Out in the Mountains

Dykes to Watch Out For: The Slide Show

Sage Russell

On February 29 — Leap Day —— Alison
Bechdel, the noted cartoonist who lives
among us here in Vermont, stepped out
from behind Mo, Lois and all the other
dykes to watch out for, to talk about her
life and her work to an enthusiastic crowd
of several hundred lesbians and a handful
of men at Burlington City Hall. She was
celebrating the publication of her latest col-
lection of cartoons, Dykes to Watch Out
F or: The Sequel.

Bechdel says she was born a lesbian, and al-
ways wanted to be a cartoonist For a long
time these two major themes in her life were
entirely separate. They did not begin to
conre together to trim her into a lesbian car-
toonist until her junior year in college.

As one might expect, Alison Bechdel
didn’t just talk about “her childhood draw-
ings, her frustrated adolescence, and her
action-packed career as a lesbian cartoon-
ist.” She illustrated her themes with slides
of her work. The first item in the collection
was a pencil drawing of a cowboy done
when she was about five on her grand-
motlrer’s DAR stationery.

The most surprising thing about her work
is that until she was in college, this com

mitted chronicler of lesbian lives drew only
men. “For a long time it kind of bothered
me. I was afraid it was like some kind of
weird psycho-sexual disorder or some-
thing. My mother would always be sug-
gesting kind of nervously to me that I draw
ladies too. I think it’s important to note
here that this isn’t just an idiosyncratic
thing that I did. I’ve talked to lots of other
lesbians who only drew men as children.
So now I see the reason I didn’t draw ladies
was in fact a psycho-sexual disorder — not
mine, but this culture’s.”

Bechdel illustrated her point with a look at
the misogyny in mainstream cartoons like
Blondie, Mickey Mouse and Beetle Bailey.
“It’s amazing to me that as women we
grow up and survive this kind of shit, this
lack of representation of what we’re really
like, this fundamental splitting off from our
humanity. But most of us survive with
some kind of scars. I think it’s because I
was a lesbian that I was able to see all this
sniff so clearly. So as a kid I was totally
outraged by this unfairness that I was see-
ing everywhere.

But my method of dealing with it, and the
scar that I personally carry, was to dis-
sociate myself from being a girl. To be a

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girl seemed like the worst, most humili-
ating fate in the world to me. So I kind of
grew up thinking of myself as neither boy
nor girl, but as something different I kept
up this protective dissociation all through
my adolescence and late teens. And all that
time, I drew mostly men.”

This began to change in college, where “I
had a kind of unofficial double major in art
and coming out. For the first two years I
just did the art part.” Bechdel found she
could draw women models in figure draw-
ing class even if she couldn’t draw women
from her imagination. The big break-
through carne in her junior year when the
event she had subconsciously been waiting
for her whole life finally occurred — she
came out.

“After I realized I was a lesbian, I realized,
‘Oh, that must mean I’m a woman then’.”
With acceptance of herself as a woman
came feminism, a political consciousness,
and the ability to draw women —— as long
as she could think of them as lesbians. “I’d
been shut off and dissociated from my fe-
maleness for so long, for all those years,
because it seemed like such a bum deal to
be a girl, but now here was this great deal
of being a dyke.”

Dykes to Watch Out For just kind of
evolved from this point: from drawings
scribbled in the margins of letters, to single
panel cartoons in the feminist newspaper
W0manNews, to multi-panel strips fea-
turing lesbians created for a particular strip
and then discarded, to the development of
the continuing characters we've become so
attached to. When her first book of col-
lected cartoons was published in 1986,
Bechdel began to take herself more se-
riously as a cartoonist And in August
1990, she quit her last part—time job to be-
come a lesbian cartoonist full-time. Today,
there is no distinction between her life and

Pamela Gale

Burlington, VT