A Clippings Scrapbook: Obscenity Laws, The Comstock Act, and the Complicated Legacy of Virginia Prince

People trying to suppress queer people with obscenity laws is nothing new, this long standing tactic has been repeatedly weaponized against us and anyone else bigots decide isn’t fit for public life.

by Piper Bly

Sources:

Panel 1:

https://www.jurist.org/news/2024/01/west-virginia-legislator-introduces-bills-classifying-transgender-people-as-obscene-matter-and-ban-gender-affirming-care-for-people-under-21/

Panel 2:

Project 2025, page 30. https://web.archive.org/web/20250201034737/https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_Act_of_1873#Contraceptives

https://www.vox.com/2014/5/28/5756494/the-homophobic-history-of-the-post-office

Panel 3:

https://www.oif.ala.org/body-transgender-history-can-teach-us-censorship/

https://magazine.pomona.edu/2022/spring/crossing-boundaries/

Panel 4:

https://www.oif.ala.org/body-transgender-history-can-teach-us-censorship/

https://magazine.pomona.edu/2022/spring/crossing-boundaries/

Panel 5:

https://zagria.blogspot.com/2013/03/virginia-prince-part-iii-femmiphilic.html

https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/2024-03-12_65efd6ce5a1da_Virginia_Prince_A_conflicted_life_in_tra.pdf

'As a Man I Exist; as a Woman I Live': Heterosexual Transvestism and the Contours of Gender and Sexuality in Postwar America. Robert S. Hill https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/57615

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Piper Bly is a professional illustrator and underground cartoonist. When she’s not busy plowing away at her drawing board, singing dirges in the moonlight, or wandering throughout the United States, she can often be found tending to her ivies, frying up some biscuits, spending unreasonable hours in the gym, or floating above the Mississippi River at midnight, waiting for the tide to wrap her in its loving embrace and take her away. Her whereabouts are currently undisclosed. You, however, can find her at piperbly.com.