Roxane Gay, Carrie Brownstein, Roberta Colindrez, Jane Lynch To Star in Audible Adaptation of Dykes To Watch Out For

feature image photo of Roxane Gay by Frazer Harrison / Staff via Getty Images; photo of Carrie Brownstein by Albert L. Ortega / Contributor via Getty Images; photo of Roberta Colindrez by Rob Kim / Stringer via Getty Images; photo of Jane Lynch by Steve Granitz / Contributor via Getty Images

🚨 CALLING ALL ALISON BECHDEL HEADS!!!! 🚨 An Audible adaptation of Alison Bechdel‘s iconic weekly comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For — which ran from 1983 to 2008 — is coming just in time for Pride month. The project has tapped a truly bonkers good lineup of queer talent to voice Bechdel’s long-running characters, including queer Broadway performer Jenn Colella, Carrie Brownstein, Roberta Colindrez, Roxane Gay, and Jane Lynch. It’s quite the star-studded and GAY voiceover cast!!!!!

Bechdel told the Advocate about this project and its cast: “I’m absolutely speechless. Fortunately, these actors have plenty to say, and they do so with dykely aplomb.” And now I need a hat that says “dykely aplomb” STAT!!!!!!

Playwright and writer on Only Murders in the Building Madeleine George adapted the Audible version, and it’s director by stage director Leigh Silverman. Original music will be provided by Alana Davis, Faith Soloway, and Bitch, and there will be a soundtrack, too, with music from lesbian artists like Ferron, Holly Near, and Cris Williamson.

The original Dykes to Watch Out For followed central character Mo and her expansive queer friend group, including drag king Lois, environmental lawyer Clarice, bisexual Sparrow, Mo’s ex Harriet, and so many others. From the official Audible description, it appears the audiobook version will be released episodically. As far as scope, the official description reads:

Follow the trials and tribulations of Mo, Lois, Toni, Clarice, and the rest of their friends as they surf the waves of dyke drama from the softball field to the women’s bookstore, from the brunch rush at the vegan Café Topaz all the way to the steps of the Supreme Court, in a very special episode set at the landmark 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

Whether you’re a longtime fan of this groundbreaking comic that holds such a special place in so many of our hearts or are looking to dive in for the first time, I strongly recommend picking up a copy of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For! It would make a perfect gift to yourself for Pride and a great companion to this upcoming audiobook version, which debuts on June 1. The compendium does not include every single Dykes to Watch Out For strip Bechdel ever wrote — a feat that would be near impossible just because of the sheer abundance of this comic — but it does have about 74% of the extant episodes in this universe and also includes a bonus interlude where Bechdel looks back over her career. You can browse some strip archives and character bios on Bechdel’s website, too, but seriously if you can get your hands on the omnibus version of her work, it’s so worth it. Ask a straight person to get it for you as a Pride gift (wow, we really should normalize asking our straight friends for Pride gifts).

The Audible adaptation of Dykes to Watch Out For comes out on June 1. Maybe if it’s popular enough, we can finally get the goddamn screen adaptation we deserve!!!!!!

Also.Also.Also: Alison Bechdel Is Working on a “Dykes to Watch Out For” Animated TV Series!

I’M BAAAAAAACK!!!! Did you miss me? 💋

---

Queer as in F*ck You

“So much of what people are asking for today in TV was organically fulfilled with your comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For — a warm, funny serialized story featuring a big, diverse ensemble of characters dealing with everything from marriage, children, polyamory, death, politics and protest. Adapting it into a TV show seems like a no-brainer. Was that ever an option?

Honestly I’m working on that right now. I don’t want to talk about the specifics, because if it falls through, it’s just a bummer. But it’s a plan to create an animated series based on my drawings. The original concept for the show was to update it and set it in the present. I wrote the pilot before Trump was elected, and we just had a discussion about how maybe it makes more sense to set it in the time period in which it really happened, which I am so much happier about. Somehow the update made sense five years ago, but now I want to do it as a period piece. We’re aiming to do it in the early ‘90s, which was the midpoint of the run of the comic strip. For older people, it might be nostalgic; for younger people, they’re curious about what now was a long time ago. When I was a teenager, I would watch movies that were 30 years old, and they seemed prehistoric.”

I started to pull out quotes from this interview, but honestly soon I was just typing out the entire thing. If you’re a regular reader of this link roundup, you know that I’m a massive fan of E. Alex Jung’s work, and here he is interviewing the ONE AND ONLY Alison Bechdel so obviously it’s excellent and thoughtful and every question I’ve wanted to ask about Dykes, answered. The biggest tidbit of course is that she’s working on a Dykes to Watch Out For animated series, and now I will never know peace until we have it: In Conversation: Alison Bechdel

(Looking for more Alison Bechdel content? Might I suggest Talking with Alison Bechdel about Feminist Martial Arts, Lockdown, and Her New Book “The Secret to Superhuman Strength” by Alyssa Favreau for this very same website you are currently reading!)

Autostraddle! Now close, personal friends with Oprah!

https://twitter.com/carlytron/status/1391879289264513026

Here’s the link: 15 LGBTQ Podcasts That’ll Make You Proud Year-Round

Cara Delevingne Is Selling an NFT of Her Vagina, Donating Profits

Instagram Adds They/Them Pronoun Options for User Profiles. Related: Top Social Media Platforms ‘Unsafe’ for LGBTQ Users, Report Finds. “Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube are ‘effectively unsafe for LGBTQ users,’ according to GLAAD’s inaugural Social Media Safety Index.”

Biden Administration Announces Reversal of Trump-Era Limits on Protections for Transgender People in Health Care (this isn’t the exact article where I read this, but reportedly this will also make those transphobic state bans harder to stand up in court, fucking finally.)

U.K. To Ban LGBTQ Conversion Therapy and Provide More Support

Lesbian Chef Kelly Fields Won the Heart and Stomachs of New Orleans Foodies. Please know that this comes with a bread pudding recipe! Is it too early to declare all bread puddings a lesbian dessert now? I’m ready. Let me know.

A Short Retelling of Atlanta’s Long — Radical — Queer History

---

Saw This, Thought of You

Breaking News: Fully Vaccinated? You Can Ditch the Mask, CDC Says And yes, you can enjoy that sun on your face — but also, let’s not lose sight of our U.S. privilege in these instances that was bought and paid for at the expense of others: For Nurses in India’s Largest Cities, ‘Every Day Feels like War.’

As a Former Foster Parent, Am I a Mom — Or Something Else? A Mother’s Day reflection that has really stuck with me this week.

Time to check in with the straights: J.Lo and Ben Affleck Have Never Been Low-Key. “That’s what makes them perfect celebrities.”

Why We Speak More Weirdly at Home

Saweetie, Rihanna, and the Memeification of Domestic Violence. “What does it mean to live in a society where violence against women and girls is treated as comedic fodder?”

Don’t Look Away. “As the WNBA begins its 25th season of soldiering on in the face of tired arguments for why fans don’t watch, the time has come to pay attention.”

---

Political Snacks

Mazie Hirono Is Okay With a Little Confrontation. “A long talk about anger with the gloriously foulmouthed senator from Hawaii.”

Talking with Alison Bechdel about Feminist Martial Arts, Lockdown, and Her New Book “The Secret to Superhuman Strength”

“My bookish exterior perhaps belies it,” write Alison Bechdel in The Secret to Superhuman Strength, “but I’m a bit of an exercise freak.” That is, it turns out, an understatement, as the celebrated cartoonist’s newest graphic novel—her first since 2012’s Are You My Mother?—makes very clear. From the sixties television fitness of Jack LaLanne to the HIIT workouts and spin classes of the 2010s, and all the yoga, karate, skiing, and cycling that could possibly fill the intervening fifty years, Bechdel recounts the enduring appeal of getting in shape.

But throughout the book she continuously questions where her motivations come from, and whether the search for strength and self-sufficiency were ever the worthwhile goals she thought they were. Told with the cartoonist’s exceptional introspective candor and perfectly pitched sense of comedy, The Secret to Superhuman Strength tackles the thorny tangle that is our relationships to our bodies, each other, and the world around us.

Alyssa Favreau: In this new book you chronicle six full decades of the fitness phases you went through. Was one that was the most fun to revisit and write about?

Alison Bechdel: Oh, definitely. My days doing karate at a feminist martial arts school when I was in my twenties. That was really the most serious athletic endeavor I ever pursued, but it was very transformative and amazing and fun, and fun to revisit for those reasons.

You mention in the book that you initially set out to write a more light-hearted book about fitness. That’s not exactly what happened. Was there a point where you realized that that shift was happening?

This book just took a long time. All my books seem to, but this one took even longer than my other memoirs. Partly because life happened. I started working on this book pretty soon after I finished Are You My Mother?, a memoir about my mom. But as soon as I really sat down to think about this book, my mom started dying. That was a big thing to go through. My life got kind of turned over to that for a while and it was just hard [and] very sad to lose my mother. I had grief to deal with, but also at the same time my life had gotten very busy. All of a sudden my profile had gotten higher and I was traveling a lot more and being in public a lot more. The musical based on Fun Home had come out and my life got slightly derailed by that stuff for a couple of years. It was very hard to make time to sit down and do the kind of deep, contemplative thinking that this book required. It worked out in the end, because as it happened the way I ended up structuring the book, with each chapter being a full decade of my life, I really needed to live through my fifties in order to finish the book. So that kind of worked out.

How do you feel now, having put out a new memoir? Does it feel like a continuation of your other work?

It does in a way; I keep trying to articulate how exactly. I’ll try, we’ll see how I do today. I feel like I’m always to some extent writing about myself. Writing autobiographically, that’s what you’re doing. But I hope that I’ve also been writing not so much about my particular self, but about the self, especially in my book about my mom. It was very much about my experiences in therapy and really thinking deeply about how our selves get formed in the earliest days with our mothers. That was some pretty deep navel gazing, but with this new book, I feel like it does continue that trajectory because now I’m writing about trying to kind of let go of myself, trying to transcend myself or to kill my ego. It does feel like a through line.

You’ve also mentioned that it took you many years to feel able to tell the story of Fun Home as well. Was there something similar happening here time wise? Was now the time to tell this story?

That’s a good question. Certainly the experience of aging was part of the impulse to write this book. I have exercised all my life. It’s always been a really fun thing that I’ve done. And it sort of gave me the illusion that I was staving off death somehow. If I could just stay fit enough, I wouldn’t die. But it was becoming increasingly clear that that was not going to happen, that even though I was still working out, I was starting to lose strength and get stiff and get inexplicably slower. So it was that experience of starting to age that really made me want to write this story.

I’m curious about how you negotiate what parts of your life to revisit. Did you feel like you were building on what your readers already know about you from Fun Home and Are You My Mother?

I wanted to be very careful not to make those things necessary. I want you to be able to just read this book without knowing that stuff. But at the same time, if you do know that stuff, I wanted to make sure you could tell where it fit into the story. So I do talk about all of my work. I talk about writing Dykes to Watch Out For, starting in my twenties and through my forties. I talk about taking on this challenge of wanting to write the story of Fun Home and finally getting up the nerve to do it. So that stuff is all in there but I tried to make it not required.

This might be a bit of a chicken and egg question, but do you tend to write books to learn more about a particular subject or does the learning come first?

Yeah, it’s very much a chicken and the egg. I never know which is leading. With all my books, I don’t know what’s going to happen when I go in. I feel like there’s no real point in writing a book if you know how it’s going to end or where it’s going to take you. So they’ve all been adventures in self-exploration and I always end up turning to other texts as guides. It’s not even like I have a plan to do that, it just sort of happens. With Fun Home I was reading these authors my father loved and getting caught up in their work and their lives. In the book about my mom, that was learning all about how psychoanalysis works and getting especially obsessed with the analyst Donald Winnicott and his crazy ideas about what happened in our earliest days, with the mother and the baby. In this book, it ended up being these Transcendentalist and Romantic writers who I really wasn’t that interested in. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, that just seemed like a snooze fest to me. And Emerson. I’ve never been particularly interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson, but that’s where the research started to take me. And I found myself getting actually excited about all of them.

That’s interesting to hear, because from a reader’s perspective, your books do feel very exploratory, like you’re being led on a journey.

I’m glad that comes through. I feel like it’s a tightrope act, I’m going out here and I better come up with a book before I get to the other side or else I’m going to drop off into the abyss.

While you were working on this book, did you think at all about how your style of visual storytelling lends itself to this particular topic?

I was worried about how this was going to work, because how many pictures can I draw of myself running or skiing? I thought it might be a problem. But once I actually began illustrating the book, that wasn’t how it worked out. What was really fun was interweaving these other writers’ stories into mine. All of a sudden we go from 1990 to 1790 and we’re back into a whole other time period. So that certainly livened things up a bit.

I found myself making the connection between the theme of wanting more, the search for more strength, more endurance, more pushing of limits, and also how very rich your illustration style tends to be. You’ve got a lot of background details, a lot of jokes, and a lot of text.

I’m a very word-heavy cartoonist.

It’s not a bad thing. I love it.

Oh good. Most of the book is in color with this sharp black line art. But then there are these periods when there’s no color and it’s brushwork instead of a pen. It’s very jarring when there are these scenes where there is no color. I tried to copy sumi-e drawing that’s just watered down ink. And I would use that at the end of each chapter and at a few other points where I felt like something sort of transformational was happening. As a way to get out of that every day kind of drawing with very sharp line art where everything’s separate and distinct to a more diffuse way of being in the world.

That’s so fascinating, the mental state as change in art style.

Especially because brush drawing is hard for me. It’s really challenging. I love the clarity and precision of an ink line, and you can’t control a brush. Here we go back to the theme of control. I very intentionally pushed myself to do that, also because you can’t really revise or correct brushwork. Either you do it right or you don’t.

That terrifies me.

It was terrifying.

You make these really beautiful connections between lives of the Romantics, the Transcendentalists, and the Beats, writing that you were interested in “the way their individual ideas are part of a larger, evolving understanding of the relationship between humans and the universe.” How did those big questions ended up in your fitness book?

At a certain point I realized that I was actually kind of writing my own version of books by these authors. In a way, I was rewriting Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, where he climbed this mountain in the Sierras with Gary Snyder. In a way I was writing this crazy book Coleridge wrote in his middle age where he was bringing together autobiographical stuff with literary stuff, just this weird hodgepodge of things. I felt like I was writing Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal, just in the way I’m keeping minute track of what I’m doing throughout the course of my life.

Another strand of the book is just how being outside, being in the woods, hiking, having access to nature has always been really life saving for me. And I feel awkward writing about that stuff. Anything insightful anyone has ever had to say about nature had been said many, many times over. So I was nervous about trying to write about that. It was helpful to rely on these other people and their experiences of nature. It just sounds so trite, the way nature makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself, and that’s what all these writers in one way or another were very aware of. I was very drawn to that, even though I don’t explicitly say that much in my book. The drawings of the outdoors, the drawings of the mountains and the experiences the different people had in the mountains, that all hopefully evokes that feeling without my necessarily stating it all explicitly.

I think it only sounds trite because it’s so fundamentally true.

