Letter: Crossen not insulting

Eddy Elmer

XTRA! West, 1 March 2007

This letter responds to complaints about a cartoon by John Crossen which recently appeared in Vancouver's XTRA! West:

Reprinted with permission from John Crossen. Copyright © 2006.

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As a gay man who has had a lifelong battle with depression, I guess Karen Ward would consider me doubly oppressed and marginalized by John Crossen's cartoon "Bi-Polar Bear Swim" (Issue 349, Jan 4). But amazingly, I found the cartoon both humorous and empowering.

Instead of stigmatizing those with mental illness, Crossen's cartoon goes a long way towards showing ordinary folk what mental illness is really like. By caricaturing sufferers of bipolar disorder and major depression, Crossen shows how mental illness can take over a person's life—how it can loom so large over everything else that the blatant absurdity of donning nothing more than a thong and jumping into frigid water in the middle of winter no longer seems particularly remarkable. Far from minimizing the seriousness and pain of mental illness, this emphasizes it.

The cartoon also forces us to appreciate just how pathological mental illness is. The gross disproportion between the swimmers' moods and what should be the fun, frivolous act of partaking in a Polar Bear Swim underscores just how much mental illness distorts perception and how much dysfunction it can cause.

Before hysterically looking for another reason to jump on the bandwagon against the 'crosshairs' of state-psychiatry, state-poverty, and state-everything-else, Ms. Ward might want to rethink whether her own moods have not clouded her judgement and led her to denigrate a little piece of humour that might actually have been for her own benefit.

Eddy Elmer,
Vancouver, BC

Letter: Crossen insulting

John Crossen's Bi-Polar Bear Swim cartoon (Issue 349, Jan 4) is, as usual, not at all funny. Mental illnesses are illnesses, and people are people, not merely their diagnoses.

This cartoon makes fun of people who live with a serious (and treatable) condition. That it makes us either ravingly manic or suicidally depressed or near-death—the woman lying face-down in the water, the man slicing his wrists open—is another indicator of the cartoonist's ignorance.

Living with the stigma of a mental illness, of being mentally different, and living within the crosshairs of state-psychiatry and state-poverty, is difficult, to put it mildly. Beyond these social factors, mental illness is a devastating thing itself. It's not terribly funny, in fact.

People who live with a mental illness are extremely marginalized, and this cartoon points to the extent of it within the queer community. I figured that out awhile ago, but it's great to be reminded!

I'd like to think that if a cartoon that mocked individuals living with any chronic illness were to appear in any paper, most people would find that tasteless and cruel. I'd like to think that if another paper printed a cartoon that was a vapid misrepresentation of gays, lesbians, transpeople, or people living with HIV/AIDS, Xtra West would issue self-righteous calls to action and denounce the paper.

Xtra West doesn't seem to realize that, politically, oppressions and marginalizations are linked in all our differences from what's deemed normal in this vicious, compulsively homogenizing society. Instead, Vancouver's only queer paper feels powerful enough to pick on some of the most excluded people around. All those years of struggle weren't for nothing: rights, money, and sanity are awesome, eh? Now we can make fun of the crazies.

This thoughtless pun is the car full of idiots who yell "queer" at me. This makes my life more difficult, because it gives people yet more permission to treat me and other people with mental illnesses like shit, and yet more permission to misunderstand the nature of the illness itself.

You see, this blithe joke indicts you as the oppressive force you once claimed to oppose. That's the part, incidentally, which makes me sad. It saddens me profoundly that Xtra West has chosen to contribute to the oppression of a group of people who are stigmatized and oppressed because of their completely natural differences from the norm. Ring a bell?

Karen Ward,
Vancouver, BC