It’s snowing in Boulder, Colorado. Big flakes, heavy-limbed trees, the whole shebang. J and I are trying to find parking on campus near the University Memorial Center late in the evening, but there’s an accident up Folsom that’s shut the entire road down. Red and blue lights glow on the fresh snow. We turn the jeep around, go a different route through campus, then encounter a sign that says “authorized vehicles only.” With just a few minutes until the lecture begins, we park in the first parking lot we see and hurry through the snow toward the ballroom.
I’m buzzing with the glee of being back on my old stomping grounds. The University of Colorado Boulder is an enormous campus, beautifully constructed right in the foothills. Despite having finished grad school more than five years ago, I still know all the twists and turns of paths and sandstone buildings. Even in the dark, under several inches of snow, the memories are careening toward me. If we weren’t in such a hurry to make the start of the lecture, I would have slowed to a shuffle, absorbing each step as a reminder of where I once stepped before. (Note: I will likely go back — and like a dork — do this on my own later.)
But we have a lecture to get to and so we smash through the snow in our sturdy boots, the memories flinging all around my head. The thinnest film of sweat coats my forehead by the time we burst into the UMC. We find okay seats near the front as the room quickly fills in. While we wait for the lecture to begin, I look around and notice the audience is a sweeping range of freshmen college students to septuagenarian locals — and that at least 85% of those attending look to be on the LGBTQIA spectrum. I blink back tears.
A man steps onto the stage and is absolutely wriggling with excitement as he introduces our speaker for the night: Alison Bechdel.
“Pulling this night together was an incredible amount of work,” he says. “Even the engineering department chipped in to make it happen.”
The audience applauds, meanwhile I’m wondering, What the fuck does the engineering department care about a lesbian writer and graphic memoirist? But also, Thank god the engineering department cares about a lesbian writer and graphic memoirist because I don’t think the English Department could have pulled this off without their funds.
And then all at once, Alison Bechdel is rising from the front row, taking her spot behind the lectern, queuing up her slideshow. She opens with an image of a protestor holding up a posterboard printout from a page of her book, Fun Home, that depicts, in just three small frames, what I would call a tasteful sex scene between herself and a girlfriend. Because of this, as well as the (*gasp*) other lesbian content in her work, her books are being banned from schools all over the country.
“In case you can’t see it well enough on the protestor’s posterboard,” Bechdel says, “Here’s the image in question.” She clicks to the next slide and on the 10-foot by 10-foot screen, we all see the sex scene frames she’s referencing.
A cheer erupts from the audience and I’m working to stifle a chuckle because I’m thinking to myself that yep, those protestors are probably right about what this book could lead to.* Because when I read Bechdel at 19 years old in a Women’s Literature course at the University of Pittsburgh, a small voice emerged in my head saying, You might not be straight. And when I picked up Fun Home after reading Are You My Mother for the class and saw these images in particular, that voice said, You are DEFINITELY not straight. I put a little post-it note on this page in the book, returning to it again and again over the course of undergrad asking myself, What the hell is happening inside of me right now?
Since finishing that course, my life and my sexual identity have bloomed into something spectacular.
*[Let’s pause here real quick so that I can explicitly say that I’m making a joke about the protestors being right and that I absolutely believe Bechdel’s books should be available in schools and universities precisely because understanding your sexual identity can be very difficult and confusing when you’ve only been exposed to heteronormative culture your entire life. It is most definitely NOT the case that I “turned gay” because I read this book, but I DID realize I’d been suppressing something in myself to appease a very, very straight culture. No one “turns gay.” People just discover who they actually are over time. Being worried that some piece of art or media is going to “turn youth gay” is actually being worried that youth are going to discover who they really are. Boom. Mic drop.]
Through this Women’s Lit course, I was exposed to writers like Bechdel, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Woolf, all of whom I’d barely heard of before and all of whom I swallowed up hungrily. What was this fantastic new world in which women could take center stage?
As Bechdel moves through her lecture, she makes it clear that Adrienne Rich was something of a guiding force not only in her writing life but also in her queer life and the ways in which she communicated that aspect of herself with her parents.
“Adrienne Rich gave me a way into understanding my mother’s life,” Bechdel says near the end of her lecture.
And as I sit in the straight-backed chair, I’m realizing that Bechdel is that force for me and gave me a way into understanding my mother’s life. I want to stand up on my chair and shout this to her in front of god and everyone. But I refrain and write it all down in my notebook.
The entirety of Bechdel’s lecture is witty and poignant, and I take lots of notes, but I’m hanging on dearly to this notion of circuity between her own influences and mine. I feel for just a moment like I’m 19 again, discovering myself authentically for the first time. I glance at the faces of the eager students, feeling immense joy knowing that they might remember this night a decade from now as a pivotal night of discovering themselves too.
The hour lecture flies by and before I’ve wrapped my head around all that’s gurgling up inside of me, Bechdel is stepping off the stage and the audience is clapping, and students are lining up to have their books signed. Because 99% of my books are packed away in a storage unit in Bellingham, I don’t have anything here for her to sign, so I decide to let this new rank of students crowd around Bechdel while J and I shuffle back out into the snowy night.
The next day, I slip a handful of letters into a blue postal box. One of those letters is to my professor from my sophomore Women’s Lit course, whom I have corresponded with regularly over the last decade. I haven’t seen her in person since 2016, but the letters keep flowing. I don’t think they’ll ever stop. Every time I learn something new about myself, the power of women, the promise of queerness, I think to myself, I can’t wait to tell Marylou about this.
I don’t know what kind of person I would be if she had been unable to teach Bechdel’s books, or had to dance around “political” concepts like queer theory. I don’t know precisely what students today will lack without easy access to these resources. But to those who wish to silence the most spectacularly authentic expressions of ourselves, all I can say with certainty is that you can ban all the books and media you want — we’ve been finding ourselves for centuries without the limitations of your prudishness. And we’ll do it for centuries and centuries more to come. [Insert a hundred middle fingers here].
Stuff I’m Reading:
Animal Bodies by Suzanne Roberts - A fantastic essay collection
Selected Poems of Adrienne Rich - On brand per this post, I know
Mari Andrew’s Substack - A delight, as always
Stuff I Like About Where I’m Staying (Boulder, Colorado Edition):
Rebecca’s Herbal Apothecary - The most excellent staff and most abundant herbal assortment of any place I’ve ever been. They helped me out with my ongoing sinus issues (hint: it sounds like it’s gut related - more to come on that) and gave me lots of yummy teas and tinctures to start feeling better. The best news is that they ship! Check ‘em out!
Osaka’s - Apparently this place was here when I lived in Boulder and I never went, and that’s a damn shame because it was fantastic and there’s only so much to squeeze in in the few short weeks we’re here.
Boxcar - Arguably the best coffee in Boulder. They also ship!
Meow Wolf Denver - Alright, not Boulder per se, but close enough. If you’ve never been to any of the Meow Wolf installations, I can’t recommend them enough.