DTWOF: The Blog

Alison's up to her eyeballs in her graphic novel right now, so she didn't write any new strips this month. Instead, she sent two archive episodes to the newspapers (and the website) that publish DTWOF. She chose two strips she thought might help put current events — like recent mentions of "Madeleine" — in context. So this month you can re-read #222 ("Indiscreet," 1995) and #252 ("The Trouble With Sydney," 1996). Both appeared in the tantalizingly titled Hot, Throbbing Dykes To Watch Out For, and neither is available online, at least until Planet Out puts them up. Guess you'll just have to buy the book. Or read 'em in the newspaper like in the olden days.

I love seeing Alison embrace the whole blogging thing — you'll notice she's written every post for the past couple of months. I'm only butting in again because I want to point out that she got mentioned in this article about graphic novels in Sunday's Cleveland Plain Dealer. Thanks to an alert reader for the tip. The story revolves around a panel discussion on graphic novels. Here's the relevant exchange: [It] attracted acolytes and skeptics, alongside hundreds of booksellers who lined the walls and scrunched onto the floor... Frank Miller, the macho creator of "Sin City," made a dramatic late entrance, anointed by applause. Cleveland's Harvey Pekar hunched and held forth in an orange T-shirt from one end of the table....First question: Why no women on the panel? Charles Burns, author of "Black Hole," a graphic novel that mines his own tortured adolescence, pulled the microphone to his chin. "Some of my best friends are women," he offered, trying mild humor. The acolytes - young guys with backpacks who hang out in comic-book stores - thumped the rug in approval. "Alison Bechdel - she's one of the best, one to watch for," Pekar said. "Well, where is she?" grumbled the skeptics, young women in sleek black. Answer: she was at the Boston Dyke March.

Well, I crawled out of my rural seclusion and went down to Boston for the Dyke March. (Waving like the queen is my girlfriend Amy on the right, our niece Lena in the pink pro-choice t-shirt, and Lena’s boyfriend Matthew in the middle.) I was rather startled, but pleasantly so, to find myself in such a multifarious crowd of lesbians and sundry lovely others. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a big city march. I’ve grown so disaffected with the whole depoliticized, Bud-Lite Pride Parade scenario, but the Dyke March was a most refreshingly radical assembly.

I spoke after the march, and I think it went over okay, especially after the hulking Lesbian Avengers Discipline Team surrounded the mentally ill and/or drunk guy who was yelling, and distracted him. I talked about the whole marriage thing, and how if I had charted the progress of this civil rights movement, I wouldn’t have picked marriage to be the deciding issue in our attainment of legal and social equality. But now that it is, let’s keep fighting for it. But more importantly, once we get it, let’s not sit back and lapse into a coma of orthodoxy, but work to undermine the false equation of marriage with citizenship. No one should have to have a state-approved sex partner to be considered legitimate, or to get health insurance. I didn’t have any practical suggestions on how to go about this undermining, but I have no doubt that everyone in the crowd was already on the job.

Anyhow, it was very overstimulating and I met lots of nice people. One of them took a picture of my shoes for her website, female sneaker fiend.com. Scroll down to “Boston (Sneaker) Pride” and there I am.

Come to the Boston Dyke March Friday June 10. I'll be speaking. About something coherent, I hope. Here's a recent article about the event from Bay Windows, the Boston LGBT paper.