Q Toon: Dukes to Watch Out For

This summer, Duke University recommended to its incoming freshmen that they ought to read Fun Home, a graphic memoir by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, eponym of the Bechdel Test. The book is about Bechdel's coming out, and her dad's closeted homosexuality. Duke recommends some summer reading every year to promote discussion when the school year starts, which seems like a reasonable enough thing for a liberal arts institution to do.

Upon learning that the book contains women masturbating and engaging in oral sex, one student, Brian Grasso, posted on Facebook that he refused to read Bechdel's book. Somehow, it turned into such a big deal that the Washington Post printed his explanation for himself.

[I]n the Bible, Jesus forbids his followers from exposing themselves to anything pornographic. “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” he says in Matthew 5:28-29. “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away.” This theme is reiterated by Paul who warns, “flee from sexual immorality.” ... 

I will avoid any titillating content and encourage like-minded students to do the same. And I believe professors should warn me about such material...

Certainly, Grasso and any others worried about looking lustily at lesbians have every right not to read books they don't want to, and at no point was reading Fun Home required. On the other hand, as has been pointed out by everyone from Jerry Seinfeld to Chris Rock to a growing list of university professors, we seem to be raising a generation of extremely delicate hothouse flowers.

And Grasso should have warned his readers that he was going to use the word "titillate."

This Week's Sneak Peek

In lieu of the usual snippet from the cartoon coming later this week, here's one I drew for the Twin Cities LGBT newsmagazine Gaze in July, 1993, the year of great flooding along the upper Mississippi River and several tributaries in the midwest.

I was en route to a church secretaries' conference in St. Peter, Minnesota that summer, traveling by bus. I stopped to visit friends in Minneapolis before boarding the bus down to St. Peter. The bus ended up having to make a number of detours because high water in the Minnesota River had overtopped some bridges and roadways and was threatening others. I ended up arriving at Gustavus Adolphus College quite late, missing the opportunity to be interviewed by a Minneapolis Tribune reporter who wanted to talk to the three of us male secretaries at the overwhelmingly female conference.

Since both of the pastors at the church where I work happened at the time to be women, I suppose I could been an interesting addition to the article. (In fact, both pastors are still women, although one now works at the synod level, not at the church.)