On Finding a Hero in Alison Bechdel

Any culture has a shared set of something: rituals, values, heroes. It’s the glue that binds. Queerness has its own set of heroes: the bands, cartoonists, writers, poets, politicians, fictional characters, performers, theorists, and activists whose work has become a kind of archive of queer possibility. Heroes don’t have to be real people, but they often are. The cartoon Alison Bechdel creates of herself is a literary hero just as much as the illustrator herself.

When I think of heroes, I think of faces like Audre Lorde’s and Adrienne Rich’s, which have been screenprinted onto canvas tote bags or made into silkscreen posters or turned into patches and stickers that get passed out at parties, concerts, indie bookstores, and protests. Idolized, in other words. Turned into stars. There are the queer bands whose songs have become anti-melodies, the soundtrack to resistance, battle cries against the patriarchy.

Queer politics intersects with so many other kinds of politics—feminism, trans politics, POC politics, anti-capitalism. We are still in the process of making our own history, telling our stories, contributing to our archives, and building up our culture. Just by being queer, we’re actively participating. There is something courageous about putting yourself out there, living your story and telling it.

In the early 1980s, Bechdel wanted to take the details of her life and record them. She told interviewer and designer Debbie Millman: “If I had it together enough to declare my mission it would have been that I wanted to show that lesbians were humans… it’s really hard to convey in this day and age just how… hated, despised, feared, mocked, ridiculed (lesbians were). It was the mocking and ridiculing I wanted to dismantle.”

This was her motivation to begin drawing her “Dykes to Watch Out For” comic strip, which records the lives of a ragtag group of lesbian feminist friends: librarians, lawyers, and activists living in a Minneap­olis-like city who celebrate and bemoan love, life, and politics side by side. More than just a political action, her cartoons were love letters to the community she adored. By chronicling her lesbian feminist world, she not only cast the unique individuals she loved as protagonists; she also created a narrative that could have a larger import on the world. The eponymous Bechdel Test (which famously gauges whether or not a film contains at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man) is derived from the “Dykes to Watch Out For” comic titled “The Rule.” By being very specific about the lives of queers, Bechdel showed that she and her friends lived and breathed just like anyone, had opinions about movies and politics just like anyone. If people understood this, maybe it would be harder for society to pretend lesbians didn’t deserve any rights in America.

“There was this gay and lesbian subculture happening in the 80s that I was so excited by,” said Bechdel. “This whole sort of parallel world where gay people were making their own art and newspapers and had their own bookstores and bars. I loved that world and I wanted to document it. I wanted to not just be part of it but to show it… so I started doing that with these comics. I just wanted to see images of people like me which I didn’t see anywhere in the culture at that point.”

Bechdel realized she was witnessing something exceptional, and her reaction was to secure her community’s stories. Other artists and writers have similar impulses to document what they see and who they love. Perhaps they’re trying to fill the gaps that were missing for them when they were young. Their art answers questions about what queer life could look like.

Take Seattle-based artist Molly Landreth, the photographer behind the documentary project Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America. In an interview with Time, Landreth says:

I have always used photography as a way to understand my place in the world—for the last 15 years that world has been the queer community. When I first picked up a camera, I immediately began by creating intimate images of my cousin and his friends dressing up in drag, getting ready to go dancing in West Hollywood. Coming out shortly after that, I turned the camera on myself, creating a series of self-portraits with my girl­friend as we dared to imagine what queer life looked like in the small farming town where we were raised. It was several years later, with this same curiosity and fondness for photographing friends, family and loved ones, when I turned the camera around once more to create a large-scale survey of LGBTQ life in America. My reason for embarking on such an expansive endeavor was simple: I was hungry for images of lives to which I could relate and I wanted to represent adequately the creative communities I saw all around me.

Like Bechdel, Landreth turns the camera toward the world, then back toward herself, then back to the world. This process of centering yourself within your community, of weaving your story into some bigger movement, is a special kind of culture-making. Landreth and Bechdel create work that is dependent on the bodies of others. In fact, they use other bodies, and sometimes their own bodies, to start a conversa­tion and make art.

