Our opening segment is from “Drawing on the Archive: Tillie Walden’s Charity & Sylvia,”a short video featuring cartoonist Tillie Walden explaining the experience of creating a graphic novel from the Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant archive at the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History in Middlebury, VT.
This week’s theme song is “Steal My Heart Away, written by Van Morrison, sung by Morrison and Willie Nelson, and licensed from LickD.
These silhouettes are the only existing images of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake; the border is created from the two women’s hair, braided into one thread. Image courtesy of the Henry Sheldon Museum/Wikimedia Commons
At the beginning of July, I stumbled across an open letter that Rachel Hope Cleves, a professor of history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, had posted to Facebook. Cleves is the author of four books, three of which fall in what some call the history of sexuality, but many of us call queer history because such work is not strictly about sex, or how people understood sex itself, but about how intimate relations are refracted in, and shape, the larger realms of culture and politics.
In this letter, Cleves recounted what she believes are the troubling similarities between her path-breaking book, Charity and Sylvia:A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2014) and a new graphic history by cartoonist Tillie Walden. It’s also called Charity and Sylvia (Drawn and Quarterly, 2026) but without the subtitle. Both books tell the story of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, a Vermont couple who lived openly, and were acknowledged in their community, as married at a time when that was not legally possible. Cleves, along with other scholars like Jen Manion and Elizabeth Reis, refute the notion that categories like gay, lesbian and trans are modern inventions; or that early Anglo-American society was uniformly repressive, either of non-heteronormative identities or queer people fashioning new identities that allowed them to be respectable.
Histories like these have long been a source of pride and comfort to LGBTQ+ people: after all, being grounded in a proud past was a companion task to the forms of civil rights activism that liberated queers, women and people of color. It’s no wonder that, at a time when these hard-won rights are under threat, Walden would create an accessible version of Charity and Sylvia’s story. So, she dug back into archives and artifacts that Cleves had studied a decade earlier, and wrote her own version.
But Cleves believes that the similarities between the two books—the use of silhouettes in Walden’s cover, the title itself, the structure of the book—too closely resemble her own work. While I cannot link to Cleves’s social media post, here is the text of the letter, in which she contests Walden’s work as an act of uncovering.
She protests insufficient acknowledgment of her own extensive research, work that went well beyond the original archive that Walden did not duplicate but seems to rely on. Finally, Cleves expresses her distress that Walden’s book seems designed to divert readers from her own work and direct any future telling of the story in other media to the graphic novel.
The ensuing controversy, largely fought out on social media, demonstrated a revealing split between professional historians and general audience readers. Numerous scholars chimed in to say that similar things had happened to them, and to their friends, and expressed solidarity with Cleves.
Walden, however, has defended her own research, pointed to differences in the substance and purpose of two texts and to a website where she listed her sources and bibliography. Walden’s press, and her supporters saw the controversy as a David and Goliath struggle, in which an economically secure and prestigious historian was trying to “own” the story at the cost of an independent artist’s reputation. They have also argued that Cleves has misrepresented Walden’s claims about the originality of the story itself, minimized the work Walden had to do to produce the book. They maintain that, by virtue of it being a graphic account with conversations and other elements that Walden acknowledges she invented, the two are necessarily quite different books.
Some of Cleves’s antagonists have inferred that historians concerned about Walden’s possible infringement on the original book have disparaged the art that graphic writers produce. I cannot speak for the rest of the guild, but I could not disagree more. I myself learned some of my first history from non-scholarly texts that included comic books from the 1930s and 1940s. Graphic histories are not only a great way to get young people interested in stories about our past, but I have used them in college classes to convey the larger narratives that the subject I am teaching relies on.
There are no easy answers here, and I don’t intend to propose them. As the high-profile plagiarism cases of the past few years have demonstrated, historians aren’t perfect either, and work written for a general audience does not always reflect the respect for intellectual property that scholars expect. As one person who commented on this quarrel pointed out, this controversy might never have arisen had Walden simply chosen a different title. But, as Cleves herself states in the interview, an author cannot copyright a title; and it is not uncommon in publishing to make those choices so that a new book will appear in an internet search alongside another, well-established one.
So, I wanted to see what Rachel had to say.
An acrostic poem written by Charity Bryant to Sylvia Drake, expressing her love. Image courtesy of the Henry Sheldon Museum/Wikimedia Commons
Show notes:
* At The Daily Cartoonist, D.D. Degg writes that the controversy relies on the misapprehension of graphic books as a narrative form (June 30, 2026)
* Christian Holub covered the controversy for Publisher’s Weekly (July 2, 2026).
* Samantha Puc of Comics Culture interviewed all parties, including the Henry Sheldon Museum, where Drake and Bryant’s papers are held (July 3, 2026)
* Cecilia Luce, of Seven Days, an independent Vermont newspaper, quotes Vermont cartoonist Alison Bechdel as saying that Cleves is correct to be concerned that her book will be superseded, which is “as much a commentary on our postliterate era as anything else.” (July 20, 2026)
* For a meticulous (and, I think, largely fair) comparison between the two books, listeners may want to read an anonymous post in the literary newsletter, Witchcraft for Cyborgs, “Charity and Sylvia: the extraordinary claims of Rachel Hope Cleves.” (August 13, 2026)
What I’m reading:
Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear(Knopf, 2026), a novel about a tradwife influencer who wakes up one morning to find herself in the mid-19th century world that she sells as a fantasy. With Labor Day a scant 6 days off, I think it is fair to say that Yesteryear is the book of the summer. Confusingly, or perhaps fittingly, Burke is herself an influencer.
A podcaster and TikToker, Burke has both profited from new media and produced a wry commentary on the individuation through mass consumption that new media promotes. As an added bonus, the heroine, Natalie Heller Mills, is possibly one of the most unlikeable protagonists on modern literature. A hundred pages in, she seems unredeemable. And yet: I cannot put Yesteryear down. So go figure.
Short takes:
* How to win the internet: “MapQuest has seen a surge in app downloads after the company said it will not rename Lake Ontario to Lake America, following an executive order President Donald Trump issued last week amid an ongoing trade war with Canada,” Aiofe Walsh reports at The Washington Post. “As of Tuesday, it was the top free app in both Apple’s U.S. and Canadian App Stores—its highest ranking in its 30-year history.” The company says it prefers names that are familiar and historic, but MAGAs can use a tool provided by the company to change it on their own devices. (September 1, 2026)
* What grift will former Congressman George Santos pursue next? Now banned for life by prediction market Kalshi “for engaging in insider trading related to his attendance at President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address,” Erum Salam reports at MS Now. Santos also agreed last month “to pay more than $35,000 after the federal regulator concluded he improperly profited from trades tied to his possible attendance at the State of the Union.” Having agreed to go, “Santos placed a bet on Kalshi that he would not attend the event. Hours before Trump was set to deliver his speech, Santos announced his absence.” George, just get a job! (August 31, 2026)
* Why has a very successful youth movement focused on climate change has pivoted almost completely to climate activism? “Wokeness is not concern about a particular issue or issues, or even an ideology,” Jonathan Chait writes at The Atlantic. “It is, instead, a political style, a form of apocalyptic obsession that is serially fixated on different issues, waxing and waning in intensity. It offers the comfort of Manichaean morality—telling adherents that they alone can see the world in its true horror. But what it doesn’t offer, by design, is any practical resolution.” (August 31, 2026)
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