Was the Duck Man Gay?

When I was growing up in Rock Island, Disney comics were a mixed bag.  Some stories depicted Donald Duck as a harried urban schlub, taking soul-destroying jobs and being abused by his nattering girlfriend.

Others depicted him as a stalwart adventurer, going off with his Uncle Scrooge and resourceful preteen nephews in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola, the Mines of King Solomon, the lost Crown of Genghis Khan, the golden fleece of Jason and the Argonauts, giving me my first glimpses of many of the twists and turns of our cultural heritage.

It was a rough-and-tumble man-only world, with never an instant of hetero- desire or hint of hetero-romance. Girls did not usually exist at all, and when they did, they were killjoys, waiting back home along with the bank notes and mortgages and all the little miseries and dull dread of "adult" life.  Who wouldn't prefer searching for the Seven Cities of Cibola to shopping for hats with Daisy Duck down at the Bon Ton?

In high school and college I found many more of these "good Duck stories."  Others I read about in comic book guides, dreaming about the wonders they held for those who could fork out hundreds of dollars for the original comics:

"Land of the Totem Poles"
"Trail of the Unicorn"
"In Ancient Persia"
"The Gilded Man"

During the 1980s,  I read most of them in reprints and special editions, and I thought about the "Good Duck Artist."  With his wonderful romanticization of masculine worlds and constant critique of heterosexual romance, surely he was gay!

I knew that his name was Carl Barks,  and he was a Disney studio animator turned comic book artist, but I didn't know anything else about him.  Maybe I didn't want to know anything else.  What if this cherished figure of my childhood was straight, sleeping with ladies while he penned men-only worlds?

Then Barks' successor Don Rosa began to spin a series of epic romance stories featuring Uncle Scrooge in love with Glittering Goldie, a dance hall girl he met while prospecting in the Yukon.

But Goldie appeared in only one canonical story!  I exclaimed. As a villain!  Carl Barks would never envision a hetero-romance!

So I looked into Barks' biography to "prove" that he was gay.

Born in 1901, Barks grew up on the family farm in Oregon, surrounded by rough-and-tumble types: prospectors, loggers, and "well-armed cowboys."

Well-armed, yeah? Nice arms?  Big biceps?  Nudge, nudge, wink,wink.

As a boy Carl  (second from right) was not interested in sports. He preferred reading, music, and art.

Artistic, yeah?  Quiet type, not athletic.  Sort of a milksop?   Nudge, nudge, wink,wink.











At age 17, he moved to San Francisco, where he lived in a residential hotel and found a job as an errand-boy.

Errand boy, yeah? Lots of errands.  Lots of running around. yeah? Lots of guys wanting things done? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

In 1921, the 20 year old Carl married Pearl Turner.

Gulp.

They had two daughters.

Carl took a variety of jobs, including mule driver and carriage maker, while trying to sell his art.  He published a lot of risque comics in the Calgary Eye-Opener, a Jazz Era "dirty magazine."

Gulp.

After he divorced Pearl in 1929, Carl married Clara Baiken.  That marriage ended in divorce in 1951.  He married Gare Williams, a painter, the following year.  They stayed married until her death in 1993.


Gulp.

He eschewed big cities, preferring the wilderness, ending up in Grants Pass, Oregon.

Gulp.

Well, was he at least gay-friendly?  He lived to be almost 100, long enough to know all about the Gay Rights Movement, support gay people in the military, and maybe even support gay marriage.

Nope.  He was a staunch Republican who "disliked Democrats," a fiscal conservative who wanted things to stay the way they are.  There don't appear to be any specific statements about gay people in his work, but the comic book story The Golden Helmet (1952) contains a homophobic stereotype: when Donald is working as a museum guard, a fluff approaches and asks directions to the "lace and tatting" collection.  Donald bemoans the lack of "he-men" in modern society.

So Donald and company rejected women because they were heterosexual he-men?

And because Barks believed that his audience of preteen boys would not be interested in hetero-romance.

Yet.

See also: Donald Duck's Double Life; Heterosexualizing My Childhood Hero