Embedded Files
Section 1: Historical Background
About this section...
About this section...
When does queer history begin? Queerness has existed for as long as humans have. Yet most timelines that dictate the history of the LGBTQIA community begin in the 1940s. In fact, ‘queer history’ as a category remains to be a field in which limited research exists.
Alison Bechdel’s stories serve as a living history, a testimony to queer generations of the 20th century. Their history is part of a much longer one, that is just beginning to be researched and rediscovered by historians today. A much longer and more in-depth timeline of queer history will be included in the ‘additional resource’ section on this website.
Passing as Straight and Why?
Passing as Straight and Why?
"As a teenager, I had developed my understanding of the way queer women presented themselves to the world through a mixture of bad television, musicals and Mardi Gras parades. I noticed that many queer women had tattoos and short hair. Part of me wanted to look like them, but I was also scared of being identified as queer. I could pass as straight, and I enjoyed that safety for another decade." Essay by Roz Bellamy
Generational Gay Activism in the United States
Generational Gay Activism in the United States
"I've been all about being out and open about being a lesbian since I came out in 1980, and it has been my career — I wrote this lesbian comic strip for many, many years. That was my job, a little bit to my family's horror at first, but they all got used to it eventually." Alison Bechdel NPR Interview
Despite a homophobic movement in the United States, gay communities continue to develop their identities and advocate for queer rights.
The Lavender Scare & Homophobia in post-war America
The Lavender Scare & Homophobia in post-war America
"Beginning in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, thousands of gay employees were fired or forced to resign from the federal workforce because of their sexuality. Dubbed the Lavender Scare, this wave of repression was also bound up with anti-Communism and fueled by the power of congressional investigation." The National Archives
"The Lavender Scare" initiated a series of homophobic laws that forced queer Americans to stifle their sexuality.
- 1947 the U.S. Park Police initiated in the city a "Sex Perversion Elimination Program," targeting gay men for arrest and intimidation.
- 1948 Congress passed an act "for the treatment of sexual psychopaths" in the nation's capital. That law facilitated the arrest and punishment of people who acted on same-sex desire and also labeled them mentally ill.
- In 1950 President McCarthy associated communism to the spread of homosexuality. He began an investigation to find, fire and then ostracize gay employees of the federal government.
- 1957 American Civil Liberties Union approves a policy statement saying laws against sodomy and federal restrictions on employment of lesbians and gay men are constitutional.
Queer Visibility & additional historical resources
Queer Visibility & additional historical resources
A Glimpse into 1970s Gay Activism
Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture
Alison. "Two weeks ago I was downtown and I wandered into the bookstore, I was just browsing around and I picked up this book."
Joan. "Ah, The Word is Out."
Alison. "And I was like. Oh, interviews. This looks interesting. And then I was like-all of these people are all uh..."
Joan. "Gay?"
Alison. "Gay. Yes. And then I was like, 'oh my god! I'm a lesb-'"
Joan. "A Dyke?" (Fun Home the Musical 35).
One of the first films made by gay people about gay people, Word is Out documented 26 very different lives — from the early activist Harry Hay to a young black Princeton undergraduate to a white corporate executive and a working-class Latina couple — talking about their experiences. And the key word was "their."'Word Is Out': A Love That Dared Speak After All
The interviews from the film were transcribed into a book of the same title, which was published in October 1978. “The book reached many people who were unable to view the film, and remained a popular gay nonfiction text for many years, helping many gays and lesbians realize that they were not alone.” Word is Out
Section 2: Memory
Alison. "Caption: My dad and I were exactly alike!"
Small Alison. "I see everything!"
Alison. "Caption: My dad and I were nothing alike (Fun Home the Musical, 12)."
Words on Memoir
Words on Memoir
"Did you ever imagine i'd hang on to your stuff, Dad? Me neither. But I guess I always knew that someday I was going to draw you. In cartoons. Yes, Dad, I know you think cartoons are silly, but I draw cartoons. And I need real things to draw from because I don't trust memory." (Fun Home the Musical 11).
This performance is a musical adaptation of a graphic memoir. Bruce, Helen, Alison, Jon, and Christen are all real people who lived and existed within one home. These memories have aligned to present a queer history and culture within different generations. But these memories also indicate how internal struggles can impact the entire household. There is also the notion that this memoir is a sort of confessional, a process, that Bechdel used to process her childhood and perhaps even her grief. This section will contain essays and videos about the Bechdel family home, but also about memory and musicals about memories.