Yeah, it’s obvious. Why should we have to say it?

It’s interesting to see how this book functions as this kind of braided essay, but in graphic novel form.

Oh, I like that. I found myself referring to the various strands of it. I really like that braided idea. There’s definitely a lot of different levels that I’m trying to weave, to let go of it here, but bring it back a little later, but I don’t want to wait too long to bring it back or you’ll forget what was happening. So it was very much an act of braiding.

I often think of fitness as something preparatory, as ensuring that your body will exist in a certain way in the future. And in this book, you spend some time discussing your difficulty with being in the moment and connecting with others. Can you talk a little bit more about fitness as avoidance strategy?

Especially in my late twenties/early thirties, when I was doing yoga, I went through a phase of deciding I was going to be celibate, that relationships were just too much trouble, and I would just do yoga and draw my cartoons and be by myself. That definitely was a kind of avoidance strategy. It didn’t last too long, but it’s very appealing. Your life can be very simple if you don’t have a relationship that you’re trying to make work.

Throughout the book, you keep returning to the idea of what the secret to superhuman strength might be. And it’s so fascinating how that sort of self-optimization can be both so helpful and so destructive.

Yes. As a kid, my fantasy about superhuman strength was that I wouldn’t need anybody else, that I would be completely self-sufficient. That’s been a fantasy that has guided me through my life for a long time. And only recently have I begun to try and dismantle it and to realize that I really can’t exist in a silo, completely separate from other people. I need other people. That’s a part of my life that is hard for me, relationship. But I’m trying to make it work, trying to figure it out.

There’s also this very late-stage capitalist idea of optimization, of being the best version, the best worker, that I think comes through in how you talk about fitness and wellness as also industries.

I definitely fall prey to that fantasy too, of wanting to be perfect or at least better than I am. And that too is something, as I get older and slower, that I’m facing. That’s not a realistic model for anyone. Much better to accept your flawed self than to flog yourself into some imaginary state of perfection.

It was also particularly interesting to read the book during this ongoing quarantine, when fitness was such a focus for so many of us, whether we were doing it or not. Did your relationship to working out change during Covid?

It did. It’s funny because I actually completely stopped going to the gym. It’s been a year since I’ve lifted weights, and that’s something I’ve always done pretty religiously. So I feel really bad about that. I kept up my running, for most of the pandemic I did that. But here’s the weird thing about the pandemic for me: I was very much engaged in drawing this book. Finally I had finished writing it and my deadline was coming down the pike, and being in lockdown was actually a really weird blessing. I wouldn’t have gotten the book done in time if I hadn’t been forced to do nothing but work eighteen hours a day. So that was really good. But I have not gotten back on the weightlifting regimen.

And for this book, you worked with your partner, Holly Rae Taylor.

Yes.

When I got to the end of the book, I found that collaboration a little surprising given that so much of the story is about control and self-sufficiency. What was that experience like?

I know. I mean that’s part of why I’m a cartoonist, because I can do everything myself. I control all aspects of the process. So it was a bit of a challenge, but in a way it was perfect because it exemplifies this struggle that the whole book is about. Being really with another person in a collaboration, in an active project together. It wasn’t my goal, when I started thinking about this book, that I would have Holly color it, but my deadline was coming. I didn’t have time to do it all myself, and she was available and it just worked out. And it was actually a wonderful experience. We had a few rough patches until we got the system down. But, you know, the nature of this work is so intense. Putting a graphic novel together is all consuming. If I’d been doing it on my own without her being involved, it would have been very lonely and weird for both of us trapped here in the house, to have me off in this other plane of existence. But as it was, we were both off in that other plane of existence and it was really great.

That’s so nice to hear! When I started thinking about what it would be like to collaborate in that way—not to get too English class about it—I thought of these two moments in the book, one where you meet Holly for the first time at a bike swap and she is ends up being this lingering presence for you. And then another where you’re biking uphill and you write that if you could choose to only bike uphill or downhill for the rest of your life, you’d pick uphill as a way of remaining in control.

Oh then there’s that scene where I’m on my first bike ride with Holly. There’s this weird thing where my jacket gets caught in my spokes and I almost wipe out. That’s such a funny connection because I did almost lose control and I feel like that whole accident happened because I was so distracted by Holly that I did this dumb thing of putting my jacket around my seat post even though you’re never supposed to do that. Holly has been a wonderful influence in my life and I always just feel a little off balance around her, even thirteen years later.

That sounds wonderful. On a different note, I was re-reading the introduction to Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, and you express a sort of dismay at being this entry point into lesbian culture and in a way—by virtue of chronicling what you saw and what you lived through—creating what lesbian culture means for some of us. Have your feelings changed on that point at all?

Now that there’s been such a huge blossoming of lesbian culture and there’s so much more stuff out there, I don’t feel that so much anymore. But it was always interesting to me when I would hear from younger women who said, “Oh, the first lesbians I ever met were your cartoon characters.” Suddenly I start thinking if they had been good role models or bad role models.

That’s too much pressure for a cartoon character.

Yes.

I also watched a recent conversation you had with JEB and particularly loved how you discussed the double-edged sword of making lesbians visible. In the context of this new book and your career, do you have any further thoughts on that idea?

The thing about this book is it’s not a particularly queer book. I mean, yes, I’m in it leading my lesbian life with my female partners, but it’s not really about sexuality. My other books have had that as a focus, but this book is just about me leading my life and I happen to be a lesbian. That’s definitely something that couldn’t have happened not so long ago. Which is nice, it’s nice to be able to have another dimension to my experience.

Ring of Keys Collective Wants Your Heart to Say Hi

Until Beth Malone started giving interviews during the original Broadway run of Fun Home, to outsiders, it might have appeared as though the only queer people in musical theatre were cis men. Royer Bockus is ready for that stigma to die. A self-proclaimed “musical theatre lesbian,” she, alongside Andrea Prestinario and Holly Marie Dunn have founded Ring of Keys, a “National network of queer women + trans and GNC artists working on and offstage in musical theatre.” The goals of the network are manifold: to create community, serve as a hiring resource, and to diversify the leadership in the musical theatre world.

Bockus, a 2015 A-Camp alumnae of A-Camp (“the year of food poisoning,” according to her), and her friends started this network because they felt alone in the musical theatre universe. She was introduced to Andrea by a mutual friend, and they instantly connected. “I had felt so isolated as a queer woman in the musical theatre industry and… to get to talk to one other person about that experience has meant so much to me… I want more people who feel isolated in this industry to not feel isolated.” This desire turned into an opportunity for national and global networking that didn’t only aim to make queer folks feel less alone but hoped to show the musical theatre industry that queer women, non-binary people, and trans people existed and wanted to be recognized.

“The cis gay male quadrant of musical theatre seemed to figure out how to find one another a little better. They seem to be visible in a way that queer women and gender non conforming people are not and so our mission sort of expanded beyond just a social network to creating a visible network—meaning visible to the industry and to the public…because we are here.”

The network’s name comes one of the most memorable songs in Fun Home, “Ring of Keys”,  about the first time Alison Bechdel saw a butch woman as a child while in a diner. “When she [Little Alison] can finally see somebody that she identifies with, it helps her inform her own identity and standing in her identity,” Bockus said. “We wanted to be the ring of keys for a lot of other young, queer theatre-makers to go ‘if I can see it, I can be it. If I have an example then I can populate this world too; I don’t have to be someone else to exist here.'”

The network has goals that encompass changing the entire landscape of musical theatre. We talked about how writers, producers, and even the canon force AFAB folks (regardless of gender) into a particular feminine heterosexual aesthetic to succeed in musical theatre. The white cis men who are writing and producing musicals reinforce these aesthetics because “their idea of femininity…the way that women seem to be presented is pretty narrow,” says Bockus.

In addition to being a networking and hiring resource, the founders hope that community building will help queer actors to feel less afraid in auditions or rehearsals to advocate for directors to honor their own gender identities and expressions. “There’s no reason why the way I express my gender couldn’t be the way the character expresses her gender…” Bockus is especially interested in the ways the canon can provide opportunities for this to happen and cited an example from her residency at Oregon Shakespeare Festival this summer where a woman is playing Mercutio, not as a person in drag, but through the lens of her own gender identity. Bockus thinks that theatres are hungry for more diverse characters and actors regarding gender and sexuality, but the isolation queer women and trans folks experience, makes it hard for us to feel as though we can advocate that others honor our expressions.

Most exciting to me about the project is the network’s clarity about their commitment to creating a queer space that’s inclusive of trans people. In an interview with Stage and Candor, Bockus and co-creator Andrea Prestinario were clear that there is no room in Ring of Keys for trans exclusionary radical feminists (also known as TERFs). At a time when folks are claiming TERF as hate speech instead of a way to identify harmful members of the LGBTQ community, Ring of Keys’ radical inclusivity is refreshing. Bockus’ own understanding of the importance of including trans people in queer spaces came from her time at A-Camp. “I never want to be a part of any feminism that excludes women or people that don’t conform to any gender at all…” she said, concluding with the adorable metaphor  that “a queer space without trans people is…a cake without cake!” Amen, sister.

Membership is open for Ring of Keys to queer women and trans people who have worked professionally in musical theatre. Joining gives you access to a membership directory, job opportunities, a secret Facebook group, and hopefully, local outings with other queer folks in the industry. Ring of Keys hopes to have chapters all over America where meetups, collaborations, and relationships can grow. Through community building and networking, Ring of Keys hopes that no other queer woman or trans person in musical theatre ever feels like they’re the only one out there.

Top 10 Stud and Butch Crushes of 2015

In 2015 we’ve met or got reacquainted with some extremely hot masculine-of-center women or otherwise-identified queers. Here’s 10 sexy studs worth swooning over.

---

10. Miki Vargas

She’s a photographer who takes amazing wedding photos, portraits of butches, and more. In 2015, in addition to taking some of the most wonderful pictures of queer nuptials, she documented the evolution of masculinity in the Handsome Revolution Project. I wonder if the smiles she gets are from the moment, or from her adorable face.

---

9. Deanne Smith

A Canadian-American comedian whose timely LGBTQ jokes make me gigglesnort. Deanne’s 2015 performance at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival solidified her place as a seriously funny comedian, and one to watch in the new year. I really want to get lifted and watch Friends with her. I think it would be an amazing time.

---

8. Siya

Siya’s work to transcend the rapper stereotype is evident on Sisterhood of Hip Hop, and in season 2 she shared her strength and courage to be who she is, inspiring us all. I once had a dream that I had a threesome with this entertainer and Samira Wiley in Siya’s mansion. Each night I try to relive said dream.

---

7. Jess Voss

Jess Voss showed us this year that being dapper is a lifestyle, and that embracing fashion is always okay. A model to watch, she was featured in Dapper Q’s He Said/ We Said not only for her clean aesthetic but her entrepreneurial skill. A spiffy San Francisco bar owner who sells wine on tap, yummy burgers, and more. Def on my next place to visit while in the Bay.

---

6. Alison Bechdel

We’ve loved Alison Bechdel’s comic Dykes To Watch Out For long time, and this year she’s not only taken it to Broadway with Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, the musical won five Tony Awards. She’s been on my crush list for ages, and her preppy style has been and will continue to be an inspiration for others in the coming year.

---

5. Amber

Amber, host of Amber’s Closet, entertains us weekly, amassing over half a million views with snapshots of her life, her style, and her relationships. She collaborated with queer favs like Ari Fitz, Hart, and Miles Jai this year, and keeps us educated, laughing, and crushing. Honestly, I had so many happy lesbian feels for Amber and Kiarra (model and Amber’s ex) – I hoped that they would be together forever, but they broke up this year. Kiarra is still my fitspiration, and I’ll be watching to see who Amber has on her arms next.

---

4. Samira Wiley

What a sweet, sweet Poussey. Besides showing us her amazing acting chops, looking stellar on the red carpet, and gal palin’ around with Lauren Morelli this year, she’s shown us that being yourself always pays off. Those innocent eyes, that anxious smile, and her internal flame makes me wish I was on lockdown at Lichfield.

---

3. Wen Liu

Wen Liu, Co-Founder of the Hey Queer Project wowed us this year with beautiful images of queer Asian beauty, and tons of thought-provoking introspection. I wish I could share ice cream with her in the Mission. I’d get salted caramel and order her a Rocky Road.

---

2. Ruby Rose

Ruby Rose’s boobs were all over our tubes in 2015. I don’t know of a single woman who hasn’t fantasized about Ruby Rose at least once. When I do, I’m Piper before she lost her innocence and naivety, and she’s a little meaner and less shady.

---

1. AzMarie Livingston

I’ve been crushing on her since America’s Next Top Model: British Invasion, and I live for the stolen moments in Empire that she pops in for a line or two. A model and actress, I’m excited to see what’s on her agenda in 2016.

Watch Beth Malone Figure Out She’s a Lesbian In Her One-Woman Show “So Far” at Joe’s Pub

Luther Ingram, Jodie Foster, Kristi McNichol, and Connie Chung all play crucial cameos in Beth Malone’s So Far, and that’s all in the first fifteen minutes. The Fun Home star returned to her roots at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York City on August 31st to perform a one-woman cabaret show following a rural lesbian through her tomboy childhood, an engagement (to a man!), her first stint as an actress in New York, another marriage (to a woman!), and her ever-tense relationship with her Colorado cowboy father.

Malone is slight in stature, but commands the stage with epic confidence, opening the act with Luther Ingram’s “If Lovin’ You Is Wrong (I Don’t Wanna Be Right)” — a song I didn’t know was so gay until Malone sang it. Her wit is biting, her story relatable, and her voice is like an angel’s. Using the storytelling aid of paper-plate puppets of Jodie Foster, Kristi McNichol and Connie Chung, we are transported through the countless childhood “aha” moments that should have led Malone to realize she was a big, fat, bleepin’ lesbian, but which only served to leave her confused into early adulthood.

Though it takes Malone until she’s already promised to a man to finally sleep with a woman for the first time and fully realize her lesbianism, her awkward and uncertain stumble toward this conclusion is one most queer women will recognize. A smaller (though, I imagine, still quite large) contingent will relate to her tragic and estranged relationship with her right-wing, Rush Limbaugh-enthusiast father, with whom she was once inseparable.

Malone tells us about getting an on-stage kiss from Barbara Mandrell at eleven — “on the LIPS!!!” — exchanging Christmas gifts with her mother in a parking lot, and getting type-casted on the New York musical theater scene: “‘Scrappy’ is a euphemism.”

With impeccable comedic timing and an ear for the queer in almost every musical genre, Malone is able to process in one show what many people are unable to process ever in their lives. It’s a lot. So much, in fact, that we are rewarded with a short reprieve from all the feelings with a mid-show interactive theatrical break called “Ask a Lesbian a Question,” during which Malone and Fun Home book writer Lisa Kron answer the audience’s most pressing questions as can only two very sarcastic lesbians can. When asked by a gay man about lesbian “labels,” Kron says she self-identifies as a “femme, top, coupon-cutting, childless MILF.”

