User:KajsaLebo/Donelan
Personal Life[edit]
Donelan was born in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in Boston, but grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the son of advertising artist Paul Donelan. He graduated from Plymouth Carver Regional High School in 1967. He studied art at Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute but did not finish a degree, and went to work in retail.
He met and began dating Christopher McKenna in May of 1979. The couple chose to wait to be married until same-sex marriage was legalized nationally in 2013. After spending most of their lives living in San Francisco, the couple eventually moved back to Donelan's hometown of Plymouth, Massachusetts after his mother Teresa passed away in 2004.
Career[edit]
In 1977, disappointed that Joe Johnson's pioneering gay comic strips Miss Thing and Big Dick had ended their run in The Advocate, Donelan submitted 29 cartoons to the publication, which turned into a long-running series of his own. "It's a Gay Life" gently lampooned the gay "clone" culture of the time, also known as the Castro clone, focusing primarily on young and middle-aged gay men in their everyday lives. He continued to work in retail while producing the series, which also yielded two paperback reprints: Drawing on the Gay Experience (1987) and Donelan's Back (1988).
For eight years Donelan also created sexually explicit comics in color for Advocate Men, later retitled Men, which was an erotica sister publication of The Advocate. His work has appeared in Frontiers, Gunner, Gay Comix (including one front cover), and Meatmen (including two front covers and several back covers). His art was produced in seven countries, including South Korea, and in five languages.
In May 2015, he was a featured panelist at the first Queers & Comics conference, as one of the "Pioneers of Queer Men's Comics".
Quotes[edit]
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