Intersectional LGBTQ Comic "Tales of the Closet", Near Complete Run, Issues 1-8

Tales of the Closet

Periodical

Ivan Velez Jr.’s Tales of the Closet, issues 1 through 8, 1987 to 1992, follows eight gay and lesbian teenagers in Queens through isolation, family violence, homophobia, racism, health, pregnancy, religion, drug use, and the fear of being outed. Published by the Hetrick Martin Institute as an educational comic for gay and lesbian young adults, the series placed Puerto Rican, Black, white, and Asian American teenagers within the same continuing narrative at a point when AIDS, suicide, and family rejection shaped the Institute’s work with queer youth. Tony Vega, Ramona Sinclair, Mary Ryan, Kyle Hooks, Shorty Mancini, Scott Lind, Jenny Chin, and Benjamin Kanas recur across the series, allowing Velez to address sexuality alongside race, class, religion, gender, and family life through characters whose relationships develop from issue to issue. The present group contains the first eight consecutive issues of the nine issues eventually published between 1987 and 1993, lacking only the final issue, and preserves nearly the entire original Hetrick Martin Institute run before Velez later returned to the work in collected form.

Velez Jr., Ivan, writer and artist. Tales of the Closet. New York: Hetrick Martin Institute, 1987 to 1992. Near complete run of eight consecutive comic issues, nos. 1 through 8, of nine published. 8vo. Original pictorial wrappers with black and white illustrated interiors. Velez’s cover scenes range from the eight central teenagers carrying placards to figures confronting brick walls, shattered surfaces, urban streets, and other graphic expressions of confinement and conflict. Interior thematic title pages organize individual installments around social problems encountered by the recurring cast, and Hetrick Martin Institute publication statements identify the series as a “Graphic Book” project associated with lesbian and gay youth suicide prevention. The first issue, dated “Summerfall 1987,” bears the interior heading “isolation”; subsequent issues carry the narrative through themes including health, pregnancy, and religion. Issue no. 5 opens its “pregnancy” section with named character portraits and recounts friendships formed amid secrecy, fear, and threatened violence, while no. 6 describes the protagonists as “a tight knit group of friends” confronting religion, drug abuse, and suicide.
The Hetrick Martin Institute had been working with lesbian and gay youth in New York before Velez began Tales of the Closet, and the comic translated that institutional mission into serialized narrative directed toward teenagers themselves. Contemporary coverage from the period describes Tales as written and drawn by Velez and following a multiracial, multiethnic group of eight gay and lesbian teenagers, while the series’ original publication context placed copies directly within the Institute’s youth outreach work. Velez’s decision to sustain the same ensemble across multiple years gave subjects ordinarily isolated in educational literature a shared social setting: Tony’s Puerto Rican family conflict, Ramona’s experience as a Black lesbian, and the lives of Mary, Kyle, Shorty, Scott, Jenny, and Benjamin allow questions of sexuality to unfold amid racial identity, reproductive crisis, religion, violence, addiction, friendship, and unstable family relationships. The AIDS crisis forms part of the immediate setting in which those subjects were being presented to young readers, while suicide prevention appears within the publication program itself rather than as retrospective interpretation. The series remained unfinished after nine issues, ending before Velez could publish the planned conclusion; he subsequently began collecting the original comics in 2005 with the intention of completing the narrative. Light toning to pulp paper stock as expected, with minor edge wear, rubbing, and softening to corners; pictorial wrappers remain bright. Overall very good condition. A near complete consecutive run of the Hetrick Martin Institute’s graphic outreach to lesbian and gay teenagers, preserving eight years of Velez’s recurring Queens cast as they confront queer adolescence during the AIDS crisis through a medium produced expressly for young readers.

Item #23830

Price: $800.00