'A Family Tragicomic'
'A Family Tragicomic'
"Fun Home isn't about Bechdel's slow discovery of her Father's hidden life; it's about her investigation of her own memories of that discovery." In the essay Reframing Memory
The Bechdel Family Home Today
Note* The relevant sections of this video are 7:24-16:09
“A number of people have pointed out to me that the compulsive attention I paid the house while I was doing the book was exactly what my dad had done,” Ms. Bechdel said. “It seems sort of obvious now, but it really never occurred to me at the time.” Alison Bechdel Interview with the New York Times
“It really set in my mind that this is the story of actual humans that we are telling,” said Glasgow. “It’s certainly fictionalized, but there are real human lives behind this in a way that increases the importance to me.” David Glasgow Interview with the Burg
Section 3: Rebirth-"Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief."
Life and Death in Fun Home
Life and Death in Fun Home
““Caption: My dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town. And he was gay, and I was gay. And he…killed himself. And I…became a lesbian cartoonist.” This opening line centers the musical around death. The physical locations of the musical; the family home, the funeral home, the road in which Bruce dies, are all centers of death in both literal and metaphorical ways. Just as death features widely within the play, so do themes of rebirth. The timeline of Bechdel’s life includes her sexual and intellectual awakening. Her father’s death signifies the time in which her identity had just been solidified. The last element of the musical, the narrator, the adult Alison creating this graphic memoir and processing her memories, is experiencing both death and rebirth at the same time. The dimensions of Fun Home’s narrative is circular and emphasizes the idea that where there is death there is also life.
The Character Pete
Bruce. Why don't we take these brochures into the office where you can think it over.
Pete. So you say we won't see any of their bruises? With the I.V's she was awful beat up by the end. (Fun Home the Musical, 19).
‘Did your parents bring you into the funeral business when you were young?’
"We spent a lot of time sweeping floors and so on at the Fun Home, as we called it. I didn't actually go into the embalming room. One of my brothers did and went on to work in it. I was spared that part. For us growing up, it was just the atmosphere we lived in. It didn't seem that strange. My friends would be freaked out when they found that we lived near this funeral home. But for us it was just normal. So it brought an interesting dimension to my experience of death when my father actually died to have had all this weird history with the trappings of death. You would think you might be more prepared for real death, but in a way it was almost more surreal." Interview with Alison Bechdel
"You wrote that in writing Fun Home you wanted to give your father “a proper funeral.” In the musical Fun Home, you’re watching your father dying again and again, every time it runs. What was that like for you to watch?"
"So far, my viewings of the play have been fraught. I’m there with my brothers. I’m there with my father’s sister. I have all these different friends, from different parts of my life. I know the people involved in the production are anxious to know my response. So, it’s hard for me to have my own direct response." How It Feels to Watch Your Life Story Onstage with Alison Bechdel
The Contemporary Importance of Fun Home
In 2015, Fun Home won 5 Tony awards including best musical.
Lisa Kron's acceptance speech in 2015
Broadway and Lesbian Representation
Broadway and Lesbian Representation
"When Fun Home was about to open at the Public Theater in 2013 June Thomas at Slate asked: "Is America ready for a musical about a middle-aged, butch lesbian?" Back then, the show had not received its Broadway run, and playwright Lisa Kron wondered to Thomas: "Are people willing to go there with people who are always on the outskirts, particularly of this form?" Broadway Is More Welcoming to Gay Men Than Lesbians. Will 'Fun Home' Change That?
"Both Alison and I have spent our entire careers forging a work in which it is assumed that a protagonist and a point of view of a piece can be from the point of view of a lesbian," said Kron. The show is "a very self-assured train that's moving at full speed. It's presumed that the audience will have no trouble getting on that ride and seeing the world from that perspective." Broadway Is More Welcoming to Gay Men Than Lesbians. Will 'Fun Home' Change That?
Fun Home As Queer History
Fun Home As Queer History
"In March of 2009, it was found that in the last ten years not a single book in the field of queer history had been reviewed by the Reviews in American History." What's Queer Got to Do With It?
"Fun Home confirms my commitment to queer perspectives on trauma that challenge the relation between the catastrophic and the everyday and that make public space for lives whose very ordinariness makes them historically meaningful. And although Fun Home's critical and popular success obviously provides many entry points for readers, Bechdel's narrative of family life with a father who is attracted to adolescent boys has particular meaning for me because it provides a welcome alternative to public discourses about LGBTQ politics that are increasingly homonormative and dedicated to family values." Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Additional Resources
Additional Resources
Alison Bechdel’s Mission to Make Lesbian Culture Visible Through Comics
Making a Fun Home: The Performance of Queer Families in Contemporary Musical Theater
Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home"
Opening Night of FUN HOME on Broadway
Memoir to Musical: Five-Year Journey
Broadway Backstory Episode Three
Helen "I loved seeing her in character as that August Matron. In a fitting coincidence, Lady Bracknell's first name, Augusta, was my mother's middle name." (Fun Home, 165)
Who Is Helen?
