One of many LGBT darlings in the “mainstream” media is Alison Bechdel, the Maddowesque lesbian cartoonist who invented the “Bechdel test” in her comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For" in 1985 – that a movie “must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.”
Her autobiographical musical Fun Home is playing in New York, and Judith Thurman at The New Yorker is so effusive in the May 11 issue she’s allowing Bechdel to half-complain about a gushing rave review by New York Times drama critic Ben Brantley:
It seemed fitting that the opening-night party was held across the street from the Port Authority bus terminal—a modern-day Ellis Island for refugees from the conformity of small-town America. Bechdel read Ben Brantley’s Times review on her phone. “ ‘Fun Home,’ ” he wrote, “knows where you live”; he called it a “universal detective story.” (The musical has since been nominated for twelve Tonys.)
“It’s funny,” Bechdel said. “When the memoir came out, I bristled at critics who qualified the struggle it describes as ‘universal.’ It felt like they were trying to co-opt my identity. But it doesn’t strike me that way anymore. I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re all queer—there is no normal.”
Actually, Bechdel has a point here: how is it universal to have a budding lesbian with a father who’s a “gay undertaker, high-school English teacher, and home-improvement maniac”? But the New Yorker and The New York Times routinely greet art highlighting “inclusive” and abolishing “normal” with ideological euphoria.
