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).