Different Ways of Being Gay: History and Queer Identity in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Abstract

ISSN 1548-9949 © 2023 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System oward the end of Alison Bechdel’s acclaimed tragicomic memoir Fun Home (2006), she reflects on her father’s premature death and on the secret of his affairs with anonymous men and teenage boys. While his death is officially deemed an accident, Bechdel and her mother agree that it was likely a suicide; Fun Home traces Bechdel’s search to understand that act, which for her is inextricably linked to her father’s hidden queer identity. The cost of this secrecy and the reasons behind it are the central problems the narrative explores. Bechdel reasons that her father’s suicide made manifest a deep sense of tragedy and shame long internalized; as she puts it, “a lifetime spent hiding one’s erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death” (228). In a telling reversal typical of her narrative, however, she almost immediately walks back from the audacity of her claim: “‘erotic truth’ is a rather sweeping concept. I shouldn’t pretend to know what my father’s was” (230). Moreover, she confesses that her desire to know it is a deeply personal one; the impulse to name him is a reach for connection beyond the loss: “Perhaps my eagerness to claim him as ‘gay’ in the way I am ‘gay,’ as opposed to bisexual or some other category, is just a way of keeping him to myself.” While Bechdel is explicitly speaking to a daughter’s search to understand her father’s life and to connect beyond loss by virtue of a shared identity, she is also hinting at a tension that is integral to our cultural desire to know, and name, the “truth” about our sexual identities. What does it mean to want to claim a “truth” at the core of sexual identity, and to claim it also for others? M E G W E S L I N G