I wrestled with my feelings for Mari for years. We really loved each other as friends…but I wanted something more. But she keeps her feelings secret, unsure that Mari feels the same. But a kiss on the cheek from Mari awakens something else in Hazel: she realizes she’d love to grow up to marry Mari. The two girls become BFFs (the sixties version), sharing school events, sports, and after school meet-ups for hot chocolate. I stared at her in class and just daydreamed about us being friends and hanging out. Mari was tall, beautiful and she smelled like cocoa butter. Readers follow the relationship through Hazel’s eyes: It all starts when Hazel catches a glimpse of Mari at the Bingo game, and is smitten with a schoolgirl crush, which only deepens when she learns that Mari will also be in her class at school. The book begins with Hazel and Mari as old women, reflecting back on their lives and how they met. It’s all ample evidence of readers’ hunger to read her stories and to see themselves in comics like this – comics that feature realistic women of color from multiple generations, written and drawn by women of color. Bingo Love won a 2017 Queer Press Grant, and Franklin raised almost $60,000 via Kickstarter for to fund the project. She’s had pieces in both the Eisner Award-winning anthology Love is Love and the Ignatz-winning Elements Anthology. Over the years, Franklin’s comics have reached larger and larger audiences. Writer Tee Franklin is a queer, disabled black woman, and her voice is one of the many that mainstream comics have too long ignored. When I say this book is much needed, I mean both the story itself and the author’s voice.
With the graphic novel Bingo Love, writer Tee Franklin and artists Jenn St-Onge and Joy San bring us the much-needed, generation-spanning love story of Hazel Johnson and Mari McCray, two women of color who first meet as teens at their grandmothers’ church Bingo hall in 1963. ‘Bingo Love’ by Tee Franklin, Jenn St-Onge, and Joy San
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