	Prof. I.B. Gittendowne
Notable works	B.B. and the Diva

Rupert Kinnard (born 1954) also credited as Prof. I.B. Gittendowne, is an openly gay African-American cartoonist, who created the first gay/lesbian-identified African-American ongoing comic-strip characters: the Brown Bomber (a teenage superhero) and Diva Touché Flambé (his lesbian partner).

Biography

Rupert Kinnard was born in Chicago in 1954, and spent his early years living on the West Side. He moved with his parents and four sisters to a 16th-floor apartment in then-new housing projects, then to the South Side, where he attended Morgan Park High and later the Chicago Public Schools' High School for Metropolitan Studies. After graduating, he attended American Academy of Art.

In 1976 he enrolled at Cornell College in Iowa, where he created the gay African-American character "Brown Bomber" in 1977; he was featured in a strip which was published weekly in the Cornellian, the college newspaper. In 1994 Kinnard created the character "Diva Touché Flambé" and the comic strip Cathartic Comics was created. These characters – described by him as "a gay male superhero-slash-fairy with a lesbian partner" – were created in reaction to Kinnard's realization that not only were all of his favorite superheroes white, but even the comics characters he'd originally been creating himself were. Brown Bomber was modeled after boxer Joe Louis (who was also known by that nickname).

He graduated from college in 1979, and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he began working for alternative newspaper Willamette Week eventually as associate art director.

In 1983 he co-founded Just Out, Oregon's first LGBT publication, which won the 1983 National Gay Press Association award for best overall design. He was the first African American to serve on the board of the Portland Town Council, the state's first LGBT organization, and helped to establish The Diversity Alliance, a multicultural LGBT group.

Upon moving to the Bay Area in 1986, Kinnard served as art director for the San Francisco Sentinel and was once again honored by receiving the 1987 National Gay Press Association award for best overall design in 1987. Cathartic Comics began as a weekly strip featured on the editorial page of the Sentinel. In 1989 the strip began it’s most fruitful run within the pages of S.F. Weekly and continued to be featured in publications in Portland, OR, San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles. In 1992 Kinnard’s strip were featured as part of the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum’s Black Ink: An Exhibit of African American Cartoonists. That same year original panels of the strip were entered into that same museum as a part of their permanent collection.

A collection of Kinnard's strips was published in 1992 by Alyson Books as B.B. and the Diva with a foreword by Marlon Riggs. The strip was carried in Just Out, S.F. Weekly, Outlines and several other gay publications, and was included in volumes of Meatmen.

After moving back to Portland in 1993 he and six other men formed the Portland chapter of Brother to Brother, a social organization for African-American queer men.

The Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé were also portrayed on stage in 1994, in Out of the Inkwell, a Theater Rhinoceros production in San Francisco, also featuring characters from Doonesbury.

In April 1996 Kinnard was involved in an automobile accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down a day after attending his grandmother’s funeral just outside of Jonestown, Mississippi. The event prompted him to refer to himself as “less-abled” rather than “disabled.” That same year he received the Oregon’s Pride Northwest’s Spirit of Pride Award.

In1997 Kinnard was invited to take part in the nation’s first Lesbian and Gay Cartoonist conference, A Tip of the Nib, at Oberlin College, which also included artists Howard Cruse and Allison Bechdel.

He and his partner of 25 years, Scott Stapley were among the plaintiffs in Martinez vs. Kulongoski an unsuccessful 2008 court challenge against 2004's Oregon Ballot Measure 36, which defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

In 2013 Kinnard received a "Standing on the Shoulders" Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Arts Foundation, which stated that his "artistic talent and leadership to reach out to the LGBTQ community honors the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." He was a featured panelist at the first Queers & Comics conference in May 2015, as one of the "Pioneers of Queer Men's Comics" and a speaker on "Queer Comics, Health and Dis/Ability".

Kinnard and Stapley own and operate The Kinley Manor Guest House in Portland. He is working on a graphic memoir, to be called The LifeCapsule Project.

Artistic influences and works

Kinnard counts other writers and cartoonists such as Howard Cruse, the late John Callahan, quadriplegic cartoonist noted for dealing with macabre subjects and physical disabilities; Alison Bechdel, the artist behind the popular “Dykes to Watch Out For” and the critically acclaimed graphic novel, Fun Home; the late filmmaker Marlon Riggs and the late poet Essex Hemphill, cartoonist Lynda Barry and historian the late Allan Bérubé as colleagues and friends.

Kinnard is known as a cartoonist, illustrator, art director and writer for various LGBTQ publications. His writings, illustrations and cartoons were also published in such anthologies and collections as Meatmen: An Anthology of Gay Male Comics, A Queer Sense of Humor, The Indelible Alison Bechdel: Confessions, Comix, and Miscellaneous Dykes to Watch Out For, Juicy Mother, No Straight Lines. and in LGBTQ publications such as Portland’s Just Out, the Bay Area Reporter, Chicago’s Windy City Times and the literary lesbian and gay journal Out/Look magazine.

As the sole graphic designer for The Rupe Group Graphics, Kinnard became dedicated to working with some of Portland’s most progressive organizations of the day: The Black United Front, Portland Storefront Theater, PassinArt, Theater Group, the National Organization for Women, National Lawyers Guild, Cascade AIDS Project, the Workers’ Organizing Committee, Oregonians Against the Death Penalty along with California Newsreel, Gay and Lesbian Press Association, National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, Oakland Tribune and San Francisco’s Theater Rhinoceros.

The Rupe Group Graphics was awarded the Oregon Cascade AIDS Project’s Community Angel Award in 2007.