So Far was written by Beth Malone and Patricia Cotter. Musical direction is by Susan Drausstrong and directed by Peter Schneider. The show is produced by LezCab, whose mission is to “create an accurate and meaningful representation of queer women in order to foster equality and community.” They accomplish this task through the magic of theater. They also host social networking events for queer women in the theater, which can be found on their events page.

“Fun Home” Made History Last Night and This Is Entirely About That

On the evening of June 7th, The Tony Awards were broadcast into a whole bunch of homes via teevee.

On the evening of June 7th, history was made when Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori became the first entirely female writing team to win for book and score; when Sydney Lucas sang “Ring of Keys” to theatre enthusiasts across America; when the only show ever on Broadway about a butch lesbian won Best Musical. Fun Home took five total Tony Awards: Michael Cerveris won for best actor in a musical, Sam Gold won best director of a musical, and Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron KILLED IT as previously mentioned.

On the evening of June 7th, I sobbed uncontrollably on my couch, refreshing my Twitter feed and various live blogs because this is a day I legitimately never anticipated.

---

Fun Home is a show about memory; about writing memoir. There is no such thing as truth when human beings are involved: everything is wilting flowers and a writer (or a cartoonist) is constantly grabbing at thoughts and events that decay so much faster than we expect them to. I had the opportunity to see Fun Home, a musical based on the graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, before it opened. They invited every lesbian in New York that has ever written words, I think. No expectations attached. We wound up sitting next to friends we hadn’t seen in a while (queers) and we screamed when we saw them squeeze past knees to sit in the two empty seats adjacent. But I digress. Which is perhaps appropriate, given the show is a show about memory. Digressions become the story.

I was, oddly enough in retrospect, worried the show wouldn’t pass The Bechdel Test. I’ve just become so accustomed to Broadway’s particular brand of misogyny — one which we all know and excuse, one which hasn’t stopped me from loving Broadway — that I couldn’t imagine any other kind of show. I was worried even though Fun Home originally opened at the Public, off-broadway; even though Lisa Kron did the book and lyrics; even though Jeanine Tesori wrote the music; even though it’s based on Alison Bechdel’s memoir in comics and that the book certainly passes. That’s how strong the flower-fication is with Broadway.

The show passes, of course it does, it has to, the show is centered on the character of Alison Bechdel. Three extraordinary people play Alison at various points in her life—Small Alison (Sydney Lucas) paints us a picture of childhood; Middle Alison (Emily Skeggs) is going to college (and coming out in college); Alison at age 43 (Beth Malone) is trying to string all the flowers together, to find the inbetweens that are memory. Not only does Fun Home have a named female character who talks to another named female character about something other than a man, it has a woman so dynamic and multifaceted that it takes three actors to play her. Watching someone harmonize with oneself, reverberating through the past and the future, is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to the experience of memory in performance.

My name is Alison, too, and I’m not the same person I was when I was Small Alison. I’m not even the same person I was five years ago, as Middle Alison; no one is.

---

I found reminders of who I used to be when I reread the book before seeing the show—not just in memories (which are never to be trusted), but in the physical evidence. Like when I discovered I’d left a streak of blood at the bottom of page 14, despite having promised myself that I’d resist my typical urge to gnaw at my cuticles while reading this time, and then realized that the streak was dry. I’d bled on it five years ago, back in 2010.

In the middle of the chapter titled “In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” (borrowed from Marcel Proust with his tea-soaked madeleine memory), I found a leaf.

“Look at this!” I said to my fiancée Abby.

“You don’t remember that?”

“Not at all.” It wasn’t surprising—I have a memory like a wiffle ball.

“I found it there when I was reading your copy—I showed it to you. It’s from when you first read it, I think.”

Right! Yes, I’d been sitting on a stone bench in a grey henley outside Scott Hall, for once actually washed, dried and groomed because I had a raging crush on Professor A, the first masculine-of-center queer woman I’d seen regularly with my own eyeballs since coming out. A leaf fell into my book, like something that would happen in a stock photo.

I first read Fun Home while taking Professor A’s creative writing class at Rutgers University. I was twenty-two. The pages were xeroxed because it was a 101 class and we couldn’t be trusted to purchase anything. I don’t remember which chapter was assigned, but after reading it, I immediately went out and bought the whole thing.

I was newly out, newly heartbroken and newly back from Paris. I had newly beaten my disordered eating (sort of—at least I was putting food in my mouth again) and despite having cut a full two feet off my hair, I still managed to look like a cast member from the musical Hair— still soft like petals in the eyes, patchouli-scented, earnest and often reading in the grass. I still thought I was going to be an actress forever and I was about to graduate with a degree in theatre.

It was an exciting time full of great change; I was panicking. This is how I was, as Middle Alison.

My problems were tiny buds in comparison to those of Alison Bechdel’s. Her problems were in full bloom. I devoured the book in a time where I was barely eating, when I was trying so hard to be girly — I don’t do that now. I am now what so many women fear becoming: a masculine woman with short hair and a perpetual button down shirt. The leaf fell in the shadow of the young girl in flower and it stayed there. I probably hoped Professor A would pass by and see me reading it. I was probably wearing tie-dye under that grey henley. I was probably still wickedly skinny, pitching my voice higher and trying to laugh softly. Femininity was important, especially as an actress.

One of the last images in this chapter is young Alison as she sees a butch woman for the first time — her father, Bruce Bechdel, asks her if that’s what she wants to look like. It is a question loaded with shame, as most girlhoods are. She lies, “no.”

Five years ago, the panel struck me. But it didn’t reach me. It’s been a journey. Middle Alison didn’t recognize the message: this is you, this was you, this will be you. This is how you will look; you will look this gay. Alison today can’t figure out how she didn’t: the professor was a masculine of center woman; the leaf fell on these pages in particular; she (me) was so uncomfortable in her (my) body because it was undesirable for theatre and she (I) sought out this book when it called. Christ, I even share the author’s name, which has the curious effect of convincing me that all the characters are speaking directly to me, through the pages and into my world. That was me, but I couldn’t see it yet.

A different person would certainly have to play me, were this a musical of my life. I went from straining to be a flower-child in a flower press to comfortably taking up space in the men’s department; getting my hair cut with clippers; laughing like a barking dog instead of like a sighing plant, making noise only because it was moved by the wind. Now, people call me “sir” and get flustered when I open my mouth and sound a lot more like Glinda the Good Witch than they expected. But I don’t mind. I’m Alison, now. And I recognize just how damn hard it is to be Middle Alison.

---

Perhaps saying “no” to masculinity wasn’t a lie. I wanted to be an actress, and actresses who are masculine don’t work. There are no roles for masculine woman. There are barely roles for women who take up space. So it wasn’t that I’d never seen a butch woman before these pages and didn’t know that masculinity was possible in women. It just didn’t occur to me that it was a possibility for me. So I kept trying to fit my body into clothes and plays that weren’t made for it.

There is a lot right about theatre culture, but there’s a lot wrong with it too—I felt the pressure, and when I was unhealthy-skinny I got cast so much more. Small is feminine, said the numbers to me. Broadway musical theatre was never meant to grow roles for women other than those of delicate flowers.

In the days leading up to seeing Fun Home at Circle in the Square, I tried to think of Broadway roles for masculine-of-center women in musicals. I’m no theatre historian, but I’ve taken so many Theatre History classes that knowledge has fallen on me like so many watermelon seeds, spit from the mouths of those who know better than I; they took root and planted jazz-hands in my heart forever.

And I could think of only one role: Shirley, from The Producers. She sings one phrase (“keep it gay”); she is fat, speaks in a humping voice with her thumbs in her tool belt; she’s a punch line, held up against the glamorous (feminine) gay men.

I’m not a person who gets upset with jokes made at my expense—I see nothing inherently wrong with Shirley in The Producers. To any person who’s spent time in technical theatre, that joke is about the business and the stereotypes therein (many lesbian electricians). But with an average audience, this subtlety might be reduced to laughing at a manly dyke. A woman who takes up space. Even so, I have no issue with it. My beef is that it’s the only role I can think of.

If I stretch real hard, I can include Joanne from Rent. But I have to stand on my tip toes to come close on that one — she is a lesbian, and androgynous, but not masculine. If I reach around in the other direction, I can include Peter Pan — but that character is a boy and I’ve reached too far again.

Maybe I’m forgetting someone, but that’s not really the issue, even though memory is the star of the show. The issue is that, whether the role exists or not, I couldn’t access it.

When I quit theatre, I was allowed to change; I didn’t have to reach, to contort, to shrink, to press. I didn’t have to bloom into a flower. But listen, here’s the point: if I had stuck with acting, to the point where I was maybe really good, or even great, and I auditioned for anything on Broadway there would only be one role for me to play. And that role didn’t exist when I left.

That’s why it’s hard to be Middle Alison, trying to figure out who you are in a culture where no mirrors reflect you. That’s why it’s hard to be Small Alison, and reach your roots into soil without having all the information.

---

When Beth Malone stepped onto the stage as Alison Bechdel on the night I first saw Fun Home, I wept. I cried for almost the entirety of the performance. I tell you this because I missed things. I might have missed a connection, the stability of a lyric, the soft scent of a leitmotif sprouting. Such delicacies might have gone under-appreciated with tears and snot running down my face.

The only thing I could see in front of me was me. Even with our lives so vastly different, this was the mirror I never had in the place I wanted it most five years ago. I can blame the tears on the uncanny coat of pollen that is the personal intersection with a piece of art; I am allergic to something I’ve never been exposed to before and it feels so good. I could curl up in the shadow of this tree forever.

I saw myself in Malone’s portrayal of Alison—a walk with legs far apart, leaning forward; a tee-shirt and jeans; short, short hair. And I saw myself as a writer there, too— pen always between her fingers as she gestured, and toward the end of the musical frantically trying to draw things out as they vanished from her memory. Malone captured the experience of flowers dying in her hands: “What’s this? ‘Table in the living room with / jack in the pulpit.’ Oh. Oh. I was going / to draw that in this panel.” Oh. Oh. Why am I crying again at this musical? I can’t quite remember.

I saw myself in Small Alison, too. The song “Ring of Keys” illustrates the moment where Alison sees the butch woman for the first time. I knew what was coming when the clank and noise of the diner began and I grabbed my fiancée’s hand, expectantly. It opens with Small Alison arguing with her father, as she has been the whole show, about wearing a barrette. He argues the barrette can suitably function to keep her hair out of her eyes.

“So would a crewcut,” Small Alison replies. It was a song about desire sung by a child; not sexual, but physical. The desire to know, to understand. To find one’s reflection in a sea of people not like you. I understand that—every gay person understands that. It’s not a song I ever thought I’d see on Broadway, a song about seeing yourself in adulthood (“It’s prob’ly conceited to say / But I think we’re alike in a certain way,” she sings), for finding a woman “handsome.” That is how I was, as Small Alison.

And it was just broadcast during The Tony Awards.

And Middle Alison. Gosh. Middle Alison. We get to see Middle Alison realize her first crush, on a woman called Joan (Roberta Colindrez). We see the first time they have sex, the aftermath — Middle Alison sings that she’s changing her major to Joan, still in white underwear and socks. Joan remains asleep as Middle Alison whisper-trills, “So by the time you’ve woken up / I’ll be cool, I’ll be collected / And I’ll have found some dignity / But who needs dignity? / ‘Cause this is so much better.” I remember stepping into the hallway in my underwear, bare feet on cold tile, after I slept with my version of Joan and jumping around. I was confused but optimistic and I liked it. That is how I was, as Middle Alison.

They were all there, all together, all singing, all occupying the same space on the stage. All these Alisons who are one person. Broadway grew up. Broadway presented everything in a woman that it had been distilled to laugh at. The show already made history without the Tony Awards. And then.

Tonight, this kind of representation was awarded. Tony history was made with the first all-female team winning for best score — women take up space with their songs and stories. Children who saw Sydney Lucas sing might have found a mirror; every gay adult found a mirror for the kid they once were. Actresses who might have otherwise sent themselves through the flower press can point to this musical and say, there. There. It is the Best Musical. For once in our damn lives, something made for mainstream labeled the masculine queer woman as “best.”

---

This is a show about memory. If singing with yourself works backwards, could it work forwards too? Since my Middle Alison and my Small Alison live in me though they are long gone, does that mean they saw this? I’d have to assume yes—that they took note of the remarkable resemblance between Joan and the woman who broke our hearts back then; that they know we have a song to belt out while doing the dishes that does not require the suspension of our own disbelief; they can see we quit acting for so many reasons, and that if this show — the only show about a masculine-of-center lesbian on Broadway ever — had won a Tony back then, that would have been one less reason. One more road sign. One more way we could have seen ourselves in the world while we were panicking. It is so hard to be Middle Alison, to be Small Alison, but I think they feel better, somehow.

I would’ve saved so much time I lost in searching. But mostly, I think, my Alisons are excited to feel the cartoon tap tap on her wrist and the un-shy, un-floral and unabashed belted song: “I think we’re alike in a certain way.” Tonight, the theatre world just told us they know us. They sang it to us. Thank you, Alison Bechdel. Thank you, Fun Home.

“Fun Home” the Musical is Messy, Hilarious, Nostalgic, and Totally Worth It

The show is over, the lights come up. The actors take their bows; small Alison jumps on big Alison’s back, and they all run out of the room. Throughout the audience, people are sniffling, rifling through their bags for any tissues they may have missed. I almost ask the woman next to me if she needs a hug. Because while the last 100 minutes gave us plenty of opportunity for laughter, shock and nostalgia, the overwhelming feeling in the room that night is wistful sadness.

Fun Home, the musical adaptation of the Alison Bechdel graphic memoir that so many of us love, opened on Broadway on April 19. Since then, it’s received a dozen Tony nominations, among other awards and accolades, and many of its performances have sold out. The one I saw did; two empty seats in front of me appeared to be the only no-shows in the entire Circle in the Square theater. The crowd was diverse in age and appearance, but everyone seemed taken in by the story of an adult Alison (Beth Malone) remembering a chaotic youth marked by her father’s strange behavior and eventual suicide.

The three versions we get of Bechdel — “Small Alison,” “Middle Alison,” and just plain “Alison,” according to the playbill — are each in a discovery phase of their shared life. Both young Alisons are stumbling toward maturity, trying to express themselves to a father who has a wholly different vision of her. Adult Alison knows he won’t understand, but continuously kicks herself for not explaining better, demanding answers. Early on, she announces what those who have read the memoir already know: This story will end with her father, Bruce (Michael Cerveris), committing suicide. She has limited time to speak with him before then, to learn what she can about how his warped, intangible trajectory affected her own development.

Because Alison is a lesbian, as she discovers in stages charmingly familiar to queer viewers. She is also a cartoonist, drawn to a medium her father refuses to take seriously. She doesn’t know what she wants to be like as an adult, but it’s not reflected in any of the adults around her. Her mother, Helen (Judy Kuhn), is robbed of her own dreams and resigned to living with a man who has no affection for her. Bruce, a big, shouting, singing force, is nonetheless opaque, living with lies and loneliness. Middle Alison (Emily Skeggs) starts to get an idea of the right track for her when she falls in love with Joan (Roberta Colindrez‘s truly dreamy, self-described collegiate dyke) but even then struggles to really say the words: I am a lesbian. And when she finally does, her parents act like they don’t hear her. It’s the same struggle that millions of young queer people endure every day, one that I endured.

