Cruse was raised in Springville, Alabama, the son of a sermonizer and a homemaker. His earliest published cartoons were in The Baptist Pupil anon he was in high-pressure school. His play thereupon occured in Fooey and Vomit . He presented high-pressure schoolhouse at Amerind Springs Schoolhouse in (what is now) Amerind Springs, Alabama, and Birmingham-southern College, where he studied drama, and had a briefs hollo in television. In 1977, Cruse moved to New York City, where he met Eddie Sedarbaum, his liveness partner, whom he married after moving to Massachusetts.

Cruse's cartooning source attracted nation-wide aids in the 1970s, anon he contributed to hugger-mugger comix publications. His best-known type from that flow was Barefootz, the championship oddball of a surreal nonparallel over a good-natured, well-dressed youth man with leaden spreading feet. Although dismissed by crowded clandestine fans as overly "cutesy", others sire it a fresh alteration of step from "edgier" comix.

Cruse had fossilized devote around his homosexualism circumference the 1970s, but never acknowledged it in his work. That contrastive in 1979, suddenly he began redaction Gay Comix , a new anthology featuring comix by candidly gay and lesbian cartoonists. For ofttimes of the 1980s, he initiated Wendel , a airstrip (1-2 hyperlinks per episode) throughout an irrepressible and idealistic gay man, his afficionado Ollie, and a spew of divergent urban characters. It was published in the gay newsmagazine The Counselor , which allowed Cruse blimp immunity in footing of nomenclature and nudity, and to speech capability such as AIDS, gay rights demonstrations, gay-bashing, closeted celebrities, and same-gender relationships, with a combining of wit and anger. Terzetto anthology volumes of these strips make anachronistic published.

Cruse past the origin one-half of the 1990s creating Staggered Caoutchouc Babe , a 210-page lifelike refreshing commissioned by editor Stain Nevelow for his DC Comics rilievo Caribe Conjure but eventually published by Dc's Paradox Press. It is the chronicle of Toland Polk, a offspring man development up in the American Confederacy in the 1960s, and his ontogeny cognizance of both his own homosexualism and the racial immorality of American society. The scripture blazes Cruse's last detailed and realistic comics art and his total impelling and composite storytelling. It received varied awards and nominations.

Cruse is a habitue subscriber to the ongoing cross comics anthology Juicy Mother , edited by Jennifer Camper, which origin showed in 2005 and anon in 2007, noteworthy for carting on the rote begun by Cruse with Gay Comix .

Cruse briefly wrote a editorial in a comedian scripture brushup magazine, Comics Scene, under the rhyming masthead "loose Cruse".