*

In their song “Hot Topic,” feminist electro-pop trio Le Tigre sings in rapid succession the names of a select group of revolutionary feminists and queer folks who are telling different stories with their art, their bodies, their lives. The song is a celebration and a syllabus at the same time. Le Tigre calls out a string of heroic, radical people and urges them to keep doing what they’re doing: “Stop, we won’t stop / Don’t you stop / I can’t live if you stop.” Among the names they list are Angela Davis, Leslie Feinberg, Joan Jett, Gayatri Spivak, Sleater-Kinney, Dorothy Allison, Gertrude Stein, Eileen Myles, James Baldwin, The Butchies, and Gretchen Phillips. By listing these heroes together, Le Tigre acts as an archivist and an educator. By shep­herding these folks into a song, they are saying you really have to know these people—there’s something similar about them.

Ever the dutiful student, I jot down the names of writers, thinkers, and artists mentioned in the work of someone I admire. I do this because I feel like the author is making those references on purpose, giving me something to discover. I once had a teacher tell me that he made a running list of writers and filmmakers he encountered while reading Susan Sontag. He’d hunt down the books or films later. That’s how he laid his foundation of cultural knowledge. It was a fundamental part of his education. By reading just one of Susan Sontag’s books, you can encounter enough references to keep reading for a lifetime.

On a discussion board about Colette’s Earthly Paradise, I stumbled upon a review from a reader who said she had only picked up the book because it was mentioned in Fun Home.

This is kind of cross-referencing is exactly what Le Tigre is doing in “Hot Topic.” By fitting all their protagonists into one musical portrait, they encourage their audience to discover new heroes. “Hot Topic” is a musical call to action.

One of the names in “Hot Topic” is the poet Eileen Myles, who, according to New York Times Magazine, is “idolized by a new generation of feminists.” Long before she graced the popular television show Trans­parent with her presence, her poems were giving voice to dyke culture in a way that was full-frontal and necessary. Her writing does the hard work of speaking truth in lean, simple lines. In her poem “An American Poem,” Myles writes:

Listen, I have been educated.
I have learned about Western Civilization.
Do you know
What the message of Western
Civilization is? I am alone.
Am I alone tonight?
I don’t think so. Am I
the only one with bleeding gums
tonight. Am I the only
homosexual in this room
tonight. Am I the only
one whose friends have
died, are dying now.

“Am I alone tonight? … Am I the only homosexual in the room tonight?” The very act of reading this poem as a queer person gives its own answer. You are not the only homosexual. Myles’s rhetorical question creates solidarity.

Dorothy Allison is another writer who, like Bechdel and Myles, has been essential in articulating lesbian life, queer trauma, and queer desire. She demands something of queer writers and calls them to the table beside her. In her 1992 keynote address at OutWrite, the gay and lesbian writers conference, Allison says:

I believe in the truth… I know its power. I know the threat it represents to a world constructed on lies. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades… The only hope you have, the only hope any of us has, is the remade life.*

Allison knows that honest stories wield power. She knows what happens when the truth is withheld, when it’s kept curled inside a fist and tucked in a pocket. She knows what happens when certain lives get left out of the story. What happens is we get a culture of violence, isolation, marginalization, and pain. She is calling for us to break through those cultural blockades with radical acts of bravery and storytelling. “What I want—my ambition—is larger than anyone imagines,” Allison writes. “I want to be able to write so powerfully I can break the heart of the world and heal it. I want to write in such a way as to literally remake the world, to change people’s thinking as they look out of the eyes of the characters I create.” Imagine the world queer people could create if we all heeded her call.

Are we, as queers, necessarily educators? Are we called to tell our truth by virtue of our identities? Are our bodies radical, our identities political, our work archive-able? Are we heroes just by existing?

I think the answer is yes.

*Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature (Open Road Media, 2013), Chapter 22.

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From A Little in Love with Everyone, by Genevieve Hudson, courtesy Fiction Advocate. Copyright 2018, Genevieve Hudson.