Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Arguably the most important of Fun Home’s themes is the queer experience. Alison’s coming out serves as a narrative focal point second only to her father’s death. Likewise, her father’s tenacious secrecy around his own homosexuality was directly causal to Fun Home’s existence. “If my father had ‘come out’ in his youth, if he had not met and married my mother …where would that leave me?” (197). While their shared queer experiences allowed them a sliver of emotional intimacy when Alison is an adult, Bruce’s affinity for the feminine and Alison’s distain for it caused them to come to blows when she was a child. Bruce and Alison’s mutual queerness both bound them together and alienated them from each other.  

Bruce Bechdel lived at a time when homosexuality was classified as both a crime and a mental illness in the United States. He remained closeted for his entire life, and as a result, he grew up to be extremely stoic, secretive, and repressed. His struggles with emotional intimacy were so pronounced that he was unable to admit he was gay directly, even after Alison came out to him as gay herself. “Instead of confiding in me, he took the novel approach of assuming I already knew—although at the time he wrote the letter, I did not” (211). Alison came of age in the 1970s and ‘80s, a time of comparative “freedom(?)” (as her father put it in one of his letters) for queer people. She was able to live her “erotic truth” more openly and honestly than her father was. However, it is difficult to divine exactly how responsible Alison and Bruce’s respective eras are for their unique experiences with the closet. Bechdel muses on this: “Would I have had the guts to be one of those Eisenhower-era butches? Or would I have married and sought succor from my high school students?” (108).

As children, Alison and Bruce both expressed their burgeoning queerness through gender nonconformity. Alison’s affinity for masculine attire presented itself from an early age. It also caused her and her father to bicker, as he insisted upon dressing her in feminine clothes. “While I was trying to compensate for something unmanly in him… …he was attempting to express something feminine through me. It was a war of crossed purposes, and so doomed to perpetual escalation” (98). In an ironic twist, Bruce later admitted to Alison that he “really wanted to be a girl” (221) as a child and cross-dressed to express that feeling. Alison responded: “When I was little, I really wanted to be a girl. I’d dress up in girls’ clothes. I wanted to be a boy! I dressed in boys’ clothes! Remember?” (221). Despite this brief moment of recognition, Bruce remained silent and said no more on the matter. Their shared experiences were not enough to overcome his emotional repression.