American cartoonist and writer Alison Bechdel was BOTD in 1960. Born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, where her father ran a funeral business from their family home, which she and her siblings nicknamed “fun home”. When she was 19, Bechdel came out as lesbian to her parents. Weeks later, her father was hit and killed by a truck, which appears to have been suicide, due to conflicts over his own closeted homosexuality. She studied art at Oberlin College, moving to New York City to pursue a career as a graphic artist. In 1983, she became known for Dykes to Watch Out For, a lesbian-themed comic strip published in Funny Times. Syndicated in a number of LGBT newspapers, it was hailed as a breakthrough representation of lesbians in popular culture, and published in book form in 1986. She achieved wider public recognition for her 1996 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a critical examination of her childhood, her father’s closeted sexuality and the psychological impact of his suicide. A critical and commercial success, it was shortlisted for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award. A sequel volume, Are You My Mother? followed in 2012, exploring her relationship with her mother through the prism of the writings of Virginia Woolf. Her work became more widely known following Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s Off-Broadway musical adaptation of Fun Home, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. The show transferred to Broadway in 2015, becoming an unlikely commercial hit, winning five Tony Awards including best musical. Bechdel is perhaps best known for formulating the Bechdel Test, a shorthand method of assessing the feminist credentials of a work of fiction by asking if it features at least two women talking together about something other than a man. First appearing as a joke in her 1985 comic strip The Rule, it became more popular in in the 2000s as a critique of sexism in Hollywood filmmaking. Her most recent graphic novel Spent, a satire about aging liberals living in Vermont, was published in 2025. Bechdel married her long-term partner Amy Rubin in 2004, separating two years later. She married Holly Rae Taylor in 2015, with whom she lives in Vermont.