Alison Bechdel’s rather parlous day job from 1983-2008 was the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a long running series about a large cast of (predominantly gay) women living in the US.
It’s been hailed as groundbreaking for its frank and witty presentations of lesbian lifestyles, and the Omnibus is on my Christmas list. It’s also got, for my money, one of the best titles of any literary work I’ve ever heard.
What most people know about Bechdel is her test. But there is infinitely more to Alison Bechdel than her test. In fact I’m rather annoyed that the Bechdel Test was the first thing I ever knew about Bechdel. For those not in the know, the Bechdel Test refers to a 1985 comic strip by Bechdel, in which a film is judged based on whether it has 1) at least two women in it, 2) who talk to each other 3) about something besides a man.
This in and of itself is a worthy touchstone for film criticism and is a good litmus test for lazy movie writing (and book writing, mind). What’s annoying is the way this ‘test’ gets treated by certain areas of the internet and overly earnest thinkpieces as law, rather than what it seems to me to be, which is something much more playful, much more ironic: admonishing, sure, but with weltschmerz and a cocked eyebrow. In the original strip, the joke at the end is that the last film one of the characters was able to see was Alien (the two women in it talk about the monster).
It’s a shame that Bechdel has only pierced the culture (or at least my culture) in this way. She should be sung from the rooftops for Fun Home. It’s a masterpiece. It’s the most sustained and intelligent comic I’ve every read. Everyone should read it.
Bechdel tells two stories of homosexuality here: her own, and her father’s. We have a kind of queer bildungsroman for the young artist, and something I can’t really define for the father. Bechdel’s story is comparatively straightforward: early on she identifies with strong ‘butch’ female figures, experiences homosexual desire, and at the end of the book, she loses her virginity in a rather touching and frank scene.
The father though, is dark and conflicted, as opaque as frosted glass. It is not for nothing that we never see him smile throughout the entire book. Bechdel outlines his homosexuality for us, but she doesn’t dwell on it. We see his court order after his ‘grooming’ of a student (a very shocking part of the book), we see his eyes wandering on a family trip to New York, but Bechdel refuses to sound the depths of her father. We get the sense of Bechdel’s father's closeted homosexuality rather more as Bechdel herself would have experienced it, as something that is never fully expressed, as something that hovers around the edges of Bechdel’s life.
On a level of pure style and structure, it’s an extraordinary work. The thematic collaging of literary reference and memoir is masterful and sustained, as is the interlinking of history and personal experience. The sheer amount of research and donkey work gone into the creation of the thing boggles the mind. The drawing is clear and honest, the writing, much more ambitious than any other comic I’ve ever read (if occasionally too verbose). Read it. And have a look at the sequel, Are You my Mother? which is good but isn’t as good.
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