Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania and grew up in the small town of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania. She lived in an old Gothic Revival house with her father Bruce, her mother Helen, and her two younger brothers Christian and John. Bechdel’s family was Roman Catholic. Her mother was a teacher and community theater actress, and her father, an army veteran, was an 11th grade English teacher who also worked part-time running a funeral home that he inherited from his father. As a kid, Bechdel and her brothers helped out at the funeral home, which they called the “Fun Home.” After leaving high school a year early, Bechdel attended Simon’s Rock College from 1977 to 1979, at which time she transferred to Oberlin College and subsequently graduated with a degree in art history and studio arts in 1981. At college, Bechdel also met her first girlfriend and, at the age of 19, Bechdel came out of the closet to her parents as a lesbian. That same year, Alison’s father Bruce died, likely from a suicide. After graduating from college, Bechdel moved to Manhattan, applied to art schools, got rejected, and ended up working many office jobs in the publishing industry. In June of 1983, a friend sent one of Bechdel’s drawings to a magazine called WomaNews, and Bechdel’s long-running comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For was born. During this time, Bechdel moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, and the strip evolved into a series of stories centering on a group of lesbian characters. In 1990 Bechdel became a full-time cartoonist and later moved to a house near Burlington, Vermont. In February of 2004 Bechdel married Amy Rubin, her longtime partner, in San Francisco, but the California Supreme Court later vacated their marriage. They separated in 2006, the same year that Bechdel’s best-selling graphic memoir about her relationship with her father, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, was released. In 2008 Bechdel suspended working on her comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For to work on a graphic memoir about her mother, which was released in 2012 with the title Are You My Mother? In 2014 Bechdel was granted a MacArthur “Genius” Award. Bechdel married Holly Rae Taylor in 2015.