That’s why I felt stung during one of small Alison’s pivotal scenes. Eating in a diner with her father, who is busy reading, Alison notices a delivery woman no one else seems to pay much attention to. She is strong, a butch with short hair, boots and, Alison sings triumphantly, a large ring of KEYS! Alison, who has struggled to dress comfortably while her father pressures her to fit in with other girls, revels in the realization that a grown woman could dress like this and be okay. She has received the first piece of her role model puzzle. Sitting in the audience, hearing those around me laugh at an admittedly silly musical number, made me want to get up and defend the girl on stage. Her story is the one that’s still developing! I thought. This is a huge deal for her! Take this seriously! 

Like many of my reactions to this play, this one came from a deeply personal experience as a queer woman. Which is great, and powerful, and exactly what good theater should inspire. But weirdly enough, it was a moment in which I felt othered — in a theater with visibly queer people! during a play about a lesbian and her gay dad! — acutely aware of all those in the audience who were there out of curiosity about something they had never experienced. It made me empathize even more with adult Alison, who throughout the play cringes and blushes at her younger selves’ more awkward moments.

Media representations of childhood are inherently revisionist — reproduced by adults, they search for complex meaning in youthful experiences that, while multifaceted and complicated, were lived by a less-developed mind. To a child, cause-and-effect reasoning is a blunt tool, and varied daily experiences are often viewed sequentially rather than in relation to one another: I didn’t eat my lunch; then I was starving all afternoon; then I had three servings at dinner; then I threw up on the carpet; then Mom got mad at me. An adult would see each situation as leading to the next (if I had eaten lunch, I wouldn’t have gotten sick; if I hadn’t overeaten at dinner, my parent wouldn’t be upset) but a child doesn’t necessarily connect the dots. And an adult looking back on a situation from their childhood may connect dots that shade experiences in a way their younger self never felt.

Fun Home gets that. Throughout the story, adult Alison wanders the set, observing small details and wondering aloud if she’s remembered correctly. At times, she rushes to sketch details before they disappear; in other moments, square lights appear around multiple scenes simultaneously, as if she’s viewing the comic strip in her head faster than she can transcribe it. Staged in the round, the play has just enough set detail to keep the eye bouncing while characters bound in and out through a multipurpose door. Scenes flow organically from one to the next, and bare-bones representations of Bechdel’s father’s same-sex dalliances inspire a truly impressive amount of discomfort. Small Alison never knew about her dad’s affairs, and middle Alison can only piece together the components her mother reveals. But neither she nor the audience needs a full play-by-play to feel how wrong the encounters are.

Bruce is the loudest character in the play, and it would be easy to think of him as its main character. He’s the only one whose story gets a beginning, middle and end. But that would be a shortsighted view of what Fun Home is, and why it’s so important. The play, like the graphic memoir, is not just Bechdel’s recounting of her father’s painful, semi-closeted life. It’s an investigation, a desperate search to pin down how who Bruce was made Alison into who she is.

It’s also a hilarious, emotionally sharp retrospective on growing up, from the delightful disco-themed commercial small Alison and her brothers record for the funeral home, to middle Alison’s declaration that she’s changing her major to Joan. The story interjects these joyous scenes with less comfortable ones of Bruce’s dalliances or family arguments, because that’s really what it’s like when you’re young. Good things happen, then bad ones, then funny ones, then awful ones.

Malone told the New York Times the story maintains that strict, investigatory sense as a reflection of Bechdel’s personal ethos: “Even her look is all about telling the truth — no ornamentation, nothing pretty. She hates lies — lies and embellishments are what got her dad killed.”

Without lies or embellishments, all Fun Home has is one woman’s messy set of memories. But those recollections are brilliantly recounted by actors who really seem like a family struggling to understand one another. Three representations of Bechdel feel both distinct and familiar, and the music is strong without overpowering the story. In the end, the play sticks with you for the same reasons the memoir did when you first read it: It reminds you how hard it is to understand who we are.

---

Fun Home is playing now at Circle in the Square theater in New York. Tickets are available at Telecharge.

Fun Home the Musical Snags 12 Tony Award Nominations

The 2015 Tony Award nominations were announced this morning. Fun Home, the musical based on Alison Bechdel‘s celebrated graphic memoir, led the way with 12 nominations, including the coveted Best Musical trophy. (An American in Paris tied Fun Home with 12 nods, as well.) Is it a coincidence that a musical about a lesbian artist and her gay father received a nomination for Broadway’s biggest award the same morning the Supreme Court of the United States began hearing arguments about same-sex marriage? Yeah, but it feels serendipitous to pull up the New York Times home page and see the stories sitting side-by-side.

The fact that Fun Home is up for 12 Tonys is just another bit of happiness in a steady stream of good fortune the musical. It was also nominated for the Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, nine Lucille Lortel Awards (of which it won three, including Outstanding Musical), the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, seven Outer Critics Circle Award, and two Drama League Awards. It also won an Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Musical and an Obie for Best Musical. It opened on Broadway to sell-out crowds last weekend and received the kind of glowing reviews NYT theater critics usually reserve for Neil Patrick Harris.

And it’s the first mainstream musical about a young lesbian. It’s a really good time to be Alison Bechdel, is what I am saying.

Here is a full list of Tony nominees.

Best Leading Actor in a Play
Steven Boyer, Hand to God
Bradley Cooper, The Elephant Man
Ben Miles, Wolf Hall Parts One & Two
Bill Nighy, Skylight
Alex Sharp, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Best Leading Actress in a Play
Geneva Carr, Hand to God
Helen Mirren, The Audience
Elisabeth Moss, The Heidi Chronicles
Carey Mulligan, Skylight
Ruth Wilson, Constellations

Best Leading Actor in a Musical
Michael Cerveris, Fun Home
Robert Fairchild, An American in Paris
Brian d’Arcy James, Something Rotten!
Ken Watanabe, The King and I
Tony Yazbeck, On the Town

Best Leading Actress in a Musical
Kristin Chenoweth, On the Twentieth Century
Leanne Cope, An American in Paris
Beth Malone, Fun Home
Kelli O’Hara, The King and I
Chita Rivera, The Visit

Best Revival of a Play
Skylight
The Elephant Man
This Is Our Youth
You Can’t Take It With You

Best Revival of a Musical
On the Town
On the Twentieth Century
The King and I
Best Featured Actor in a Play
Matthew Beard, Skylight
K. Todd Freeman, Airline Highway
Richard McCabe, The Audience
Alessandro Nivola, The Elephant Man
Micah Stock, It’s Only a Play

Best Featured Actress in a Play
Annaleigh Ashford, You Can’t Take It With You
Patricia Clarkson, The Elephant Man
Lydia Leonard, Wolf Hall Parts One & Two
Sarah Stiles, Hand to God
Julie White, Airline Highway

Best Featured Actress in a Musical
Victoria Clark, Gigi
Judy Kuhn, Fun Home
Sydney Lucas, Fun Home
Ruthie Ann Miles, The King and I
Emily Skeggs, Fun Home

Best Musical
An American in Paris
Fun Home
Something Rotten!
The Visit

Best Play
Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar
Hand to God by Robert Askins
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Simon Stephens
Wolf Hall Parts One & Two by Hilary Mantel and Mike Poulton

Best Book
Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell, Something Rotten!
Lisa Kron, Fun Home
Craig Lucas, An American in Paris
Terrence McNally, The Visit

Best Score
John Kander and Fred Ebb, The Visit
Wayne Kirkpatrick and Karey Kirkpatrick, Something Rotten!
Sting, The Last Ship
Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron, Fun Home

Best Scenic Design of a Musical
Bob Crowley and 59 Productions, An American in Paris
David Rockwell, On the Twentieth Century
Michael Yeargan, The King and I
David Zinn, Fun Home

Best Orchestrations
Christopher Austin, Don Sebesky and Bill Elliott, An American in Paris
John Clancy, Fun Home
Larry Hochman, Something Rotten!
Rob Mathes, The Last Ship

Best Scenic Design of a Play
Bunny Christie & Finn Ross, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Bob Crowley, Skylight
Christopher Oram, Wolf Hall Parts One & Two
David Rockwell, You Can’t Take It With You

Best Costume Design of a Play
Bob Crowley, The Audience
Jane Greenwood, You Can’t Take It With You
Christopher Oram, Wolf Hall Parts One & Two
David Zinn, Airline Highway

Best Lighting Design of a Play
Paule Constable, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Paule Constable and David Plater, Wolf Hall Parts One & Two
Natasha Katz, Skylight
Japhy Weideman, Airline Highway

Best Director of a Musical
Sam Gold, Fun Home
Casey Nicholaw, Something Rotten!
John Rando, On the Town
Bartlett Sher, The King and I
Christopher Wheeldon, An American in Paris

Best Scenic Design of a Play
Bunny Christie & Finn Ross, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Bob Crowley, Skylight
Christopher Oram, Wolf Hall Parts One & Two
David Rockwell, You Can’t Take It With You

Best Director of a Play
Stephen Daldry, Skylight
Marianne Elliott, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Scott Ellis, You Can’t Take It With You
Jeremy Herrin, Wolf Hall Parts One & Two
Moritz von Stuelpnagel, Hand to God

Best Lighting Design of a Musical
Donald Holder, The King and I
Natasha Katz, An American in Paris
Ben Stanton, Fun Home
Japhy Weideman, The Visit

Best Choreography
Joshua Bergasse, On the Town
Christopher Gattelli, The King and I
Scott Graham & Steven Hoggett, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Casey Nicholaw, Something Rotten!
Christopher Wheeldon, An American in Paris

The awards ceremony will be hosted by Alan Cumming and Kristin Chenoweth on June 7 at Radio City Music Hall, and broadcast live on CBS.

 

 

 

A Queer Girl’s Epic Roundup of New York Comic Con 2014

From October 9-12, the Javits Center in Manhattan was overrun with elves, Star Lords, Harley Quinns, and various incarnations of Dr. Who. This year’s New York Comic Con was the biggest ever, with the number of attendees beating out even the long running San Diego Comic Con.

I can’t speak to how the programming compares, as this was my first large scale Comic Con. But I had a great time! I’ve already written about one the excellent anti-bullying/pro-hero panel that was held on Friday, but there were so many fabulous things going on that I couldn’t pick just one to talk about.

For context, keep in mind that the comics industry is still very male-dominated. As DC Women Kicking Ass pointed out, there were 327 comic guests at NYCC, and only 32 of them identify as female. That’s a mere 10.21%. Still, the convention is big enough at this point that there are more than enough things to keep a queer geek girl wildly overbooked with interesting activities from Thursday through Sunday.

Here are all the things you should know about from NYCC 2014.

---

 

---

Cosplay Is Not Consent

NYCC premiered a brand new anti-harassment policy this year, giving attendees protection against all forms of harassment, including offensive verbal comments, non-consensual photography, and bathroom policing. The zero tolerance policy was drafted by The Mary Sue, She Geeks, and Women Write About Comics (among others), and came about as a result of feminist geek community outcry.

To promote the policy, large signs titled “cosplay is not consent” were placed prominently at each entrance. Slides with the full text were also displayed on projection screens in between panels.

The policy was largely well received.

---

---

Women of Marvel and Women of DC

Am I committing sacrilege by talking about the DC and Marvel panels together? Probably, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Marvel made several big announcements at their panel:

• Nicole Perlman, co-screenwriter of the Guardians Of The Galaxy movie, is now writing an ongoing series starring Gamora. After four decades of being a teammate, henchwoman and guest star, it’s about time.
• Novelist Margaret Stohl is taking on Black Widow in a Young Adult novel. It will be published by Hyperion Teens next year. (At which point they pretty much have to make a movie, right? I hope?)
• G Willow Wilson of Ms. Marvel will be writing a four part story arc in X-Men, titled “The Burning World.” She will be the first woman writer to work on X-Men since it relaunched with an all-female X-Men roster. Her issues, X-Men #23-26, begin in January.
• Marvel will be celebrating Women’s History Month in March by featuring 20 Women of Marvel variant covers drawn by female artists, including Sara Pichelli, Stephanie Hans, Jill Thompson, Vanesa R. Del Rey, Stacey Lee, and Faith Erin Hicks, among others.

At an earlier, “closed door” panel for professionals, Marvel also teased that the recently introduced Spider-Woman known as “Spider-Gwen” would be getting her own ongoing series in February.

Their Women of Marvel panel was jam-packed full of panelists — who, as one audience member pointed out, were suspiciously absent from panels that were not specifically about diversity. Better luck next year?

DC’s panel had a more reasonable number of panelists and was actually able to have a really interesting discussion. Moderator Amanda Salmons, owner of Muse Comics + Games and a founder and former executive director of the retailer association ComicsPRO, introduced the panel by explaining that “Women In Comics” panels are typically disappointing to her, with their tendency to tokenize women and focus almost exclusively on discrimination and its effects. She decided to take it in a different direction this time because, “This is our industry. This is our house. We’ve been here for decades, and there were others before us. These writers, artists and editors here on the panel are the comic book industry. This is their world. Our world.”

A high point of the discussion for me was when panelist Marguerite Bennett (writer of Butterfly and Sleepy Hollow) shared how she first fell in love with comics when she discovered supervillainesses Catwoman, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn. “I had wonderful and judicious parents. They raised me to believe that there is no such thing as toys for girls and toys for boys. You know, I had free range. I had — and still have — action figures. It’s really terrific. I remember going into a comic book store and wanting to follow up on Catwoman. There were no other women there. And I remember realizing, my parents told me I’m allowed to be here; these are toys for girls too. That was the moment where I realized there was nothing wrong with me.”

To see the image slides projected during DC’s panel, check out The Outhousers. A writeup of the discussion is posted on Comic Book Resources.

---

---

Women in Queer Comics

On Thursday, PRISM Comics hosted a panel showcasing six fantastic queer women:

• Moderator Tara Madison Avery of Dirtheads, who describes herself on Twitter as an “Amazon trans woman business owner, bisexual activist, and self-taught, self-published cartoonist.”
• Joan Hilty of Bitter Girl, an “editor, producer, & all-out missionary of/for comic/graphic novel content across all platforms.”
• Jennifer Camper (@QueersComics) of Bitch Magazine, a cartoonist and graphics artist whose art “examines life from a perspective that is irreverent, female, queer, and mongrel (Lebanese American).”
• P. Kristen Enos (@PKristenEnos) of Web of Lies, a lesbian, activist, writer, journalist, reviewer and photographer.
• Ariel Schrag of ADAM, an author who can be found on Twitter and has her own Wikipedia page
• Elizabeth Fernandez of The Code Crimson, who is currently working on a new graphic novel about Alan Turing.

There’s a writeup of the panel on Bleeding Cool, and a copy of the presentation slides available on PrismComics.org. A teaser:

Camper thinks everything is political; comics seemed to make lesbian sex sweet; her books show how dykes fuck.

