“Why?”  “Because.”  Wrong answer!

Jok Church, creator of the internationally syndicated comic strip You Can with Beakman & Jax, offers a different parental mindset.  He proposes, instead, “I can tell you HOW and WHAT, but ‘WHY it’s that way’ is where you are growing up to. Maybe you and I can figure out WHY together.”  He adds, “It’s philosophy.  And philosophy takes time.  It’s something you grow into.”

More and more lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexuals (“LGBT”) are adopting and/or co-parenting children.  And, just like their heterosexual counterparts, these new parents are learning to nurture and educate their little ones.  Church, one of San Francisco’s most creative minds, has drawn and composed Beakman & Jax (written for youth as well as parents) for over 19 years.  The comic has a weekly circulation of 52-million readers in 13 nations!  As a gay man and activist, he brings both a sensitivity free of gender pressure to each comic — “I like to think of myself as an old-time feminist, the kind that did not say person-hole cover” — as well as an appreciation for the universe of possibilities for inquiring minds. 

Receiving both questions and fan mail from about a hundred children every week, notably about 80% from girls, Church muses that “Boys wonder how to be a man, but men don’t reveal a lack of knowledge, and writing a letter is something a girl might do.  Beakman & Jax works to counter these thoughts.”

He also receives a lot of “thank you” mail from teachers as well as young adults who grew up with his comic.  Church adds that he never receives hate mail from Jews, Muslims, etc.; only from Fundamentalist Christians who even complain about the five-pointed rainbow star backing the comic’s title.

Church considers his goals for Beakman & Jax “to make sure my readers are not intimidated by the world through which they walk.  I mean, if you shut off the questioning part of yourself because you don’t think you can ever understand how a fluorescent light bulb works, then I’d say you’ve shut off too much.  I’d say you just got bad answers before, and you need a good Ahh-Haaa!”

Church reflects that “All those letters — L, G, B, & T — have a job in society.  If we didn’t, society would have stopped creating us.  That job is healer of the sick, namer of the children, reflector/artist who holds up the mirrors.  That also made us fabulous uncles or aunts or both.  And I am one of those great uncles or aunts or both, and I want to focus on my brothers and sisters who have done the long and hard work of being parents.”  He adds, “I’m pleased that parenting has become our job, especially nowadays without closets, lies, or unspoken truths.”

 “My father taught me to not be afraid of creating stuff,” Church explains.  “He was a crazy artist and showed me that you could do just about anything if you are able to look like you knew what you were doing.  When my cure-the-faggot child psychologist prescribed father-son activity, I’m pretty sure it did not include shooting shotgun shells full of paint at canvases to make abstract art.  That’s about as butch as we ever could get.”

Having worked as a Newscaster (8 or 9 newscasts a day for “underground FM”) and a Special Projects Manager at Lucasfilm Ltd. (interacting with Star Wars fans), Church was “overcome by the bravery children showed by asking Mr. Lucas anything at all, from how to fix the plumbing to which way is down.  So I decided to write about real questions from real kids, and let the children be the beard — the disguise — for the rest of us.”

Church recollects that “Back in 1991 when Star Wars fans faded, my position was eliminated, and I had to get a ‘real’ job.  I got one at a printing plant and learned to use this new little computer that looked like a food processor, the all-new Macintosh.  I created Beakman & Jax on that Mac and offered it for free to the Marin Independent Journal.  This was before inkjet printers, and the only way I could get color copies was to take them out of the trash at the I.J.’s printing plant.  I’d mail those copies every week to the top 60 (in circulation) newspapers in the U.S. and Canada.  Beakman & Jax was the first comic strip created on a computer. Now all of them are.”]

Church continues, “I  mailed those tear sheets out every week, even if they sent me rejection letters, many of them.  And I kept doing that.  I also sent it to the syndicates, and Universal Press Syndicate picked me up.  I told their Chief Editor that I had a public life as a gay activist, and an AIDS activist, and that he and Universal could run into static because of this. His answer was ‘We’re pretty sophisticated in Kansas City’.” ]

Looking back over his 19 years of syndication, Church offers, “Beakman & Jax saved my life.  I got to spend almost my entire adult life making my art.  I found something that wasn’t being done — young people weren’t reading the paper — so I created a comic that parents and children could do together.

But most of all,” Church concludes, “I work to create the ahh-haa that parents and children both love to get with their cappuccino or chocolate milks while scanning the newspaper together.  I think they used to call that quality time.”

You Can with Beakman & Jax will appear weekly in the Bay Times, starting with this issue.  Also, Church’s Beakman’s World appears on channel 36 at 7am, Monday through Friday.  “Check it out,” Church suggest, “and have a good laugh and a few ahh-haa’s.”