It Was Forty Years Ago Today…

June 1st, 2023

…or forty years ago this month, anyway, that I published my first Dykes To Watch Out For cartoon in the Pride issue of the NYC feminist monthly, WomaNews. This anniversary fortuitously coincides with the release of the Audible Original version of Dykes to Watch Out For–an amazing audio adaptation of the comic strip.

This project is the brainchild of the redoubtable Susie Bright, who was working at Audible, and was determined to make an audiobook happen with big stars and high production values–and so she did. The playwright Madeleine George wrote a gemlike script which covers much of the plot of the first three published collections of the strip, and is set in 1987. Jane Freaking Lynch plays The Narrator! Carrie Brownstein is an amazingly anxious Mo. Roberta Colindrez (who played my college girlfriend in Fun Home (the musical based on my memoir) on Broadway, does Lois like nobody’s business. Another Broadway star, Jenn Colella plays a pitch-perfect Harriet. Roxane Gay steps in as Jezanna, the badass bookstore owner! It’s incredible! You should listen to it!

So yesterday, I dug out that ancient issue of WomaNews from my archives and started flipping through its crumbling, yellowing pages. I found that first cartoon in situ…

…but I also found a lot of other fascinating stuff which I’ll share with you here. The cover of the issue says July/August, but we worked on it in June and got it out in time for Pride at the end of the month.

Inside, there’s an article about Meg Christian giving up music to follow her guru, with a truly hilarious headline.

There’s an article by the illustrious Sarah Schulman, our unofficial ringleader, about toxic chemicals in the water supply. There’s a piece about the W.O.W. Café, the insane lesbian theater collective where Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, Holly Hughes, and The Five Lesbian Brothers all got their start. Lisa Kron, one of the Brothers, would later win Tony awards for Best Original Score and Best Book of a Musical for her adaptation of Fun Home. (In a further coincidence, Lisa’s partner is Madeleine George, mentioned above, who wrote the Audible Dykes to Watch Out For script.)

There’s a review by Jewelle Gomez of Toi Derricotte’s book Natural Birth, which was edited by Nancy Bereano of Crossing Press. Nancy would soon go on to found her own press, Firebrand Books, which would publish ten volumes of my cartoons over the next fifteen years.

There’s an ad for the karate school where I sweated away many an evening of my youth, and gained the focus and discipline necessary to sit down and draw comics.

Here’s a small sampling from the Calendar of Events—which is what we had before dating apps. I wonder how many couples got together at the meetings of Feminist Intellectual Late-blooming Lesbians.

There’s a long, impassioned, and unfortunately still relevant letter to the editor from a self-described “lesbian transexual” who urges lesbian organizers not to exclude people but to work in coalition. I scanned ahead to the author’s name—it’s Riki Anne Wilchins, (though we misspelled her name “Wilson”) who over a decade later would go on to found the direct action group The Transexual Menace, as well as Camp Trans.

There’s an informational article about AIDS, which was only just starting to be understood, by Dr. Joan Waitkevicz. “Policies seemingly based on fear of infection, when discussed, are often rooted in contempt for the types of people at risk.” Joan volunteered at the St. Mark’s Health Collective, where I was lucky enough to have her as my doctor. 

In fact, the issue also includes an ad for a dance to benefit the St. Marks Women’s Health Collective—a dance where I would meet the woman who would be my girlfriend for the next five years. And which was the basis for the “benefit dance for the lesbian health collective” where my DTWOF character Mo met Harriet, who would become her girlfriend. A meeting which, to come full circle, you can hear with your very own ears if you listen to the Audible Original!

In real life, when my future girlfriend and I went our separate ways at the lesbian health collective dance, I went outside and smoked a joint with Sarah Schulman and some other WomaNews people. I remember Sarah telling us that night that Susan Sontag was a lesbian, which was news to me. Sarah also expressed her annoyance with Sontag for refusing to come out, which led to an observation that all these “movement lesbians,” meaning us, the ones who were going to protests and lesbian dances, were merely “the tip of the iceberg.” There were many, many times our number, Sarah said, who were still in the closet.

I’m feeling very grateful for my formative years at WomaNews. There would have been no DTWOF without all those amazing dykes to watch out for.