ah fun home, one of the most recent "all gay men are pedophiles" and "kill yourself because you're gay" pieces of media to reach popularity in the modern age somehow
you realize that’s her life right like
alison bechdel didn’t kill off her dad for the angst
Me, while being eaten by a bear: I can’t believe they would fridge a neurodivergent WOC like this
JFC, anon.
All right.
Fun Home, as @jesterlesbian rightly points out, is a musical based on a graphic memoir based on Alison Bechdel’s own life, in which she attempts to come to terms with her father and his impact on her sense of self and her life. Bechdel, in addition to being the source of the Bechdel Test, has been a major influence on lesbian culture for American women of my generation. Before writing Fun Home, Bechdel created a comic strip called “Dykes to Watch Out For” which was one of the few places where we could see queer women depicted in popular culture. Bechdel later wrote a graphic memoir about her relationship with her mother, called Are You My Mother?, which is is much less widely read, possibly because all the protagonists are women, but more likely because its narrative is shaped by Bechdel’s experience of psychotherapy rather than by her engagement with literature (as is Fun Home).
I think it’s very unlikely that anyone will ever make a musical out of Are You My Mother?. Fun Home works as a musical in part because Bruce’s life story creates a strong narrative and emotional arc which produces a powerful catharsis. In a still largely patriarchal culture it also always helps, if you’re trying to reach a mainstream audience, to have at least one significant male character, which is one reason why lesbian literature generally does not reach as wide an audience as gay literature does.
So Fun Home, both the memoir and the musical, does draw on literary and narrative conventions, some of which overlap with literary tropes about homosexuality from the Bad Old Days. This is partly due to the fact pattern, as it were, and partly due to the fact that Bechdel is trying to make sense of this fact pattern using canonical literary texts, most of which were written by white men before 1950. In the graphic memoir, the irony of the fact that Bechdel was introduced to many of these texts by her father, whose attachment to them is sincere but who also has a history of using these male-authored texts to deceive, manipulate, and seduce those around him (including Bechdel’s mother Helen and his own high school students) is made apparent in numerous ways. So Fun Home the memoir is constantly commenting on its own narrative strategies, visually and verbally, including by demonstrating some of the consequences of fidelity to a largely white and male literary canon.
Anyway. I could go on about Fun Home for a while, but my point is: Fun Home is one of the only musicals in the American repertoire that represents queer women from a queer woman’s perspective. Because Alison is telling the story, Bruce’s arc is subordinated to her own, which ends with her finally being able to integrate her history with her father in a way that doesn’t annihilate her. Though it strives to achieve the kind of balance visualized in the final panel of the two of them playing airplane, ultimately Fun Home is less a story about Bruce’s death than it is about Alison’s survival. It is a personal memoir, and it is also an allegory for generational conflict within the LGBTQ community: Bruce’s legacy, with all its tragedy and its Problematicness with a capital P, is partly a function of Bruce’s own time and place. Oppression harms people, and not everyone responds to that harm by becoming a saint. Alison’s era has its own problems, but at least she goes to a college with an out and active queer community, something to which Bruce never had access.
Making sense of queer history often involves confronting aspects of queer culture over which one might rather draw a veil. Fun Home points out, through its extended incorporation of The Importance of Being Earnest, that Bruce is not behaving that much differently from widely revered queer martyr Oscar Wilde, who went to prison for paying teenagers for sex. Wilde was part of a generation of queer culture-makers who idealized youth and beauty, and his famous and impassioned speech on behalf of same-sex love at his second trial imagines it in terms of the Hellenistic model then in vogue in British university circles–in which relations between men are inseparable from patriarchal structures of mentorship and patronage, and therefore incorporate the kind of power differential that feminism has identified as productive of exploitation and inequality. Fun Home acknowledges and engages with that tension between gay male history and Alison’s feminist education.
The desire for queer role models, and queer texts, to be morally perfect is a product of the same homophobic condemnation that created the atmosphere of fear and blackmail in which both Oscar Wilde’s and Bruce Bechdel’s lives were lived. We don’t have to value everything our queer forepeople valued or accept everything they did in order to understand and draw sustenance from our queer history. But we impoverish our own sense of ourselves if we reject everything about that history that we find problematic, and tell queer people that they can’t tell their own stories unless they fit some pre-approved, presentist notion of what a queer narrative is supposed (read: allowed) to be.
