Alison Bechdel shares career upbringing with students

Zoe Deno
News Editor

A crowded BTC Auditorium welcomed award winning cartoonist Alison Bechdel to Hudson Valley to talk about her life and her work.

Among many things, Bechdel is known for being one of the first writers to depict lesbians in popular culture. Her popular comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For,” was first put into print in 1983 when representation for the lesbian subculture was nonexistent.

“I think a lot of the younger people don’t understand that in the 80’s the only time you saw the word ‘lesbian’ in the paper was when there was lesbian bashing or when you heard about someone having their kids taken away,” said Grace Nichols, a Social Security Administration worker who attended the event.

Nichols continued, “Lesbian visibility was not a thing, and Bechdel was representing us. It cheered me up whenever I was able to open up a paper and find that.”

Delight Avoke, who works on the New York State Child Abuse Hotline, also attended the event. She has been following Bechdel’s work since her college years and was excited to meet an author who was so influential in her life.

“Her comics always stood out to me,” Avoke said. “I loved the characters, I loved that she was talking about things that no one else was and I loved that she was a woman being successful.”

Bechdel’s comics have a strong political undertone. They often challenge sexuality and gender conformity.

“The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings,” Bechdel said.

One of the most infamous strips in her comics is a 2008 strip, called “The Rule.” In 1985, the strip a character states she will only watch a movie if it has at least two women who talk to each other about a topic other than men. The guidelines became the well-known Bechdel Test. It is usually used to illustrate the dramatic gender disparity in films by both critics and the average moviegoer.

Bechdel said she had never imagined the strip would become a test at all, let alone an applied one. She had taken inspiration from her friend Liz Wallace.

“The only movie my friend could go see was ‘Alien’ because the two women talk to each other about the monster,” Bechdel explained. “Somehow, young feminist film students found this old cartoon and resurrected it in the Internet Era, and now it’s this weird thing. People actually use it to analyze films to see whether or not they pass that test. Still, surprisingly few films actually pass it.”

Bechdel branched out from soley writing comic strips in 2006 when she published her first graphic novel, “Fun Home.” She described it to the audience as the memoir of “how my closeted gay dad killed himself a few months after I came out to my parents as a lesbian.”

The novel was initially intended to be printed entirely in black and white, though in the publishing process it was tinted blue. “I resisted using color in ‘Fun Home’ because my father was such a controlling color freak, and I wanted to prove that you could tell a complex visual story in black and white,” Bechdel said.

The novel was highly acclaimed and was adapted into a Broadway musical.

Crowdgoer Christina Romes was one of the hundreds of people who saw the play in Broadway when it first premiered. Rome said she saw the play during a period of her life when she was also struggling with the death of her father and her own sexuality.

“[Being introduced to Bechdel’s work] really transformed the way I saw myself and the situation I was going through,” Romes explained. “She has really helped me come out to myself.”

After writing “Fun Home,” Bechdel published a memoir about her distant relationship with mother in 2012, entitled, “Are You My Mother?”

Bechdel said she wants to publish another graphic novel, however she is torn as to what she wants to write about. This is nothing new for Bechdel, as both of her other graphic novels had begun just as ambiguously. Both Bechdel and her followers will have to wait to see what she comes up with next.