Spawn of Dykes to Watch Out For, the fifth volume of Alison Bechdel’s beloved comic series, came out (!) 30 years ago today, highlighting the journey to parenthood of characters Toni and Clarice. Let’s take a look back as we also start LGBTQ History Month.
Published in 1993, Spawn of Dykes to Watch Out For (Firebrand Books) won a Lambda Literary Award the next year. Despite the story’s age, Toni and Clarice’s story still feels relevant, as they experience multiple rounds of insemination, cryotank deliveries, pregnancy tests, telling their respective conservative parents that they’re having a child, buying a family-friendly car, sex during pregnancy, not-quite-inclusive birth classes, and the support (with occasional skepticism) of their queer community. Bechdel delves with perception and wry humor into Clarice’s hesitation about her place as a nongenetic, nongestational mom, the strains of balancing work and family life, and the worries of bringing a child into an imperfect world.
Toni and Clarice’s parenting story technically started in the very first Dykes to Watch Out For when Clarice mentioned they were thinking about having a child, and it continued in subsequent volumes as son Raffi grew. Spawn of DTWOF, however, captured the key early period up through Raffi’s birth—and its name and cover (both the original and a reissued edition) were a definitive reminder that we’re here, we’re queer, and we’re starting families.
The entire DTWOF series is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, but Spawn of DTWOF has a special place in my heart. By sheer coincidence, 1993 was also the year my now-spouse and I started our relationship. (We celebrated our 30th anniversary last spring.) We were both still in graduate school and had no idea at the time that a kid would be on the horizon, but reading Spawn of DTWOF at the local women’s bookstore that year gave me the most fully realized representation of lesbian conception and parenting that I’d seen before I began to think about parenthood myself a number of years later. Perhaps it helped put a subconscious possibility into my head. I suspect the book may have similarly influenced other queer parents.
In the introduction to Bechdel’s omnibus collection of DTWOF comics, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (Bookshop; Amazon), which includes strips from Spawn of DTWOF, she notes that she drew the comics in part for herself, because “it was so comforting to see my queer life reflected back at me”—but she also wonders whether her comics have shown that lesbian/queer life is essentially the same or essentially different as that of everyone else. The answer is likely a little of each, but in giving us a mirror to see both our similarities and our differences to others, she has done all of us, parents and otherwise, a great service.
Bonus fun fact: The former home of Firebrand Books, which published the Dykes to Watch Out For series as well as Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and other lesbian and feminist works, was designated a historic building last fall by the Ithaca Common Council in New York.
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