Who Is Helen?
Helen Bechdel-1933-2013.
"Helen met her future husband, Bruce A. Bechdel when they were both performing in a college production of The Taming of the Shrew. Upon graduation, Helen moved to New York City for two years, working as a secretary and studying acting with Uta Hagen at the esteemed HB Studio. In the city, Helen also attended as many plays, operas, poetry readings, concerts, and jazz performances as was humanly possible.
In 1959, Helen and Bruce were wed in Luzerne, Switzerland. Bruce was stationed in Germany with the US Army, and the couple remained in Europe for almost a year before returning to make their home in Beech Creek, PA."
"My parents met, I eventually extracted from my mother, in a performance of The Taming of the Shrew… It’s a troubling play, of course. The willful Katherine’s spirit is broken by the mercenary, domineering Petruchio… Even in those prefeminist days, my parents must have found this relationship model to be problematic. They would probably have been appalled at the suggestion that their own marriage would play out in a similar way." Expert from Fun Home
Queer History of Chopin
Queer History of Chopin
Helen begins practicing an etude.
Small Alison. "Did Chop-in write Chop Sticks?"
Helen. "It's Sho-PHAN. Alison stop bothering me
Francois Chopin was a polish composer in the 19th century. His most meaningful female relationship was with a women called, George Sand.
"Sand's dress also drew attention: this was not altogether her intention. She cross-dressed, sometimes for practical reasons, sometimes for fun, and sometimes to see the world, and be treated, differently. She also had a penchant for exotic costumes. Smoking was a pleasure that she indulged in public at a time when for women the practice was wholly unacceptable. She smoked cigars, for which she is famous, but also cigarettes, which she rolled with deft expertise, and she delighted in her beloved hookah. She became thoroughly tobacco-dependent: numerous letters testify to her fear of running out of stock." Read More about George Sand Here
Helen in Are You My Mother
Helen in Are You My Mother
Helen appears in the musical Fun Home, but her daughter Alison wrote another graphic memoir called, Are You My Mother?
Alison Bechdel Reading Are You My Mother
Helen in the Musical
Helen in the Musical
"Ms. Tesori and Ms. Kron said they wrote “Days and Days” in less than 24 hours, hurrying to meet a deadline before an early workshop several years ago. While it felt rushed at the time, they said, it is among the few songs in the long-gestating score that have since remained unchanged. Ms. Kron attributed the song’s special strength not only to its function in the story but also to its break from tradition."
“For us, it was very important that this wife not remain invisible,” Ms. Kron said. In addition to writing for the character and the situation, she said: “We were also addressing this character as she has largely been portrayed in the theater — the long-suffering wife, in the background, some kind of satellite. It’s just absurd how little we have expected from our female characters onstage.” Days and Days New York Times Article
"I had some practice in telling my mother difficult things. I felt kind of like I did 20 years earlier, when I was preparing to tell her I was a Lesbian. And kind of like I did 5 years before that, as I was working up the courage to tell her I had gotten my first period. That had taken me six months. This story, a memoir about my mother, could just as well begin with either of those scenes. But as I consider moving the beginning further back in time, before the coming out, before the first period; I see perhaps the real problem with this memoir about my mother is that it has no beginning.'"Short reading on Bechdel's Are You My Mother
Bruce "Old Father, Old Artificer(Bechdel 14)."
Who is Bruce?
Who is Bruce?
"Over the course of this development, Alison eventually arrives at a queer erotics of reading that encourages a free play between the personal, the fictional, and the semiotic. In order to do so, she must ultimately reject her father's mode of interpretation, which fixates on reader identification and authorial persona. This allows her to disengage from hierarchical modes of reading and ideas of literary authority, a decision which has importance far beyond Bechdel's individual story." Queer Reading Strategies and Identification in Fun Home
Bruce in the Musical adaption
Bruce in the Musical adaption
"A major conundrum was how to portray Alison’s father, Bruce, who was close to his daughter but could also be cold and remote. “He’s so volatile and can easily fall into a scary place where you don’t like him,” said Philip Himberg, the artistic director of the Sundance theater program. “They had to find the vulnerability of that man inside the anger and volatility.”