— Geeks OUT 🏳️‍🌈 (@GeeksOUT) October 10, 2014

---

---

Secret Identities: Transgender Themes In Comics

This Sunday panel discussed common tropes in historical depictions of trans characters, and was my favorite thing at the entire convention.

Said Moderator Charles Battersby, “In the first, I guess, fifty years of comics, you would really only see transgendered characters used as a plot device — that someone’s going undercover, or they’ve been forcibly changed in their gender. You can see a bunch of the zany things that comic writers have put characters through, from shapechangers becoming women to Captain America disguising himself as an old lady. One of the long running gags that’s used to make a character change gender is that they’ve got to go undercover. There have been a lot of stupid stories that are usually played for humor, where people are laughing at the character. There’s a recurring theme that when a man is dressed as a woman, he’s degrading himself because women are inferior.”

P. Kristen Enos observed, “One of the key things is that when it’s a male character dressing as a female character, not only is it a disguise but also the idea that he’s less threatening and he’s easy to take on as a target — which is usually the point of why he’s dressing like that, to flush out the bad guys.”

Morgan Boecher added that the trope highlights gender identity and gender roles as two distinct things, allowing readers to see it all the more clearly when they’re switched. Often, storylines of this trope promote “the idea that femininity is lesser, and look how strange that this person is that they’re trying to put on these feminine qualities. Their facial structure doesn’t match our idea of what a feminine person is supposed to be. Their height, their body shape. Like these people aren’t real women. It’s a very poignant idea, especially when these are bodies that real women have. Transgender women oftentimes don’t fit into the mainstream idea of what female bodies are supposed to be. And yet, their gender identity should be enough to validate that.”

Looking at the wider implications of the “cunning disguise” trope, Boecher noted that even the idea of “disguise” is telling. The narrative typically goes, “if you’re not revealing who you truly are, what’s underneath your clothes, what’s underneath your expression, then you’re not an honest person. But why should any trans person be expected to divulge everything about what’s under their clothes when cisgender people don’t have to do that on a regular basis too?”

The panel also explored the “curse” trope, wherein characters are forced to change gender, frequently as a form of punishment. Said Boecher, “I think forcing someone into another gender is a really good punishment, because who wants to be in a gender that they don’t identify as? That’s sort of the transgender struggle. Society is categorizing people and labeling them in a certain way that doesn’t match how they feel.” However, panelists noted, most comics write these stories in a way that paints gender change as deplorable.

Battersby also observed, “Many of these curses are intended to punish someone that’s sexist, by showing them what it’s like to live the other gender’s cultural roles. But often they’ll do a good job of exposing sexism, but not actually addressing what it’s like to be a transgender person.” Even a single line acknowledging transgender experiences could go a long way to fixing this. (For example: “do you know how many people would love to have that curse?”)

Boecher, Battersby and Enos all appeared on a similar panel at the Special Edition NYC comic book convention in June. You can check out a recording of the Special Edition panel at Amber Unmasked.

---

---

Buffy at NYCC

BTVS comic book editor in chief Scott Allie, who has just had a baby, is retiring from the Buffyverse comics after 16 years. He did a video interview about it with Buffyfest.

Amber Benson — who played the queer character Tara in Buffy — played a multi round game of Fuck/Marry/Kill with Buzzfeed.

She also did a pretty great interview with Nerd Reactor about her new book series, the first of which (The Witches of Echo Park) launches in January.

Finally, there was a Buffy panel! Much love for those Strong Female Characters.

---

---

New York TimesOUT and GeeksOUT Presents LGBT in Comics

In a panel on Thursday, Phil Jimenez of Wonder Woman, Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie of Young Avengers, Luciano Vecchio of Ultimate Spider-Man, Annie Mok of Screentests, and Noelle Stevenson of Lumberjanes discussed their experiences in the comics industry and incorporating queer themes into their work. Jude Biersdorfer, Staff Editor of the NYTimes Book Review, moderated. This is the second time the panel has been hosted at NYCC.

During the talk, Jimenez made some interesting remarks about Wonder Woman being “ultimate queer character in comic books.” Except that by “queer” he didn’t mean “sexually or romantically interested in other women;” rather, “defiantly anti-normal female in a world filled primarily with males.” So, that was a thing. He also didn’t think that anyone would want to make a Wonder Woman movie in her current form, as the male writers have turned the character into a sort of generic “warrior maiden” archetype that is already well-covered by other characters.

The outspoken Jimenez also suggested that there may be too much focus on same-sex marriage in comics. “It’s good, it’s acceptable, it’s heteronormative, you know, ‘We’re just like you!’ But for me, pushing the envelope would be to defy this more, and to continue to put out characters that are not just like them and are still pretty awesome anyway.”

Asked about Lumberjane’s success, Stevenson shared, “I think we kind of thought that we could do whatever we wanted because no one was really going to care. Which amazingly was proved wrong, really quickly, that a lot of people were watching and were reading. And that was amazing.

But we kept doing whatever we wanted to do. And that was really exciting. It was great to have three whole issues without any male characters at all in them, and for every girl character at camp to be so different from each other, and to show all the different ways that it’s possible to be female.”

A (quiet and kind of mumbly) recording of the panel is available at Gay Nerds.

---

---

Things That Aren’t Comic Con

But I bet you’ll like them anyway.

• Queers & Comics Now Accepting Proposals – The first-ever university-based LGBTQ comics conference will be presented by CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies in New York City on May 7-8, 2015. The Queers & Comics conference will offer two days of workshops, portfolio reviews, slideshow presentations, roundtable discussions, and an exhibition of queer cartoon art. Alison Bechdel is a confirmed keynote speaker.
• Women Who Conquered the Comic Book World – Has everyone read the Collector’s Weekly article detailing the unknown history of female cartoonists? It’s pretty great, so.
• Gillian Anderson Wrote A Book – Her first novel, A Vision Fire, is co-authored with science fiction writer Jeff Rovin. It’s the first book in a planned trilogy about a brilliant psychiatrist, Caitlin O’Hara, whose perplexing new patient seems to be conjuring visions and nightmares on an apocalyptic scale.
• “Drawn To Comics” Continues To Happen – Mey writes a weekly column right here on Autostraddle that looks at comics by, featuring and for queer ladies. Whether you love to look at detailed personal accounts of other people’s lives, explore new and creative worlds, or you just love to see hot ladies in spandex, you should come back on Tuesday to read the latest and greatest! And comment!
• Sailor Moon Crystal Sanitary Napkins – Did you know these are a thing? Apparently they’ll be released in Japan November 1st. Discuss.

Holy Moly Alison Bechdel Won A MacArthur Genius Grant

The MacArthur Foundation awarded lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel one of its coveted Genius Grants. The only requirement of the $625,000 award is that Bechdel and the 20 other recipients continue doing the good work they were already doing.

So, hopefully this means Bechdel will continue doing revolutionary work related to film, family and culture. Her name was on everyone’s lips starting last year as her 30-year-old film test re-entered mainstream conversation. The Rule was born from a 1985 strip of her comic Dykes To Watch Out For.

The rule, now known as the Bechdel Test, calls for basic inclusion of women in film. The concept shouldn’t be so revolutionary, but when women had only 30 percent of speaking roles and 15 percent of leads in last year’s top films it is clear we have a lot of work left to do. It’s great to see the MacArthur Foundation honoring someone doing that work.

Bechdel has also earned well-deserved praise for graphic novels including 2006’s Fun Home and and 2012’s Are You My Mother. In August, it was announced that the stage production of Fun Home is officially headed to Broadway after years as a beloved Off-Broadway experience.

Some of the other winners are pretty cool too — Mary Bonauto, the director of the Civil Rights Project for Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders also won a grant. Then there’s Pamela Long, the 71-year-old who pursues research on medieval history without a university affiliation, and Terrence Hayes, whose poems on race, politics and love are some of the most powerful words being written today.

The winners are doing their work from around the world — Bechdel, for example, is on an artists’s residency in an Italian castle. Although it took 30 years for Bechdel’s simple, brilliant ideas to reach this level of recognition, with this new recognition and funding she’ll be able to continue moving the conversation and stealing our hearts.

“Fun Home” The Musical Is Officially Heading To Broadway, Thank Goodness

Feature image by Joan Marcus

---

Hey, do you remember that book that changed your life, that book called Fun Home? You know, the Alison Bechdel comic book memoir about coming out and her relationship with her dad that launched a thousand queer book club discussions? Well GUESS WHAT, the musical adaptation of Fun Home will open at Broadway’s 700-ish-seat Circle in the Square Theater on April 22! The date is significant because it’s IMMEDIATELY before the normal Tony Awards cut-off date, so you know they’re gunning for Best Musical next year. But you guys. BROADWAY. The big time! The biggest stage a musical can aspire to play on, so to speak! This is an enormous deal!

Transferring from Off-Broadway to Broadway is notoriously difficult, particularly for shows that aren’t well-known properties, since it costs millions of dollars to mount each production and since it can be difficult to draw in large audiences. What that generally translates to, when you’re a queer woman who is a feminist and a fan of musical theater, is a lot of sighing and accepting the fact that you’ll almost never see yourself reflected onstage unless your sexuality is a punchline, Rent notwithstanding. (This applies to professional and amateur productions [and generally to queer women but not queer men, and to queer women of color waaaaaay more than white queer women], but that’s a much larger conversation for another day.) I mean, seriously, it’s rare enough to get a show that’s not based on a movie or music anthology to Broadway at all, let alone a show written by women, let alone a show about a masculine-of-center queer woman! What a time to be alive. This could be the start of something new, do you hear the people sing, let the sunshine in, etc.

Casting for the Broadway production will be announced at some point in the (hopefully near) future. In the meantime, I strongly recommend listening to the Off-Broadway cast recording, featuring performances from Beth Malone, Michael Cerveris and Judy “Pocahontas” Kuhn, among others. Also, you should watch this clip from the Drama Desk Awards of Sydney Lucas as Young Alison singing “Ring of Keys,” which is about her first encounter with a butch woman. You guys, I can’t even believe there is a song about that. This is so crazy, I can’t believe this show is transferring to Broadway, somebody hold me.

Lez Liberty Lit #48: It’s Totally Okay To Read YA Novels, You Guys

Feature image via ejukfun.tumblr.com.

---

by carolyn & riese

Linguist Gretchen McCulloch discussed gendered pronouns, writing:

“In the late 18th century, grammarians started recommending that people use he as a gender nonspecific pronoun because they was ostensibly plural, as part of the grand tradition of awkwardly shoehorning English grammar into Latin which has caused many of your present grammatical insecurities, and which I’m totally sure had nothing whatsoever to do with the patriarchy. Many excellent writers proceeded to ignore them and kept using singular they, just as English-speakers had been doing for some four hundred years by that point, although the more easily intimidated types (er, axe to grind, who, me?) and a whole bunch of style manuals did end up adopting generic he. That is, until they started facing pushback in the 1970s.”

Volatile organic compounds from degradation, paper, binding adhesive, printing ink and more are what makes books smell so good.

Illuminati Girl Gang is a zine dedicated to showcasing female perspectives in art and literature and it looks relevant to your interests.

Ebooks are going to outsell print books in the UK by 2018, according to a recent report.

At the Toast, Mallory Ortberg writes about the exactly wrong way to review women’s writing.

When is imitation imitation, and when is it plagiarism?

Prooffreader has graphed the letters in the English alphabet according to usage and frequency.

Roxane Gay was profiled at the Great Discontent and also recently chatted with the Rumpus book club.

At the Toast, Anne Thériault writes about how fairy tales are women’s tales: “[I]nitially at least, the idea that fairy tales came from the domain of women was commonly acknowledged, and even used to give credibility to some stories. And yet these days, we think of them as being for children only. So what happened?”

At Slate, Ruth Graham argues against reading YA fiction, arguing that “adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children” because “it’s not simply that YA readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life—that’s the trick of so much great fiction—but that they are asked to abandon the mature insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults.” At the Hairpin, Jen Doll responds with a YA book list and argues, “There are many, many factors that go into what makes something complex, great, or “appropriate to one’s age,” and most of all this depends on who is reading it—not based in age, because age categorizations do not always match prescribed reading levels; just ask any kid sneaking illicit tomes off her parents’ bookshelf because all “her” books have already been devoured—but based in who that person is, what they want, and what they bring to the table.” 

Then Nerve.com shut it down with A Young Adult Author’s Fantastic Crusade to Defend Literature’s Most Maligned Genre, by Kathleen Hale: I sighed. What did it matter, in the end? I was growing hoarse from arguing and dying of all my cancers. Besides, soon the sun would rise. Ruth and I were two immortal undead creatures. We needed to crawl into our coffins and dream about becoming prom queens, beauty queens, or nerdy prudes—our only options for what would invariably be a very happy ending. Life was a mystery we would solve by the last page. It was all a dream, I realized. But there would be a sequel.

The Poetry Archive has relaunched.

The archives of the Partisan Review, a cultural and literary journal, are now all online.

This 23-year-old is making the NYT crossword cooler.

It’s time to re-invent the bookstore.

Alison Bechdel has a new comic about an old love in the New Yorker.

New research has found links between writing things out by hand and learning: “Typing may be a fast and efficient alternative to longhand, but that very efficiency may diminish our ability to process new information. Not only do we learn letters better when we commit them to memory through writing, memory and learning ability in general may benefit.”

More accurate titles for every English novel ever.

In an interview at the Rumpus, Canadian author Joseph Boyden discusses portrayals of Native people, The Orenda, points of view, first-person narration, history and scholarship and more.

At Lambda Literary, July Westhale reviewed Viral by Suzanne Parker. Mitch Kellaway reviewed Beloved Pilgrim by Christopher Hawthorne Moss. Michelle Theall wrote about the challenges of writing about faith and your family. John Erickson reviewed Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire by Amy Villarejo. Marcie Bianco reviewed Redefining Realness by Janet Mock. Heather Seggel reviewed The Death of Lucy Kyte by Nicola Upson.

At the Lesbrary, Kalyanii reviewed My Awesome Place by Cheryl Burke. Nicole reviewed A Good Death by Helen Davis. Danika reviewed Gender Failure by Rae Spoon and Ivan E. Coyote.

Recently, on Autostraddle: Sarah Rosenblatt wrote about queer mixed experiences.’Mey wrote about webcomic Becoming Me. Fikri wrote about completing your dissertation in a week. Beth wrote about starting a tarot journal. Maggie wrote about journalling and travelling. Carolyn wrote about the 2014 Lamba winners.

Events To Watch Out For:

15 June: Submissions for the first issue of bald hip magazine, a Canadian online magazine that showcases experimental writing, collaborations, poetry, traditional forms, art, gifs and photography, close.

16 June, Los Angeles: Yumi Sakugawa is reading from I Think I Am in Friend Love with You at Book Soup (8818 Sunset), 7 to 9 p.m.

20 June, New York: Girls Write Now’s 2014 CHAPTERS reading series concludes with guest author Christina Baker Kline at Scholastic (557 Broadway), 6 p.m.

