Tim Barela is a Los Angeles cartoonist and creator of the gay comic strip Leonard & Larry. He was born in 1954 in Temecula, California. He began work as a cartoonist in the mid-1970s. In the 1980s he created the comic strip Leonard & Larry, which focused on the life of a middle-aged gay couple living in West Hollywood. Leonard & Larry first appeared in Gay Comix in 1984. The strip then moved to the Advocate magazine in 1988 where it ran once a month for two years. In 1990 the comic moved to Frontiers magazine where it ran every other week for 12 years. The comic has since been published by Palliard Press in four volumes: Domesticity Isn't Pretty (1993), Kurt Cobain and Mozart Are Both Dead (1996), Excerpts From the Ring Cycle in Royal Albert Hall (2000), and How Real Men Do It (2003).

The strip focuses on the domestic life of Leonard and Larry and their increasingly diverse group of friends. Leonard is a fashion photographer and Larry owns a leather shop in West Hollywood. The characters age in real time as the strip progresses and follows the couple as they deal with everyday domestic problems, such as parenting; but it also touched on issues that came up in the national media, such as gay celebrities outing themselves.