Alison Bechdel's father was an army veteran who was stationed in West Germany.
15 Facts About Alison Bechdel
2.
Alison Bechdel was a high school English teacher, working full-time and operating a funeral home part-time.
3.
Alison Bechdel has two brothers, Bruce "Christian" Bechdel II and John Bechdel, a keyboard player who has worked with many bands including Fear Factory, Ministry, Prong and Killing Joke.
4.
Alison Bechdel graduated with a degree in studio arts and art history in 1981 from Oberlin College.
5.
Alison Bechdel moved to Manhattan during the summer of 1981 and applied to several art schools, but was rejected and worked in many office jobs in the publishing industry.
6.
Alison Bechdel gradually moved from her early single-panel drawings to multi-paneled strips.
7.
In 1987, Alison Bechdel introduced her regular characters, Mo and her friends, while living in St Paul, Minnesota.
8.
Alison Bechdel has written and drawn autobiographical strips and has done illustrations for magazines and websites.
9.
The success of Dykes to Watch Out For allowed Alison Bechdel to quit her day job in 1990 to work on the strip full-time.
10.
In November 2006, Alison Bechdel was invited to sit on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.
11.
In 2006, Alison Bechdel published Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, an autobiographical "tragicomic" chronicling her childhood and the years before and after her father's suicide.
12.
Alison Bechdel described its themes as "the self, subjectivity, desire, the nature of reality, that sort of thing," which is a paraphrase of a quote from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
13.
Alison Bechdel published another memoir The Secret to Superhuman Strength in 2021.
14.
In February 2004, Alison Bechdel married Amy Rubin, her girlfriend since 1992, in a civil ceremony in San Francisco.
15.
Alison Bechdel subsequently lived with her partner Holly Rae Taylor, a painter, for seven and a half years before their marriage in July 2015.