21 June, New York: Kelly Cogswell, author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger, will be reading at Bluestockings (172 Allen St.), 7 p.m.

28 June, New York: LGBTQ Youth Organization Everyone Is Gay will be hosting an all ages Pride Celebration at Bluestockings (172 Allen St.), 1 p.m.

Know of a queer event with literary merit? Send it to us! The Liberty Lit is bi-weekly.

---

2014 Lambda Literary Award Winners Announced, Include Alison Bechdel, Imogen Binnie And More

The winners of the 26th annual Lambda Literary Awards, including Alison Bechdel, Susan Choi, Nicole J. Georges, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Katherine V. Forrest, Imogen Binnie and others, were announced last night at the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York.

This year is the first that comics have had a category to themselves, though they’ve won in other categories previously. Calling Dr. Laura, a memoir by Nicole J. Georges, won, and finalists included Artifice by Alex Woolfson and Winona Nelson, Duck! Second Chances by Tana Ford and The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story by Vivek J. Tiwary, Andrew C. Robinson, Kyle Baker and Steve Dutro.

The Lambda Literary Awards started in 1988 to recognize the best queer literature annually as judged on literary merit and content relevant to queer lives, and are run by the Lambda Literary Foundation. As I wrote last year:

“In the past, the awards have been criticized for transphobia, biphobia, representing only a fraction of queer creative output, and not representing queer creative output at all.

2011 was the first year there were both fiction and non-fiction categories for trans works, and 2010 was the first year there were both categories for bisexual works. As recently as 2004, a transphobic book made the list of finalists in the transgender category until protests got it removed.”

There remains ongoing debate around the awards. For instance, authors of any sexual orientation can win any prize that doesn’t specify otherwise (not those that celebrate a queer author’s career, for instance), which some have criticized. The career categories recognize only binary genders.

The Lambdas also face the same criticism that all literary awards do — how do you determine whether or not a book is “literary” or has value? What makes a work fall in one category rather than another? If everything is subjective what is even the point? (The Millions suggests “promotion, encouragement, and pleasure.”) And some unique ones — are there better ways to celebrate queer literary culture?

Whatever you think about the answers to these questions, the Lambda Literary Awards play a vital role in queer literature: plumping up reading lists everywhere.

A partial list of the winners of the 2014 Lambda Literary Awards is as follows:

Transgender Fiction: Wanting in Arabic by Trish Salah

Transgender Non-fiction: The End of San Francisco by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Bisexual Fiction: My Education: A Novel by Susan Choi

Bisexual Non-fiction: The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television by Maria San Filippo

Lesbian General Fiction: Happiness, Like Water by Chinelo Okparanta

Lesbian Memoir: Body Geographic by Barrie Jean Borich

Lesbian Mystery: High Desert by Katherine V. Forrest

Lesbian Romance: Clean Slate by Andrea Bramhall

Lesbian Erotica: Wild Girls, Wild Nights: True Lesbian Sex Stories edited by Sacchi Green

Lesbian Poetry: Rise in the Fall by Ana Bozicevic

LGBT Debut Fiction: Descendants of Hagar by Nik Nicholson

LGBT Non-fiction: White Girls by Hilton Als

LGBT Graphic Novel: Calling Dr. Laura: A Graphic Memoir by Nicole J. Georges

LGBT Anthology, fiction: Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction edited by Karen Martin and Makhosazana Xaba

LGBT Studies: Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence by Christina B. Hanhardt

Dr. Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award: Imogen Binnie and Charles Rice-Gonzalez

Dr. James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize: Michael Thomas Ford and Radclyffe

The Pioneer Award: Kate Bornstein

The Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Literature: Alison Bechdel

“Fun Home” is Relatable, Brilliant and Paving the Way for Women Musical Theatre Writers

Feature Image via BroadwayWorld

Every so often, I see a musical that changes my life. That’s a big statement, but my life revolves around musical theatre and the feelings it gives me, so it’s inevitable that I’ll be deeply affected by a musical. I’ve only seen three musicals that caused this life-changing sensation, so when I saw Fun Home at The Public Theater, sparks flew, and I saw fireworks. Fun Home is a new musical (!), based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel (!), written by two women (!), about a lesbian (!). I didn’t know much about the musical prior to seeing it for the first time (yes, there have been multiple viewings), as I had never read the source material (which is a fancy term for the book on which the musical is based).

Here’s the thing about musicals: it takes a long time, a lot of rewriting, and a lot of money to get one from page to stage. A musical can easily take ten years from its first draft to a major New York or regional production. Fun Home has journeyed through readings and workshops in different cities. In the fall of 2012, the musical was produced in the Lab Series at The Public Theater. This was my first exposure to it.

In the Lab Series, the writers were in the audience, making script changes on a daily basis. In labs, sometimes there are small changes: a line gets rewritten or a joke that doesn’t land gets cut, but sometimes entire songs and chunks of book (dialogue) are rewritten, cut, or added. You could see the show twice and it would be completely different. The writers take their cues from the audience. In the rehearsal room, a line, lyric, musical progression, etc. could seem great, but it may not work in front of the audience. This is one of my favorite things about live theatre: the audience is a player in the production.

After a year of revisions (and anticipation), Fun Home has returned to The Public Theater in a fully-staged Off-Broadway production. I saw the musical three times in previews (changes were still made until opening night), and once after it opened, and I felt all the feelings. Fun Home centers around the protagonist, Alison, in three phases of her life. There’s Small Alison (Sydney Lucas), who is in elementary school, Medium Alison (Alexandra Socha), who is in college, and Alison (Beth Malone), who is in her forties. At its core, Fun Home is about Alison discovering and accepting her sexuality and its relation to her father’s sexuality and his death. Lisa Kron‘s book and lyrics prove that no one is ever too young or too old to come of age. Jeanine Tesori’s music complements the tone and spirit of Alison and her family’s awakenings.

As every musical should, Fun Home has a mixture of light-hearted and heart-wrenching songs. My favorite is “Changing My Major,” which explores Medium Alison’s euphoria after her first sexual experience with a woman. Socha is wonderful as the college freshman, riding the emotional roller coaster of vulnerability, excitement, and nerves of discovering one’s sexual orientation. Small Alison has an inspiring song about seeing a butch woman for the first time, perfected by Lucas, who has more spunk than I’ve ever seen in a kid. Watch out for her; I see a big career in her future. Malone ties the piece together as the adult version of Alison, reflecting on her past and trying to make sense of her relationship to her father. Judy Kuhn, who plays Helen Bechdel, Alison’s mother, makes brilliant, subtle acting choices and broke my heart with her solo number. Michael Cerveris, who plays Bruce Bechdel, Alison’s father, is equally strong, as his relationship with himself, his wife and Alison play a key role in the musical.

In musical theatre, I am used to seeing straight female protagonists fall in love with straight men. There’s nothing wrong with that, but as a lesbian, it is nice to see queer protagonists struggle with issues that are similar to mine. Not only does Fun Home put a lesbian center stage, the lesbian character is a fully developed, three dimensional human being with thoughts, feelings, and complex issues. Alison is trying to make sense of herself and her family in different stages of her life, which is something to which I deeply relate. I have struggled with accepting myself and my sexual orientation, and I’ve discovered the complexity of how learning to love myself affects my family. I saw myself in all three Alisons, I saw my mother in Helen, and I saw my father in Bruce. I have a complicated relationship with my father, and every moment I witnessed Alison communicate with Bruce, I saw my relationship with my dad. The most beautiful part of a musical theatre, to me, is seeing myself on stage. As a writer, my goal is for audience members to see themselves in characters and situations I have written, as lived by actors.

As mentioned before, Fun Home is written by two women. The visibility of women writers is very important in musical theatre. The majority of musical theatre writers are white, gay, cisgender men. While musical theatre boasts a world of acceptance, rainbows, and unicorns, women writers are in the minority, and I have been discriminated against as a woman and as a lesbian. A well known television and theatre actor once told me that lesbians “belong on the softball field.” He was joking, but his comment was not abnormal. Women writers are seen as over-emotional creatures, and we’re not taken seriously.

Last Broadway season (2012-2013), pop icon Cyndi Lauper, who wrote the score for Kinky Boots, was the first woman to ever win the Tony Award (think Oscars or Grammys, but for Broadway) for Best Score without a male co-writer. This is big time. I can count on one hand the number of female Broadway musical theatre writers. Since Fun Home debuted Off-Broadway this fall, the visibility of women writers and queer women characters have been discussed. While I hope Tesori and Kron are paving the way for women writers, at least the conversation is being started.

The future of female musical theatre writers is looking up. Intern Grace compiled a playlist of musical theatre songs written by women, and there are many emerging female musical theatre writers. Many of these women are bookwriters, but more and more women are writing lyrics and music. As a female musical theatre writer who writes with a female composer, I’m excited for the continued growth of female musical theatre writers.

If you’re in New York City, please do yourself a favor and see Fun Home at The Public Theater. It’s an amazing piece of theatre, and it will touch your heart.

---

Rachel Kunstadt is a librettist/lyricist, pursuing an MFA at the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is a founder and the Producing Artistic Director of LezCab, a cabaret series celebrating queer women in musical theatre. She resides in Manhattan with her shih tzu, Bernie. www.rachelkunstadt.com. Tweet her @rkunstadt.

You Should Go: Fun Home the Musical is Finally Real, Going to Be Magic

Musical theatre has more than its fair share of critics. I’m not sure whether I can even say “critics,” because it’s often less “reasoned, engaged analysis” and more “people laughing and pointing at other people singing and dancing onstage.” Some dude at The Evening Standard called musical theatre an “innately idiotic form” and I’m not immune to this kind of thinking either: I often catch myself justifying (to whom?) musicals as a guilty pleasure, uncritically and unthinkingly consumed.

Bleedin’ snobs, the lot of us.

I get it. When musicals are bad, they’re really bad. Both We Will Rock You and Rock of Ages made me want to bang a guitar repeatedly against my head, and I’m glad that I will likely not live to see Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (at the rate they’re going, neither will some of the cast). Sometimes you’re into your third overwrought Queen rendition and you’re stuck between rethinking every life decision you’ve ever made that got you to this point… and trying to quash that little bit of you that wants to sing along.

Avenue Q piqued my interest in musicals, Wicked cemented it. The Phantom of the Opera gave me significant pause — perhaps all of this was really overrated after all? — but then The Lion King reminded me that masks can make magic, not just disguise stalking and jealousy as romance. Les Misèrables is my current reason for being. (If you’re ever in London, by the way, booking in advance can get you tickets for ~£15-25 and the view’s not half-bad from the upper circle. Unless you’re afraid of heights.)

See, done well, I dare say there are few things that rival the immersive experience of the musical. Sure, you can keep mocking “people acting and then singing at the same time, and quite possibly dancing too,” but I’ll just be here constantly in awe of people acting and singing and dancing all at the same time.

You leave the theatre and some people will love it, some people will hate it, but absolutely everyone will get the songs stuck in their heads. It’s a gift that keeps on giving, as my mother learns every time my youngest siblings (aged 7 to 18) happily and loudly garble their way through “Do You Hear the People Sing?”.

Now all of this has just been a terribly lengthy way to tell you why I’m really, really excited that Fun Home’s off-Broadway debut will take the form of — yes! — a musical.

From four-time Tony Award-nominated composer Jeanine Tesori (Caroline, or Change) and Tony-nominee Lisa Kron (In The Wake, Well) comes a fresh, daring new musical based on the acclaimed graphic novel by Alison Bechdel. When her father dies unexpectedly, graphic novelist Alison dives deep into her past to tell the story of the volatile, brilliant, one-of-a-kind man whose temperament and secrets defined her family and her life. Moving between past and present, Alison relives her unique childhood playing at the family’s Bechdel Funeral Home, her growing understanding of her own sexuality and the looming, unanswerable questions about her father’s hidden desires. Directed by Sam Gold, FUN HOME is a groundbreaking, world-premiere musical about seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.

With Fun Home, Alison Bechdel took the graphic novel — another medium that is similarly derided (and that I feel just as strongly about) — and spun a haunting emotional masterpiece. It was a book that not only reached into me with its words but left soft-edged, ink-washed images lingering at the back of my mind long after I’d left the last page. I’d held onto it in a new country then, newly alone, and all I wanted was to be able to share it.

So now I am so excited to see what Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron are going to do at the Public Theater, bringing Fun Home to audiences old and new. I can’t quite imagine how it’ll turn out just yet, I’ll admit, but that’s exactly what makes the thought of it so fascinating and I have high hopes. Maybe there will be dancing (sadly probably not). Most likely there will be new duets for you to sing along to with your human of choice. And if there weren’t enough reason for me to want to go already, Bechdel personally swears by Sydney Lucas‘s performance as “Small Alison,” and I am of the sort that is immediately charmed by anything done by anyone below the age of 12.

Except — due to fiddly matters of “being on the wrong continent” — I can’t actually go.

I briefly considered stopping over in NYC on the way to LAX for A-Camp 4.0, but my wallet (and sense) won’t allow it. So this is where you come in! NYC-based queers, watch this for me. Do it for everyone who loves musicals, queers, and queer musicals. I’m counting on you.

September 30 – November 3, 2013
425 Lafayette Street, New York City
$81.50 – 91.50 (regular price) / $45 (member price)

Purchase tickets online or call 212-967-7555. Accessibility information (as well as information on rush/student tickets) is also available on Public Theater’s website.

The Mako Mori Test is Here to Fill Another Spot on Your Feminist Film Criticism Toolbelt

Feature image via monstersandcritics.com

It’s no secret that Hollywood isn’t the most female-friendly place. It’s extremely difficult to find a movie with a capable, interesting, three-dimensional female lead. That’s one of the reasons that this summer’s movie Pacific Rim has struck such a chord with Millenials. One of the movie’s protagonists is Mako Mori, a Japanese woman played by Rinko Kikuchi and who co-pilots the film’s main Jaeger (a giant monster-fighting robot) and ultimately helps to save the world. However, some have criticized the movie for failing to pass the Bechdel test, which is often unilaterally used to determine if a movie is feminist or not. In response, a new test has been devised based on Mako Mori and her role in the film. A test that is meant to work with, not in place of, the Bechdel test to give us a better look at feminist trends in the movie industry.

Ever since a fateful day in 1985 when Dykes to Watch Out For cartoonist Alison Bechdel decided to make a joke about the lack of meaningful female relationships in films, it seems that we’ve had only one way to measure if a film is feminist or not. In that comic strip, one of Bechdel’s characters said that she only goes to movies that meet her three simple requirements. Out of those requirements the Bechdel test was born. For a movie to pass the Bechdel test:

1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it

2. Who talk to each other

3. About something besides a man

While this seems like an easy thing to do, out of Box Office Mojo’s top 100 grossing movies of 2012, only 46 passed the Bechdel test. 49 didn’t, and I was unable to find information for the other five.

