I Was Drawn This Gay: Queer Community Activism in the Serial Comics of Alison Bechdel and Howard Cruse

Hayward-Fitch, Cassia Helena (2025) I Was Drawn This Gay: Queer Community Activism in the Serial Comics of Alison Bechdel and Howard Cruse. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis explores how serial queer newspaper comic strips build active communities of readers, focusing specifically on two comic strips: Howard Cruse’s Wendel (1983–1989) and Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For (1983–2008). Drawing on archival materials from the Howard Cruse Archives at Columbia University, the Alison Bechdel Archives — part of the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, and the Gay Comix Records at The LGBT Community Center National History Archive in New York, this thesis studies Wendel and Dykes within their original newspaper formats and in all their comic book (re)publications. It examines these comic strips from five perspectives: seriality, paratext, comics format, content, and reception, and argues that all five aspects worked together to enable Dykes and Wendel to create strong imagined communities of readers.

This thesis argues that the format of the newspaper comic strip naturalizes queerness which allowed Cruse and Bechdel to tell new stories about “Gaily Life”. The combination of this new narrative focus, coupled with their seriality and comics nature, published in a time with little other positive queer visual representation, made reader interaction doubly significant to queer newspaper comic strips, further strengthening their ability to foster active reading communities. This thesis argues that these connections were heightened, first by Wendel and Dykes newspaper paratext, which allowed readers to link the strips’ storyworlds to their lifeworlds, and second by their republication as comic books — in which readers could re-read the stories and thus deepen their connection to the narratives. It posits that the focus on community relationships seen in Wendel and Dykes’ plots, spaces of publication, and reader engagement fostered by their serial comics nature, allowed these strips to effectively create communities of readers and become the “godparents” of today’s American queer comics scene.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy and Area Studies
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	02 Oct 2025 07:46
Last Modified:	02 Oct 2025 07:46
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/100577
DOI:

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