GLR July-August 2025

ments and progress in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. In 1930, as the Depression deepened, most of those associ ated with the Harlem Renaissance left New York, but Cullen stayed and accepted a job at Frederick Douglass Junior High School, where he mentored a student in whom he saw great promise, the young James Baldwin. That’s when the divorced Cullen met Ida Mae Robertson. They knew one another for ten years prior to their marriage, after which he lived for only an other six. Those sixteen years proved to be the happiest in Cullen’s short life, and he was to a large extent able to reconcile his attraction to men with both his need to be part of the literati and his deep affection for Ida Mae. Brown sees Cullen’s sexual self-identification as on “the spectrum of cisgender bisexuality, whether trending homoerotic or heteroerotic,” concluding that “[b]eing closeted seems an his torical circumstance, not a character flaw.” In fact, Cullen was more dedicated to concealing his orphaned childhood in poverty than he was to concealing his same-sex attractions. As far as the couple’s sex life is concerned, Brown, a straight man, offers only that Cullen had at least a half-dozen gay lovers and that Ida Mae had a miscarriage during their marriage. The story of Countée Cullen’s afterlife is in large measure the story of Ida Mae’s zealous promotion of his work and reputation.

Not a public speaker, a poet, or a scholar, she made it her business to advance Cullen’s legacy until her death in 1986. It was during the last twenty years of her life that Kevin Brown developed a relationship with his great-grandmother, which was fueled by his curiosity and her impassioned lectures. A masterful storyteller who revealed more than she intended, Ida Mae was by nature combative, particularly with her great-grandson, and their flare ups eventually led to a rift between them. Brown writes, “I had my own biography to live, my own books to write.” Ida Mae saw her great-grandson as an inheritor of the “fam ily business,” hoping he would continue to live in the literary world, sustaining the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance as she had. Brown writes about Cullen’s work only from the “stand point of a practitioner,” not a critic or scholar, and takes the long view about how the evolution of American and global poetic movements, tastes, and styles are related to developments in contemporary Black culture. Ida Mae Cullen-Cooper and Kevin Brown’s lives came to gether once more during the final year of her life, after he had moved to New York City for the first time. Brown’s own story goes on, and he will continue sorting out the exigencies and complications of his life and family legacy: “To this day, even in my solitude I never feel I’m working in isolation. ... [M]y predecessors number in the thousands.”

A Graphic Plan to Beat Late Capitalism

O VER THE PAST two decades, Alison Bechdel has become something of a cultural phe nomenon, not just because of the spectacular success of her 2006 graphic memoir FunHome , which was adapted into a blockbuster Broadway musical, but also due to the media litmus test she created to

tive media conglomerate in the vein of Ru pert Murdoch’s media empire called Mega lopub, which causes her significant moral angst. In her personal life, she co-owns and co-runs a pygmy goat sanctuary with her wife Holly in Vermont. Her friends, based on characters from Dykes to Watch Out For , her weekly

B RIAN A LESSANDRO

SPENT: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel Mariner Books. 272 pages, $32.

assess how well women are represented in film and fiction. The bar to pass is quite low, yet when she created it in the mid-1980s, many commercial creative endeavors failed miserably. Passing The Bechdel Test requires a work to contain two female charac ters who discuss anything other than a man. Needless to say, her new graphic novel, Spent , passes with flying colors.

comic strip that ran from 1983 to 2008, envy her success, and everyone, even Bechdel, frets about their finances and the hor ror-show that is American politics (the book takes place in 2022, eerily forecasting the return of Trump). Troubled by the rise of fascism and the decline of both civilization and the en vironment, she imagines writing a book about late-stage cap

In Spent , her fifth semi-autobiograph ical graphic novel, Bechdel has a success ful TV series based on her previous graphic novel Death and Taxidermy , which is streaming on Schmamazon (after Amazon, of course). The latter takes wild, absurd liberties with her life story, incor porating cannibalism, dragons, and ham burger-eating (Bechdel is a vegetarian). She’s also working on a new graphic novel with an attractive offer from a conserva Brian Alessandro co-edited Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs (Rebel Satori Press). 38

italism, using her own privilege as an example. But soon she starts to see her self as a sellout. She berates herself for ordering almost everything on Amazon and gently pokes fun at her eccentric, hip pie circle. It’s as if she sought to both revel in and subvert every cliché and stereotype the Right has of the Left as being hypersensitive, delusional tree-hug gers. The book is a potent response to the disparagement of “leftist elitists,” and by that Bechdel means teachers, journalists, activists, librarians, community organiz ers, and nonprofit workers. “I feel like as I age, I’m somehow getting both more

Alison Bechdel. Cover photo for Spent .

TheG & LR