CIVILesbianIZATION: Dykes We Love - Honoring Alison Bechdel

You know you want it.

You've looked at it lovingly at your local independent bookstore. Had it sitting in your online shopping cart at Powell's or Amazon. You want it in its hardbound glory.

It's thick; nearly four hundred pages. You know it will last longer on your shelf if you splurge for the hardback. You know that it will feel even more delicious and weighty in your hands if you get it soon.

Let me implore you, buy it now. It's worth the splurge. If you've been following Dykes To Watch Out For for the past twenty-five years, you owe it to yourself and to Bechdel to buy this new edition, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. If you're new to Mo, Lois, Sparrow, Ginger, and the gang, you'll treasure the volume. Go. Now. Buy it.

Now that we have that out of the way, here are a few of my reflections on reading and rereading Bechdel's new The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For.

Bechdel began the strip, Dykes To Watch Out For, in 1983. The first cartoon--it wasn't yet a series--was published in the 1983 Lesbian Pride Issue of the local feminist newspaper, according to Bechdel in the graphic introduction.

The strip began, in Bechdel's words, as "a catalog of lesbians"--she wanted to "name the unnamed" and "depict the undepicted." She did just that through the syndicated comic strip, Dykes To Watch Out For, for the next twenty-five years.

The strip spawned eleven previous books and legions of fans among lesbians, gays, and queers in cities, towns, and hamlets around the world. Now, on the twenty-fifth anniversary, we have this "essential" collection.

Dykes To Watch Out For has an eclectic cast of characters who have grown and evolved over the past twenty-five years of their lives on the page courtesy of Bechdel's deft hand, sharp eye, and incisive pen.

Reading The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For is a treat, bound to elicit a wide variety of emotions-laughter, tears, joy, pain, giggles, sadness, awe, and disbelief.

I was thrilled to have all of the strips together in a book; it's like catching up with old friends. The characters of the strip feel like old friends, and the brilliance of the series (and Bechdel's genius as a stripper) is that the characters mirror people in "real" lesbian life as well.

Paging through the volume, I remembered various locations where I read the original strip: the dyke bar in Ann Arbor, outside the womyn's bookstore in Ferndale, in countless issues of off our backs.

Reading The Essential reminded me of those places where I haven't been in years and of the people in my life then, some of whom I haven't seen since. It's like a reunion, but you don't have to buy new clothes or lose any weight to attend.

Reading it isn't entirely nostalgic, however. The strips hold up over time--and reveal new gems of discovery and insight. The first time I read Dykes To Watch Out For, I identified with Mo most of all, but now, a graduate student myself, I'm interested in Ginger and Sydney and their lives. When I first read about Clarice and Toni and their baby, Raffi, I thought that was the life I wanted. Now I like reading it--and knowing it is not mine!

While reading the new compendium may be a personal journey for many, as it was for me, the book also documents our history. In its pages unfold the demise of Mad Wimmin books, the triumphal election of Bill Clinton, marches and demos and marches and demos for gay and lesbian rights, LGBT rights, queer rights, abortion rights, solidarity with central America and countless other causes, the dispiriting vote for Clinton after he championed and signed ENDA, Al Gore's loss, Bush's reelection, sodomy law repeal, the advent of marriage equality. The big political moments are all there.

So are all the nuanced moments in lesbian life--sex in many positions and with many emotional and physical consequences, changing footwear (from Birkenstocks to Doc Martins to Australian boots), childbearing, child rearing, friendships, fights, passionate breakups, forestalled affections, illicit affairs, and, through it all, anger and outrage at new and different things.

Alison Bechdel captures lesbian life-the highs and the lows-in words and pictures. She's been doing it for twenty-five years. She herself is a Dyke To Watch Out For and, more than that, a dyke we love.