The Comics Journal website has posted an interesting conversation between cartoonists Stan Sakai and Chris Schweizer that's well worth your attention. And I can't resist expanding on the following, which was said by Stan…
When I was doing freelance work I met Sergio Aragonés, and he invited me to a C.A.P.S. meeting, The Comic Arts Professional Society. It was an organization of print cartoonists started by Sergio, Mark Evanier, and Don Rico. There are so many comic-book artists in the Los Angeles area, but we never socialized. I joined the second year. I was told that the first meeting was in a church in Hollywood, and it was booked right after the Gay Christians Organization or something like that.
The first two C.A.P.S. meetings were held in June of 1977 at the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church up on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, near where Don Rico and his wife Michele were then living. They went there occasionally and knew the minister, who was a flamboyant man named Dr. Ross Greek. On their suggestion, I went up to see him and check out the meeting room he had there.
Dr. Greek, I later learned, was a true mover/shaker of the area. He'd spent much of his life running this and other churches, usually staying only slightly ahead of financial ruin. He had an admirable track record for taking in kids (runaways, especially) who were homeless and/or on drugs and helping them clean up, straighten out and just plain survive. He was also a founder of something called the Lazarus Project, which has been described as "a ministry of reconciliation between the church and the lesbian, gay, and bisexual community." He passed away in 1995 and is still revered in that community.
He was an energetic, happy man who was somehow doing about eleven things at once that day. One of them was showing me the hall they had there…a facility, he said, that was open to any sort of group that looked like it might do anybody any good, no donation required. I decided it would be a decent place for this group we were trying to start and gave him $50 — which from his reaction was a lot more than anyone else had donated lately. When, I asked him, might the room be available?
He led me over to a wall calendar, studied it and said, "Well, we could squeeze you in on Thursday nights between the Lesbian Softball Team and the Alcoholic Gays." I said that would be fine and he took a pen and wrote us in…so the calendar then said…
Lesbian Softball Team
Comic Book Artists
Alcoholic Gays
…and I wondered if anyone was going to look at that calendar and say, "You're letting comic book artists meet here?"