Jon Macy

Jon Macy was born on September 11, 1964, in California.

Macy's first series, Tropo, was part of the early 1990s black and white alternative comics boom. It was followed by the erotic horror series Nefarismo, published October 1994 – October 1995 by Eros Comix.^[4] These stories contained dark and surreal motifs, mixing eroticism with hallucination and death/rebirth, a common theme in Macy's personal works.^{[citation needed]}

Throughout the 1990s, Macy contributed to queer comics anthologies Meatmen and Gay Comics, and gay skin magazines such as Steam by Scott O'Hara, Bunkhouse and International Leatherman.^[5][6] His work on Meatmen included a short story entitled "Tail". Gilad Padva argues in his academic paper "Dreamboys, Meatmen and Werewolves: Visualizing Erotic Identities in All-male Comic Strips" (2005) that Macy's "Tail" eroticizes and politicizes Sigmund Freud's homophobic myth of the Wolf Man.^[7][8]

After a hiatus of eight years, during which time he worked on his graphic novel Teleny and Camille, Macy began publishing again with an autobiographical story, "Crazy in Bed", published in Robert Kirby's anthology The Book of Boy Trouble, Vol. 2.^[9] He has since collaborated with various established and independent gay cartoonists, including Sina Evil and Justin Hall.^[10][11]

In 2010, Macy's Teleny and Camille was published by Northwest Press, a graphic adaptation of the classic anonymous erotic novel Teleny, attributed to be a collaboration between Oscar Wilde and other writers he knew.^[12] Teleny and Camille then was awarded the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Erotica.^[3][13] An excerpt was featured in Teleny Revisited, a special issue of The Oscholars.^[14] Also in 2010, he, Diego Gomez and Fred Noland contributed to Justin Hall's Glamazonia: The Uncanny Super Tranny. It was a finalist for the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction.^[3]

Macy produced the self-published comic book series Fearful Hunter (2010–2014), started as an act of protest against California's Proposition 8.^[15] After the first three issues were published, this title was picked up by Northwest Press, who hosted a Kickstarter fundraiser in April 2014 to publish a compiled anthology including the final previously unpublished fourth issue.^[16] Fearful Hunter won the Prism Comics Queer Press Grant in 2010.^[17]

He has contributed to many anthologies including Justin Hall's No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics and Robert Kirby's Qu33r. He was co-editor, with Tara Madison Avery, of ALPHABET: the LGBTQAIU creators from Prism Comics. ALPHABET was a finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Anthology.^[3]

In 2024, Macy published Djuna: The Extraordinary Life of Djuna Barnes. It is a graphic biography about Djuna Barnes, a queer writer who befriended many American cultural figures like Peggy Guggenheim and T.S. Eliot but did not achieve the same level of recognition. Nick Havey, reviewing the work for the Washington Independent Review of Books, said the work metaphorically shows "her life and legacy in vivid Technicolor" and although the book can jump around too quickly, the attention it pays to so many varied moments of her life is great for piquing readers' interest.^[18] Djuna was a finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction.^[19]