But a movie passing the Bechdel test doesn’t automatically mean it is a feminist film. Both The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Pt. 2 and the Oliver Stone movie Savages pass the test, but I doubt many would call either feminist. Similarly, Pacific Rim didn’t pass the test (it has two named female characters, but they do not talk to each other in the movie), but many women find the film, and specifically Mako Mori’s story, to be very empowering and inspiring. One of the main narratives of the film is Mako’s desire to become a Jaeger pilot and overcome the childhood trauma she faced when a Kaiju (giant monster) destroyed her hometown of Tokyo. This idea that Pacific Rim still offers a strong, feminist role model and story for women inspired tumblr user chaila to come up with her own test to “live alongside the Bechdel test (not to supplant it…).”

The Mako Mori test is passed if the movie has: a) at least one female character; b) who gets her own narrative arc; c) that is not about supporting a man’s story.

Mako Mori is one of the film’s heroes. She’s a survivor, she’s clever, she’s both mentally and physically strong, she isn’t objectified and she has the most awesome Kaiju-killing moment in the entire film. While it’s true that she doesn’t talk to another woman in the course of the movie, she has her own distinct narrative and goes through the traditional hero’s journey arguably just as much as any other character in the film. Surely there’s some merit in that.

From what I could tell, it seems like movies passing the Mako Mori test are a lot rarer than movies passing the Bechdel test. It seems easier to have two women have a superficial conversation in passing than to give one woman her own story that doesn’t revolve around a man. This isn’t to say that the Mako Mori test is more indicative of feminism than the Bechdel test, it just measures one more factor out of many. (Arguably, it’s still possible for a movie to pass both tests without being particularly feminist.)

While almost half of 2012’s top 100 grossing movies passed the Bechdel test, by my count only 23 passed the Mako Mori test. However, due to how new the Mako Mori test is and how little discussion there has been about it, whether a movie passes or not is still very subjective. For example, movies where the narratives seem to mostly revolve around a group narrative, like The Avengers are hard to grade. Similarly, does a movie like Skyfall where M, the female lead of MI6 has a narrative about trying to keep her job and maintain control of MI6, pass? It’s hard to say, as that arc seems to heavily revolve around and support both James Bond’s return to espionage and Raoul Silva’s revenge plot. Surely as there is more discussion on the topic, a clearer consensus about what passes and what doesn’t will be reached.

Neither the Bechdel test nor the Mako Mori test is meant to test if a film is feminist or not. They’re not even meant to test if a movie is good or not. They are both just measurements in what should be a detailed examination of characters, dialogue and story. Furthermore, to focus on whether or not each individual movie passes each test ignores the trends that are going on in Hollywood. Instead of looking at Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and saying that it passes the Bechdel Test, we should be looking at the fact that less than a quarter of the top movies in 2012 passed both tests at the same time. Some have seen the Mako Mori test as a reason to bring up renewed criticisms of the Bechdel test, saying that it is mostly useless because of how low a bar it sets. But that low bar is the point. If the majority of movies can’t even pass the most basic requirements for female character interaction, there must be something wrong with the system that produces them. GLAAD has recently coined yet another test for queer and trans representation, the Vito Russo test; it has similarly low numbers for passage. Although it may not have been examined yet, one suspects that the movies passing the Bechdel, Mako Mori, and Vito Russo tests are very few and far between.

As the original tumblr post said, this new test isn’t meant to replace the Bechdel test, it’s meant to give us another tool in our efforts to examine the sexist trends that exist in the movie industry. And the more tools we have, the better equipped we are. Since women make up a little more than half of the population, it makes sense that we should want to see characters and relationships that reflect our lives. We must remember that neither one of the these tests should be used as an end-all be-all. Instead we need to use as many measuring sticks as we can get our hands on. The more knowledge we have about how female characters are treated in the movies we watch, the less likely we’ll be to ignore it when they are pushed to the side.

Read All Of The Books: The Fall 2013 Queer Books Preview

feature image via Shutterstock

by Carolyn & Mey

The fall is looking good for queer reading! Books look out for include new work from Jeanette Winterson, S. Bear Bergman, Nicola Griffith, Malinda Lo, Julia Serano, Radclyffe, Kathleen Warnock and a ton of other heavy hitters. With forthcoming history and historical fiction, erotica and academic analysis, literature and genre fiction, and Buffy and Batwoman, you won’t have any problems finding something new to read.

August

One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, by Lucy Corin: The series of short stories in this new collection explore endings and new beginnings, whether of relationships or of the world. Corin uses an experimental style, varying lengths, type size and tone, to muse “not just on the end of the world, but the rapture of existence.”

Love in the Time of Global Warming, by Francesca Lia Block: Block’s writing has a dream-like quality and her unique voice — best known in her queer-friendly children’s book, Weetzie Bat, is at full force in her latest YA novel. When Penelope’s family are swept away in a flood, she embarks on an Odyssey-like quest to find them and encounters sirens, witches, magic and love.

Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian History of Post-War Britain 1945–71, by Rebecca Jennings: Jennings explores lesbian identity and culture in post-war Britain. Using oral histories and archival sources, she illuminates Britain’s lesbian social scene, both in London nightclubs and also in magazines and organizations across the country, in contrast to the conventional picture of post-war austerity.

September

Fairytales for Lost Children, by Diriye Osman: A series of narrators — young lesbian and gay Somalis on the edge of self-revelation — navigate family, identity and place in this collection of short stories that defy categorization. Alison Bechdel writes of the collection, “The characters in these fairy tales are displaced in multiple, complicated ways. But Osman’s storytelling creates a shelter for them; a warm place which is both real and imaginary, in which they find political, sexual, and ultimately psychic liberation.”

Girls I’ve Run Away With, by Rhiannon Argo: Sister Spit’s Rhiannon Argo (who Laneia once interviewed) founded Moonshine Press through an Indiegogo campaign in order to publish Girls I’ve Run Away With. Lo Flynn falls in love with rebellious Savannah Blanco and they go on the run while facing coming out, dysfunctional families, being kicked out, mental health issues and more.

Strangers In Paradise Omnibus, by Terry Moore: This is the ultimate collection for any fan of one of the most groundbreaking series for lovers of lesbian and queer characters in comic books. This edition contains all 107 issues of the series, including all of the spin offs. Moore’s masterful art and storytelling are at their highest levels in this two-book package.

Willow Volume 1: Wonderland, by Jeff Parker, Christos Gage and Brian Ching: Everyone’s favorite lesbian witch from Buffy is back in her own title, setting off on her own on a quest that will lead her to finding old allies and new battles. Magic has disappeared from the world and Willow is determined to get it back, no matter how dangerous the journey might be or where it might take her.

Blue is the Warmest Color, by Julie Maroh: First published in French as Le bleu est une couleur chaude, Blue is the Warmest Color is the English translation of the graphic novel recently adapted into the film that won the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Clementine discovers the power of love when she meets the blue-haired Emma in a lesbian bar. Their relationship challenges Clementine’s ideas about herself and her identity.

Viral, by Suzanne Parker: Parker’s slim book of poetry offers a response to Tyler Clementi‘s tragic suicide that explores sexuality, masculinity and shame. Carol Muske-Dukes calls the poems “relentlessly tender, impossibly empathetic […] which echo and clarify the body of grief.”

After Delores, by Sarah Schulman: Schulman’s acclaimed 1988 novel about an unnamed New York waitress recovering after her girlfriend, Delores, leaves her appears in a new edition from Arsenal Pulp Press. After Delores is as much a sexy novel about heartbreak as it is a look into the Lower East Side’s lesbian culture in the 1980s.

Web of Obsessions, by Diane Wood: Jordan Mackenzie is a social worker in a women’s prison when she meets assistant superintendent Danielle Veillard. Her ex-girlfriend and Danielle’s ex-husband stand in their way as begin a romance, and a prison drug ring and mysterious death make the stakes even higher.

Show of Force, by A.J. Quinn: Correspondent Tate McKenna brings navy pilot Lieutenant Commander Evan Kane home after an embassy dinner and the two can’t imagine separating again — even if it means risking their lives. Following Quinn’s romantic suspense novel Hostage Moon, Show of Force promises to be a one-sitting read.

Inheritance, by Malinda Lo: The sequel to Adaptation, Lo’s young adult contemporary sci-fi thriller, continues to follow Reese Holloway as she deals with being implanted with alien DNA, government conspiracy and her feeling for her ex-girlfriend Amber and her best friend David. Inheritance explores sexuality, adolescence and “the other.” (Read Autostraddle’s interview with Lo on Adaptation.)

Batwoman Vol. 3: World’s Finest, by J.H. Williams III: The only lesbian superhero to have her own title at one of the major comic book publishers is back in action as she partners up with the most iconic of all lady superheroes, Wonder Woman. Not only do you get to see two of DC’s coolest ladies teaming up to fight mythological monsters, but also Batwoman takes some serious steps forward in her relationship with a fellow crime fighter.

Fairy Tale Comics: Classic Tales Told by Extraordinary Cartoonists, edited by Chris Duffy: This book features classic fairy tales, some familiar and some new, retold in comic book form by a super talented group of people including queer comic-maker Emily Carrol, Love and Rockets creators Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, and Jillian Tamaki, the illustrator of Skim.

Queer Jihad: LGBT Muslims on Coming Out, Activism, and the Faith, by Afdhere Jama: Jama, author of Illegal Citizens: Queer Lives in the Muslim World, explores individual and group efforts to reconcile sexuality and faith. He discusses the post-9/11 West, law in the East, the new generation of queer Muslims, voice, change and rights.

October

Excluded: Making Feminist Movements More Inclusive, by Julia Serano: “Julia Serano is a careful and astute critic of the ways that trans women have been stereotyped and dismissed in popular culture, feminism, and psychology,” says Patrick Califia on the back of Whipping Girl. In Serano’s newest book, Excluded, she details how feminist and queer movements police gender and sexuality at the same time as challenging sexism, and how to foster inclusivity.

The Daylight Gate, by Jeanette Winterson: Lambda-Award-winning author Winterson is best known for Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and Written on the Body. Her new novel, set in seventeenth-century England, centers on the 1612 witch trials and a dark, paranoid moment in history.

Rookie Yearbook Two, edited by Tavi Gevinson: The second book from Rookie, an online magazine for teenage girls, isn’t just for those of us still in high school. Contributors include Judy Blume, Grimes and Mindy Kaling as well as interviews with people like Emma Watson and Carrie Brownstein. Yearbook Two collects the best of the website from its second year and is perfect for teens or anyone who remembers being one.

X-Files Classics Vol. 2, by Charlie Adlard and others: Although it’s not explicitly queer, it’s hard not to have a special spot in our hearts for FBI agent and medical doctor Dana Scully. This book features stories that were not featured in the TV show or movie and can only be found in the comics, including “Feelings of Unreality,” “Home of the Brave” and “Night Lights.”

Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from Bordered Lives, by Verónica Reyes: “Reyes resurrects old-time shops and hangouts. They memorialize the land alongside edifices of refuse, sterile towers, man-made deserts and rivers, machines that suffocate the sky, fields locked in the historical cycle churning out the fieldworker’s woe. Queers, dandies, cholos, mariachis the same as ‘Chumash, Pomo, Modoc’ ramble these streets,” writes Kristin Naca of Reyes’s new collection of poetry, which captures the lives of immigrants, Mexican Americans, Chicanas/os and la jotería.

Are the Lips a Grave?: A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex, by Lynne Huffer: Balancing current debates around both queer and feminist theories, Huffer — also the author of Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory — looks at queer sex, sodomy laws, interracial love, porn and work-life balance to rethink ethics and sexual morality.

Blood, Marriage, Wine and Glitter, by S. Bear Bergman: Bergman’s earlier books — Butch is a Noun, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, and Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (co-edited with Kate Bornstein) — are all seminal texts on gender and trans* life and issues. In Blood, Marriage, Wine and Glitter, Bergman considers different ideas of family from all perspectives with a voice that is both honest and hilarious.

Adventure Time: Fionna & Cake, by Natasha Allegri: This is the first trade paperback of comics based on the fantastic genderbent Adventure Time episodes. Fans of the show will love this comic illustrated and written by storyboard artist and Fionna & Cake creator Allegri.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 9 Vol. 4: Welcome to the Team, by Andrew Chambliss, Georges Jeanty, Karl Moline, Dexter Vines and Andy Owens: The second comic book-only season of the series that helped a lot of us figure out our queer feelings continues with Buffy fighting off a horde of zombies before being recruited to join a team that’s planning on taking down one of the most powerful enemies she’ll have to face — the Siphon.

First Love, by C.J. Harte: Harte’s novels thrive equally on romance and drama. In her latest, Jordan Thomson, daughter of the president of the United States, hires Drew Hamilton, once and future rancher and current medical student, as a tutor. Both women learn more than they expected.

Sexual Diversity in Africa: Politics, Theory, Citizenship, edited by S.N. Nyeck and Marc Epprecht: The contributors in this volume of essays discuss contemporary debates on and issues around sexuality and gender identity. Same-sex networks, ex-gays, pseudo-scientific gay “cures,” the “kill the gays” bill in Uganda, relationship dynamics between women who sleep with women, Caster Semenya and nationalism all show the problems with oversimplified discussions of heterosexuality and homosexuality, Africa and the West and the closet and being out.

A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, edited by Valerie Steele: As the director and chief curator for the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Steele has been called one of “Fashion’s 50 Most Powerful” by the New York Daily News. Her new book talks about gay designers, fashion and style within the queer community and more to show the impact of gay culture on modern fashion.

Batgirl Vol. 3: Death of the Family, by Gail Simone and Ed Benes: Collecting issues #14 to 19 of Batgirl, as well as Batman #17, Batgirl Annual #1 and a story from Young Romance #1, this run features Batgirl facing off against not only the Joker, but also against her dangerous brother. This is also the run of the series where Batgirl’s roommate Alysia Yeoh comes out as transgender.

Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things that Happened, by Allie Brosh: The long-awaited book from acclaimed graphic humor blog Hyperbole and a Half includes half unpublished content and all hilarity. The book chronicles cake eating, owning one neurotic dog and one mentally challenged one, depression, anxiety and more, all illustrated in MS Paint in Brosh’s signature style.

Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique, by Rebecca Munford and Melanie Waters: There is often a troubled relationship between pop culture, feminism and post-feminism. Munford and Waters discuss Mad Men, Homeland, The Stepford Wives, American Horror Story and more to highlight the characters within the postfeminist landscape. They show how pop culture relates to feminist debates and explore the implications for the future.

November

Homestead, by Radclyffe: Best-selling lesbian author Radclyffe is nothing if not prolific. In her latest, Tess Rogers learns her to-be-inherited six hundred acres of farmland has been leased to an oil and gas company. Tess resists the takeover, much to the chagrin of R. Clayton Sutter, who is in charge of making the new refinery operational.

Love and Rockets: New Stories, Vol. 6, by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez: One of the forerunners in the alternative comics revolution and one of the earliest comic series to feature queer women of color, Love and Rockets continues with more stories of the several generations of Latina characters that we’ve come to know. Los Bros Hernadez’s distinctive stylized illustration and magical realism storytelling style is showcased once more in their latest graphic novel.

Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, edited by Megan Milks and Karli June Cerankowski: “I also wish I’d known that it’s totally okay to feel passion and desire and pleasure in ways that don’t appear sexual. To feed other parts of yourself,” says Eliot in an interview with the Hairpin. This first-ever collection of critical essays on asexuality looks at its feminist and queer politics. Authors consider gender, race, disability and medical discourse to challenge ideas about gender and sexuality as they relate to desire, bodies and sexual practice.

Hild, by Nicola Griffith: “Hild is not just one of the best historical novels I have ever read — I think it’s one of the best novels, period,” says Dorothy Allison, author of Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. Hild is set in seventh-century Britain and focuses on the girl who would become St. Hilda of Whitby, who establishes herself as the seer to a ruthless king who finds her indispensable — until he doesn’t.

Moonin’s Desert Island and Moonin and the Golden Tail, by Tove Jansson: From Swedish-speaking Finnish lesbian author Tove Jansson, these comics in the beloved series are being released fully colored for the first time. Jansson’s fantastical and heartfelt story telling combines with her simple yet whimsical illustrations in these stories of a group of trolls and their friends on various adventures.

Queering Marriage: Challenging Family Formation in the United States, by Katrina Kimport: Legal same-sex marriage is often seen as either a challenge to heterosexual privilege or as a way to preserve that privilege through assimilation. Using a series of interviews with queer spouses, Kimport reconciles both views to show how gay marriage and reinforce and disrupt traditional ideas about marriage and sexuality.

Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History, edited by Patrizia Gentile and Jane Nicholas: Gentile’s first co-written Canadian queer history book, The Canadian War on Queers, explored sexuality and gender identity — and oppression — in Canada during the Cold War. Now, Gentile and Nicholas explore the history of the body as a site of contestation in Canada. Contributors address health and medicine, consumerism and fashion, citizenship, work and more.

Bandette Volume 1: Presto!, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover: Illustrated by the amazing bisexual artist Colleen Coover, this Eisner-nominated series is about costumed teen thief Bandette and her adventures in Paris. She and her friends can be found dodging the police, pulling off major heists and having fun while fighting for justice. That is, before Bandette finds out that an international criminal organization wants her dead.

Lesbian Sex Positions: 100 Passionate Positions from Intimate and Sensual to Wild and Naughty, by Shanna Katz: Sexologist and sex educator Katz is a self-described queer kinky disabled feisty femme and “professional pervert” involved with numerous sex-positive organizations and equality and social justice work. In this full-color guide, Katz explores old and new ways to make sex fun, step by step.

Under the Rainbow: A Primer on Queer Issues in Canada, by Jeanette Auger and Kate Krug: Canada has long been known as a generally queer friendly society. Auger and Krug discuss its social and political history and contemporary issues in queer Canadians’ lives. They also talk about social constructions of identities, law and politics, Quebec and queerness, trans* issues, education, sports, aging, health, end-of-life decisions and more.

Quivering Land, by Roewan Crowe: Among other projects, Crowe is involved in an ongoing collaboration with Michelle Meagher that explores new feminist art practices. In her literary debut, Crowe conducts a queer literary experiment in which she questions what it means to be a queer feminist artist and settler in a landscape reminiscent of the Hollywood Western.

December

Rhetorical Secrets: Mapping Gay Identity and Queer Resistance in Contemporary America, by Davin Allen Grindstaff: Looking at language and rhetoric, Grindstaff looks at persuasion and gay identity construction. He chronicles sexual identity as a secret as a strategy of heteronormative discourse before examining issues related to contemporary identity.

Pretty in Ink: American Women Cartoonists 1896-2013, by Trina Robbins: Tracing more than 100 years back into the history of cartoons and comics, this new book from Trina Robbins covers artists from Rose O’Neill at the end of the 19th century, to a Native American women cartoonist in the 40s, to alternative comic creator Lyda Barry to modern women in comics like Alison Bechdel and Kate Beaton. This book is full of incredible stories and beautiful art.

Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims, by Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle: In Living Out Islam, Kugle uses interviews with gay, lesbian and transgender Muslims living in secular democratic countries to demonstrate the importance of support groups and solidarity in changing social relationships. He goes beyond the idea of the closet to show interviewees’ ways of living out Islam with integrity; reconciling faith, gender and sexuality; and reclaiming Islam for their themselves.

Love Burns Bright: A Lifetime of Lesbian Romance, edited by Radclyffe: A new collection compiled by Radclyffe looks at lesbian love from the first kiss to the first night to the love that goes on many years later. Contributors include Andrea Dale and many more.

Best Lesbian Erotica 2014, edited by Kathleen Warnock: Cleis Press’s annual erotica collection returns with an introduction by Sarah Schulman, co-founder of the Lesbian Avengers.

After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics, by James Penney: Penney, author of The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire, has written extensively on queer theory. However, in his latest book, he says it’s dead. Using a critical look at Marxism and psychoanalysis, Penney argues that the best way to include sexuality in political antagonism is to toss aside the idea of politicized sexuality.

Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran, by Afsaneh Najmabadi: “Najmabadi brings her nuanced understanding of multiple discourses and institutions in Iran to bear on the recent and remarkable visibility of transsexuality in that country. Professing Selves […] will be the definitive text on its topic for a long time to come,” writes Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History. In what promises to become a crucial text, Najmabadi uses history and ethnography to discuss the post-revolutionary era, law, psychology and psychiatry, Islamic jurisprudence, biomedicine, and transsexual and homosexual categories in contemporary Iran.

The Bechdel Files Are Basically Everything I’ve Ever Wanted From The Internet

Rachel’s Team Pick:

Sometimes, even often, the internet is full of terrible things. Racist jerks! Rape apologists! Endless pointless Kickstarters! But sometimes, the internet gets its shit together and acts as a space in which really great ideas can form, or in this case, already great ideas can be turned into something double great. Enter The Bechdel Files, a tumblr whose author is re-watching the entire X Files from the pilot on and rating each episode from 1 to 5:

0 – Fail

1 – Two named female characters

2 – Talk to each other

3 – About something besides a man

4 – There are a couple qualifying conversations or the conversation is somewhat meaningful/longer than a few lines

5 – There are several qualifying conversations or a very long and/or meaningful conversation.

Although it’s not included in the original conception of The Bechdel Test, the author of The Bechdel Files also seems committed to noting the representation of POC characters in the series (apparently the first speaking role for a POC character is Agent Atsumi in Season One’s “Conduit”).

I love The X Files more than I love many things in life. But it is also pretty fucked up sometimes! Although Scully gets to save Mulder more than a few times, she also has to suffer through providing all of the episode’s suspense via being threatened with abduction, murder or violation by aliens plenty of times. Her storylines outside of physical danger usually revolve around cleaning up Mulder’s messes, having no life outside the FBI, and/or being seized  with inexplicable baby fever as a single lady living alone. The representation of people of color on the show is pretty reprehensible, ranging from “none” to “hackneyed and inaccurate versions of ‘traditional fables'” and “super frustrating narratives relying on ‘mystic Native American characters.'”

Loving something, even when it’s total and unabashed, doesn’t preclude us from criticizing it. And criticizing something doesn’t mean we don’t love it or have to stop loving it — in fact, it often speaks to how much we really and truly care about it, because we want it to be the best thing it can be. So in that spirit, I am going to wait with bated breath for every update on The Bechdel Files, and both look forward to and dread the appearance of agents Fowley and Reyes.

More Than Words: Dyke Pt. 2 — Dyke Dynasty

Welcome to the twelfth installment of More Than Words, where I take queer words of all sorts and smash them apart and see what makes them tick. Every week I’ll be dissecting a different word, trying to figure out where it came from, how it has evolved, where it might be going, and what it all means. It’s like reading the dictionary through a prism. Feel free to send word suggestions to cara@autostraddle.com.

Header by Rory Midhani

When we last left dyke, she was unsure whether she was the descendant of a Greek goddess or only slightly better than a sheepdagger. Over the next hundred years or so, the word settled into its basic definition of “a masculine woman,” but as always, even if its technical meaning stayed the same, the accompanying connotation was in the mouth of the speaker and the ear of the listener. In the 1960s, opponents of the Women’s Movement used the word to dismiss and intimidate feminists. Alison Bechdel and her friends began referring to one another as dykes a few years before Bechdel decided to call her comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” in 1983 — “at that moment in history, many lesbians had begun to proudly identify themselves as “dykes” as a way to remove the stigma… if we could re-define the word in a positive way, our thinking went, we could also change peoples’ negative attitudes about lesbians… assuring [the word’s] frequent appearance in print felt to me like a kind of linguistic activism.” With the advent of ACT UP in the late 1980s, “dyke” (along with “queer” and “fag”) began being used as terms of pride, that in-your-face quality (the one sharp syllable, the hard ‘k’) repurposed as a statement of self-affirmation. As scholar, activist and ACT UP member Dr. Deborah Gould remembers, in the early 1990s, “lesbians in ACT UP and elsewhere began wearing t-shirts with the words “Big Dyke” emblazoned in enormous and bold typeface across the front.” As of 1996, at least one publisher considered the word “dyke” more “contemporary and relevant” than the word “lesbian.”

While researching this column, I noticed that all of my best sources were suspiciously well-written, tidy, and similarly formatted. In fact, they were all bookended by the same chunks of legal jargon. Intrigued, I switched from investigating the history of the word “dyke” to investigating the history of these histories of the word “dyke.” What I found was a case study (literally!) on reclamation, complete with personal histories, differing views, controversy, The Patriarchy, motorcycles, and interns. Here’s what happens when a group takes a process that’s traditionally cultural and personal and decides to push it through legal channels.

On July 4^th, 1976, a small group of women rode their motorcycles to the San Francisco Pride Parade. One or another of them was visited by a cheeky muse, looked around, and waxed briefly poetic about what she saw — dykes on bikes, of course. The name stuck, partially thanks to a San Francisco Chronicle reporter with a good ear, and as their numbers grew, the group became more formalized. They adopted an official name, the Women’s Motorcycle Contingent, in order to “make the group appeal to all woman motorcyclists,” though most groups still used the catchier nickname around family. As the group expanded, they expanded its syntax in turn, sandwiching the two together into “The Women’s Motorcycle Contingent Dykes on Bikes” (SFWMC), a slangy in-group term preceded by its own more accessible definition. As SFWMC secretary Soni Wolf says, “the display of pride exhibited by the Dykes on Bikes motorcycle contingent in the Pride Parade is literally earthshaking.” Hundreds of bikes rattle the streets and stir up a tailwind for the marchers that follow. But by the time the rumble reached the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), it was mistaken for a roar of controversy, offense, and even hate.

Dykes on Bikes tried to trademark their own name in July 2003, twenty-seven years after that first burst of inspiration struck, because a clothing manufacturer was horning in and the bikers wanted to save the phrase for noncommercial use. By this point the organization had twenty-two nationwide chapters, over four hundred members, and a bunch of sweet collectible pins. They filed a patent application and coasted until February 2004, when the PTO rejected their application, saying that “a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities would recognize that the term “dyke” is disparaging and objectionable to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities.” Seems a little unwarranted, as these dykes — certainly reasonable, if containing some extraordinary sensibilities — made up a sizeable lesbian community, and were clearly not feeling disparaged. Something was going on here. A 1913 Webster’s Dictionary, which weight was slowly bending whatever shelf it sat on into submission, had taken precedence over actual testimony from a group of those best equipped to judge the word.

After the initial rejection, Dykes on Bikes appealed. With help from Brooke Oliver Law Group and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, they called in the big guns. Attorneys cried foul, speculating that concerns over “the public at large” were just censorship masquerading as fellow-feeling (“Oddly, they did grant a trademark for the Bravo TV show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” last year”). Activists, scholars, and linguists (and high-profile dykes of all pinstripes, like Bechdel: “I’m not sure which of those three categories I fall under, though I have been told I’m good with my tongue”) submitted testimonials “demonstrating that the LGBT community considers the name “Dykes on Bikes” to be a positive, empowering and affirming term.” They sent in pictures. Home videos. Statements from “self-identified dykes with and without bikes.” But was the PTO touched? Were they excited to be the sudden center of all this fascinating hashing-out?

Nah. After reading through it all, they upheld their original decision and decided the word was “vulgar” as well. K. Alex Ilyasova, in her article “Dykes on Bikes and the Regulation of Vulgarity,” argues that this sudden intensification is less about the word and more about the whole idea: “The main thing that makes “Dykes on Bikes” vulgar to the PTO is the same thing that makes it “vulgar” to mainstream society, and to some within the riding community: the women’s explicit association with motorcycling and their unflinching and unashamed display of their masculinity… it is about the audacity of some of these masculine women to make explicit what has been implied for so long — that they exist.” The US, consciously or unconsciously, doesn’t want to be a place where gender gets blended like that, and so its legal representatives — like patent officers, who are basically the nation’s Official Namers — put their hands over their ears and red-stamp everyone who tries. Eventually — after lawyers appealed to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board — the PTO reversed their decision and “Dykes on Bikes” was granted a trademark. It subsequently survived a couple of appeals one from someone who called it an “Anti Male Hate Riot“). As of 2008, “Dykes on Bikes” is legal, baby.

It’s too bad it took so long. But the court documents, especially those twenty-six expert testimonials, are some of the greatest breakdowns of word reclamation I’ve ever read. They weave history and cultural criticism in with media studies and personal testimony, and serve a secondary role as mini-biographies of great minds. You’ve got former ACT-UPer Dr. Deborah Gould, who has “been identifying as a dyke for over 15 years,” fighting alongside Jesse Sheidlower, male slang expert and author of a book about the history of the word “fuck.” Lexicographer Ronald R. Butters runs through precise definitions of the words “disparaging,” “derogatory,” and “offensive” (and a brief historical aside about the increasing sensitivity of dictionary makers) before declaring that “Dykes On Bikes” is not any of those. Meanwhile, legal intern Rebecca Bodfish contributes “fifty different magazines, videocassettes, and books relating to lesbian culture which used “dyke” in the title” that she found on “the Google search engine.” Author, professor, and former Lavendar Menace Karla Jay remembers proposing the name “Dykes with Tykes” to a group of lesbian mothers at a conference in 1975 and being “met with cheers.” Writer and activist Judy Grahn recalls how she “began reclaiming gay and lesbian words and experiences in teh 1960s,” and clinical psychologist and self-identified dyke Dr. Shara Sand describes how her patients use the word when speaking privately.

Above all, you have more than two dozen people eloquently defending the lesbian community’s individual and collective right to self-definition — both by taking the time in the testimonials to personally self-define, and by arguing eloquently for the necessity of being able to do so. Bechdel, in my opinion, puts it best:

“Our community has engaged in intense, thoughtful, and nuanced debate for many years about the words we use to describe and identify ourselves, and we have come up with many creative and liberatory solutions. But more importantly, we have arrived at a common understanding that the language a person chooses to describe her own identity must be regarded with the utmost respect.”

The US Patent and Trademark Office, in an attempt to protect a disenfranchised group, disrespected them instead. In doing so they underestimated the power of a group of made up of, in Judy Grahn’s definition, “powerful, independent women capable of defending themselves, who are also lesbians in sexual orientation.” And, luckily for all of us, really good with their tongues.