Queer Cartoonists Diane DiMassa and Alison Bechdel in Conversation

Video (48:17): Queer cartoonists Alison Bechdel and Diane DiMassa in conversation about their creative practices at the Brookly Book Festival 2025. Moderator: Jennifer Camper.

‘Giants of queer cartooning, Alison Bechdel and Diane DiMassa have lived through and responded to decades of warmongering, anti-feminist rhetoric, and oppression. Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, released this year in a new edition from New York Review of Books, was a steam release valve for zine readers in the late 1980s to early 1990s, featuring a trigger-happy lesbian warrior against patriarchy reined in only by her nagging cat, empathetic neighbor, a lightbulb-shaped deity, and the moon. Alison Bechdel’s longrunning serial comic Dykes To Watch Out For chronicled a group of mostly lesbian neighbors from 1983 to 2008; in her new book Spent, an alternate Alison lives alongside aging versions of her fictional characters in Burlington, Vermont while struggling with issues of money, fame, polyamory, goat husbandry, and campus activism. Joining these authors in conversation to discuss how queer art of the past and present can teach us how to respond to the urgent political moment is teacher, organizer, and fellow groundbreaking lesbian cartoonist Jennifer Camper’. – Brooklyn Book Festival

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