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  Love, Politics, and Laughing Out Loud

  Posted Friday, December 05, 2008 1:15 PM | By E.J. Graff

  Julia and Marjorie, thank you for pointing out these designers' complete (and amusing) inability to draw a black woman. How behind the times these ethnocentrists will be in just a few short weeks, their limited talents overtaken by events! (My own stick figures are SO superior.) Your posts reminded me—[alert: this thread now being hijacked]—of the astonishing skill of Alison Bechdel, the brilliant "cartoonist" who can reveal differences in ethnic background, gender identities, and class attitudes with the slightest of strokes, no after-the-fact coloring-in or cartoonish exaggeration needed.

  Bechdel broke into wider public view with Fun Home, a stunning graphic memoir that NYT's Dwight Garner said "knocked a lot of people, myself included, right over." It had a narrative and metaphoric depth that was literary in the best sense—meaning not "poetic" but profound. But some of us can boast that we already worshipped Bechdel's pen. Like every other lesbian of a certain age and attitude, I've been addicted to—infatuated with—Alison's work since she began chronicling and gently mocking our shared subculture with hilarious precision in Dykes To Watch Out For. Back in the day when the only place to find gay news was in weekly lesbian and gay newspapers (remember newspapers?), some of us would turn first to the back pages for our Alison fix. Every week, her characters, apparently based in Northhampton (aka "Lesbianville"), were working themselves up into soap-operatic fevers over love and politics all at once. Who else could intertwine (and send up) discussions of the perils of dating and monogamy, the unitary executive theory, bisexuality, Guantanmo, sex toys, the dot-com bust, academic jargon, internal debates over same-sex marriage, credit card overspending, and the problems of parenting with such kind, laugh-out-loud accuracy? Her work, over time, has added up into a kind of Dickens-like chronicle of my generation's sociopolitical world.

  Now she's published the Essential Dykes To Watch Out For collection—which means I needn't keep trying to find back issues of my life (er, old collections of her strip) in used bookstores. For anyone who wants to know what a certain slice of feminist lesbians have been worrying about for the past 25-ish years, buy this book! And if, um, the publisher wants to send me a free publicity copy, I wouldn't send it back.

  Bechdel is a goddess—and, to my regret, taken. (Note to my prosecutor: So am I, baby, nothing to worry about!) But seriously, folks: I have no idea why Alison Bechdel hasn't yet received a MacArthur Genius Award. She's the real thing, walking amongst us.

  Filed under: lesbian, LGBT rights, Fun Home, Alison Bechdel, Dykes To Watch Out For

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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