Cartoonist Alison Bechdel, 62, is the author of three graphic memoirs, including Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, but she’s most widely known for cinema’s Bechdel test. To pass, a film has to feature at least two women – preferably named characters – talking to each other about something other than a man. The test originated in Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF), her landmark comic strip that launched in 1983 and ran for 25 years. DTWOF followed the politics and news of the times, providing a weekly lifeline for queer readers across the US. Now, 40 years on, the trials and triumphs of Bechdel’s tight-knit lesbian ensemble have been given a fresh lease of life in a new audio series, with a cast including Jane Lynch, Carrie Brownstein and Roxane Gay.
DTWOF started in the 1980s. Name one thing from that era that you’re glad to be shot of and another that you miss
I’m glad to be shot of Ronald Reagan, although he did sort of seep out into the next decade. I miss the sense of community – the very tight-knit subculture that I was able to come out into. I wouldn’t want to go back to that because it was a sign of how embattled we were. We had to form a separate culture, but it had a lot of consolations and was quite wonderful in many ways.
What made you decide to end the strip in 2008?
It was very consuming and I had other things I wanted to do. I wrote the strip until the end of the Bush administration, when I was just exhausted. Little did I know what was to come.
It’s an epic amount of time to spend with one group of characters. Did you find yourself wondering what they were up to afterwards?
I honestly didn’t think much about them because I was so relieved at that time to have my life open up to other things. But after Donald Trump became president, I did a few self-therapeutic episodes about how the characters were responding and, recently, I’ve been working on another project with them and that’s been really fun.
Which character do you most closely resemble?
When I began writing, I envisioned Mo as an avatar of myself, but I’ve become like her girlfriend, Sydney, the evil women’s studies professor, who’s a more jaded, more worldly character.
Were you apprehensive about transforming a comic strip into an audio series ?
I didn’t know what was going to happen. How do you turn a visual thing into an audio thing? But a wonderful playwright, Madeleine George, did the adaptation. I’m still amazed at how she managed to take so much of my original language.
Your first memoir, Fun Home, describes how your closeted father died by suspected suicide shortly after you came out at the age of 19. How big have the cultural changes in gay culture been since that time?
If you look at older gay people and then at the very young gay people, the change is quite marked. My generation made this generation possible but it’s pretty different from how we envisioned it.
In what way?
We were so attached to our identity as gay men or lesbians and it feels like that’s going to be a historical blip. If humanity even survives another 100 years, which I’m not so sure of, I think that there’s going to be a lot less attachment to sexual or even gender identity. I think it’s going to be much more fluid and we’ll be fine with it.
Have you ever considered switching pronouns?
I understand why people want to use “they”, and I could do that, but I’ve worked so hard to count as a “she”, I’m going to stick there.
Is it harder to be queer in America these days?
Even a few years ago I was saying: “Oh, it’s so hard to convince people how hostile the culture was towards us when we were young,” but now it’s gone off the rails. All these anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ bills that are being passed – it’s crazy. I don’t want to feed into the people who are sure there’s going to be a civil war. I could easily work up that anxiety, and sometimes in my worst moments I do. I also don’t want to take away the sense of urgency. We’ve got to be vigilant.
Growing up, your family was in the funeral home business. Did that give you a healthy attitude to mortality?
I felt grateful to have that exposure to death as a routine fact of life because most people don’t have that but I continue to grapple with my own mortality.
Did it influence your sense of humour?
We would joke about the funeral home – it was just part of our daily life – and that definitely shaped me.
We should talk about the Bechdel test…
If we must.
How do you feel about it these days?
It was a joke. I didn’t ever intend for it to be the real gauge it has become and it’s hard to keep talking about it over and over, but it’s kind of cool.
Is it dismaying that so many films continue to fail the test?
What’s really dismaying now is the way so many movies cynically try to take shortcuts and feature strong female characters – but they just have a veneer of strength and they’re still not fully developed characters.
You hear about writer’s block – have you ever experienced illustrator’s block?
I often go through phases of it. Ideally, I would draw every day, but I’ve got into bad patches where I’ve stopped and I start to lose the skill. It’s like any kind of manual dexterity – you lose it if you don’t practise it.
What gets you through?
I have little projects that I force myself to do, like keeping a daily visual diary.
In its original format, DTWOF was released weekly. In its audio incarnation, listeners can binge the entire series. Is there anything you binge on?
What I am watching is a YouTube show by this Dutchman [Martijn Doolaard] who brought two crumbling stone barns in the Italian Alps and restores it in real time. It’s so soothing, the antidote to all of the craziness that we’re living through. He releases episodes weekly, but I’m a year behind so I’m bingeing to catch up.
Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For is available on Audible