Jan 21, 2024

Lil' Abner: Backwoods Adonis with No Interest in Women

During the 1930s and 1940s, gay kids could pick up any daily and Sunday comic strip to see a muscular, usually shirtless teenager who was not interested in girls, plus a committed same-sex couple.

Al Capp's L'il Abner, started in 1934, chronicled the adventures of 19-year old muscleman Abner Yokum, his elderly parents, and the colorful residents of Dogpatch, U.S.A.  It was part of the contemporary hillbilly fad.

Books, movies, and radio programs were presenting the hills (Ozarks or Appalachians) as an untouched wilderness, an Eden inhabited by rustic Adonises whose muscles and rude manners provided a remedy for the ultra-sophistication of Cary Grant and Clark Gable.

The backwoods Adonis became a common image, extending through Jethro of The Beverly Hillbillies to The Dukes of Hazzard.

The prelapsarian state had one drawback, at least for heterosexual readers: no place for heterosexual romance.  So uninterested were the men of Dogpatch that Al Capp instituted a Sadie Hawkins Day, an annual festival in which man-hungry spinsters chased "skeered" bachelors, and whoever got "ketched" had to marry.

But there was plenty of room for same-sex romance, notably the man-mountain Hairless Joe and his diminuitive Indian companion, Lonesome Polecat, who live together, embark on various money-making schemes together, and even count themselves as a "married couple" on their census form.

Their soft drink brand, Kickapoo Joy Juice, is still being sold in Asia.








In 1952, changing sociocultural mores -- such as the increasing awareness that a man who is not interested in women may be interested in men -- prompted Al Capp to marry off Abner.  Soon he became a father.

Increasingly conservative and unfunny as time progressed, the strip pushed forward in a dwindling number of newspapers until 1977.








There were two movie versions of the strip.  Everyone remembers the 1959 version, with Peter Palmer as Lil' Abner, and a plot about a "yokumberry tonic" that turns ordinary men into bodybuilders but has the side effect of making them uninterested in women.

See also: Li'l Abner, the Musical; and I Go Pogo: The Gay Possum of Okefenokee Swamp


3 comments:

  1. There is a porn version starring Sonny Landham, but only watch in the interest of seeing how depraved the hets are.

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  2. Abner's marriage ruined all his good 'bachelor' storylines and his 'family man' role didn't work well (Honest Abe notwithstanding). So in 1954, the strip introduced his previously unmentioned brother, 'Tiny' Yokum, perpetually 15 1/2 years old, and even bigger and dumber than Abner. Originally with a bulbous nose and shaggy hair, he eventually got a nose job and buzz cut and a new confirmed bachelor was born. Because of the deathgrip that the owners maintain on the property, it is a little hard to find images of Tiny online, but not impossible.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There's a page on Facebook with a lot of Li'l Abner strips, including complete runs of some years in the 1950s and 1960s, and an album devoted to Tiny Yokum. He seems to fall in love in most of them. In one, he has a date with a person named Harold. His friends make fun of him, until he angrily states that Harold is a girl.

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