Howard Cruse & Ed Sedarbaum Residence

History

Howard Cruse (1944-2019) established himself as an underground cartoonist with the 1970s series Barefootz, which included a gay character that he eventually outed. He moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to New York City in 1976 and made a living as a freelance artist. In 1979, he met Ed Sedarbaum (b. 1945), who was then a caseworker at the NYC Department of Social Services. Sedarbaum, born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, had recently left the Queens home he shared with his wife of ten years, who had known about his relationships with men. Seeking to help others who were also coming to terms with their sexuality, Sedarbaum began volunteering at the Gay Switchboard and led a rap session at Identity House, a walk-in counseling center in Manhattan.

Soon after they met, Cruse and Sedarbaum moved into an apartment at 88-11 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1979. Janine Utell, in her biography of Cruse, notes that he “would take up the apartment–floors, dining room table–with large-scale versions of his panels on Bristol board, working with undiluted focus once a story got going.” Sedarbaum, who became a freelance editor after leaving Social Services in 1981, edited Cruse’s work.

In 1980, Cruse was invited by publisher Denis Kitchen, who worked with him on Barefootz, to be the founding editor of a new series called Gay Comix. (The term “comix” refers to the underground comic book scene that arose following the Comics Code of 1954, which prohibited “controversial” topics.) Cruse, who was not yet out professionally, felt the series would provide much-needed visibility for LGBT people. He wrote a letter announcing the new publication to underground comix artists, straight and gay, which read, in part, “Many gay artists have never included the gay facets of their lifestyle in their published work, whether from fear of ostracism on a personal level, possible negative reactions from fans, or the chance that homophobia among editors or publishers could result in long-range career damage. As a gay artist myself, I have shared those fears.”

Utell writes that underground comix at the time was a straight man’s world where homophobia and misogyny were commonplace. Cruse, in developing Gay Comix as a three-dimensional portrayal of gay and lesbian experiences, drew inspiration from lesbian cartoonists who had pioneered the art form with lesbian-themed work in the early 1970s. Gay Comix was carried by several gay bookstores, including the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop. A young Alison Bechdel came across the first issue there in 1981, soon after moving to Manhattan, and credited it for shaping her career as an acclaimed cartoonist.

Cruse was the editor of Gay Comix for four issues before moving on to create Wendel, about a gay man and his lover during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, which appeared nationally in The Advocate from 1983 to 1989. His semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby (1995), received an Eisner Award and a Harvey Award, two of the highest honors in comics.

In the early 1990s, Cruse and Sedarbaum, whose gay social and activist life had been centered in Manhattan, became involved with the burgeoning LGBT rights movement in Queens following the murder of Julio Rivera. Sedarbaum, in particular, was a leading figure. In response to Rivera’s murder, and other gay hate crimes in the borough, Sedarbaum worked with the Anti-Violence Project (AVP) to develop a training program for the 115th Police Precinct to help improve the relationship between the police and the LGBT community. In 1991, he co-founded Queens Gays and Lesbians United (Q-GLU) with Susan Caust to address the needs of LGBT residents in their home borough. The first meeting was held at Cruse and Sedarbaum’s apartment; later meetings were held at the nearby Community United Methodist Church (Cruse provided artwork for various efforts, including those for Q-GLU and the Queens Pride Parade). Through Q-GLU, Sedarbaum also took part in the March for Truth, organized in 1993 to counter homophobic backlash to the NYC Department of Education’s “Children of the Rainbow” curriculum.

In 1995, Sedarbaum used his background as a former social worker to found SAGE/Queens Clubhouse, a center for LGBT elders that opened at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Astoria, Queens. He ran unsuccessfully in the 1998 race for the New York State Senate. That same year, he was the head of the Anti-Violence Project’s Hate Crimes Bill Coalition. Cruse and Sedarbaum left their Jackson Heights apartment in 2002 and settled in the Berkshires. They married in 2004 after same-sex marriage was legalized in Massachusetts.

Entry by Amanda Davis, project manager (December 2023).

NOTE: Names above in bold indicate LGBT people.