(In one of many enthusiastic reviews the show received, Ben Brantley of The New York Times praised Ms. Tesori’s musical handling of “the divided self of Bruce, with melodies that change moods — from crisp, fatherly propriety to growling, guttural lust — subtly and disturbingly.)" Memoir to Musical: Five-Year Journey
The song, 'It comes back' was written to introduce Bruce to the audience by showing them what he loves.
Linen, this is linen, gorgeous Irish linen.
"If we bring him on stage quickly, and have him get mad at his kid which is what we (Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori) we'll (the audience) turn on him." Behind the Music of Fun Home
'For if my father was icarus, he was also daedalus skillful artificer, that mad scientist who built the wings for his son and designed the famous labyrinth and who answered not to the laws of society, but to those of his craft.' Fun Home, 7.
"The title of “Fun Home” officially refers to the family’s nickname for this venerable establishment, founded by Bruce’s great-grandfather. But, from the book’s opening panels, the old clapboard house on Main Street—where Bruce embalmed bodies, Alison vacuumed the viewing parlor, and she and her two younger brothers, John and Christian, played “corpses”—tends to merge, in a reader’s mind, with the Bechdel homestead, a short walk away. Fun Home II was a derelict Gothic Revival mansion, and Bruce took a “manic, libidinal,” but also funerary approach to its décor. He ripped its rotting guts out, then filled the void with simulacra of Victorian grandeur. The effect was less of a living space, perhaps, than an undead one. “Early on,” Bechdel writes in “Fun Home,” “I began confusing us with the Addams Family.” Drawn from my life
Little Alison 'I was spartan to my father's athenian. Modern to his victorian, butch to his nelly, utilitarian to his aesthete' (15).
Writing 'Ring of Keys'
Writing 'Ring of Keys'
"From the get-go, we had conversations about butch representation, and how impossible that has been historically. When you would see lesbians in a play or a movie they would be played by a straight actress who didn’t get it, who couldn’t quite go there. So we knew that was going to be an issue. And I knew that Lisa would be the person to make that happen, if anyone could.
She did a great job with the lyrics to “Ring of Keys,” and the excitement of small Alison, dramatizing that moment in the diner when she sees a butch lesbian for the first time.
That was a risk too. Having this child singing about desire in that interesting way also feels revolutionary. "How It Feels to Watch Your Life Story Onstage
"But then finding the language was very tricky. I was sort of looking through the eyes of this little girl and thinking, 'What is she seeing?' And then there were all kinds of descriptive words. So, lace-up boots, there were all kinds of other descriptors for the boots that I knew would tap people into pre-existing stereotypes of that woman as a joke. So to find language that was authentically what this little girl might say, and then also that sounded new that didn't tap into those other things. That was the trick of it. Jeanine really latched onto the ring of keys. She has a daughter, and she thought, 'That's where a little girl's eyes would go... to the keys.''" Why "Ring of Keys" Was the One Song Fun Home's Creator Didn't Want to Write
Fun Home "occupies the place where we all grew up, and will never be able to leave. That’s the shifting landscape where our parents, whether living or dead, will always reign as the most familiar and elusive people we will ever encounter." Fun Home Musical Review
Alison starts and ends the show with a reference to the Red Baron and Superman:
Little Alison. "I wanna put my arms out and fly. Like the Red Baron in his Sopwith Camel! No wait-like superman." (Fun Home the Musical 9).
The closing lines are similar but slightly different as all three Alison's sing the lines:
Alison. "I wanna put my arms out and fly"
Medium Alison. "Like the Red Baron in his Sopwith Camel!'No wait-like superman." (Fun Home the Musical, 75).
Who is the Redbaron?
The Redbaron or Manfred von Richthofen was a fighter pilot with the German Air Force during World War I and one of the most famous aviators in history.
"During a 19-month period between 1916 and 1918, the Prussian aristocrat shot down 80 Allied aircraft and won widespread fame for his scarlet-colored airplanes and ruthlessly effective flying style. Richthofen’s legend only grew after he took command of a German fighter wing known as the Flying Circus, but his career in the cockpit was cut short in April 1918, when he was killed in a dogfight over France." Red Baron History
The RedBaron in Comic Books
"Richthofen was mentioned regularly in the comic strip Peanuts, by Charles Schulz, and was included in subsequent television specials as a running gag. Charlie Brown's beagle Snoopy frequently fantasized about being a World War I flying ace. In his daydreams, he imagined his dog house to be a Sopwith Camel ( a British World War I Fighter plane) and carried a personal grudge against the Red Baron, whom he imagined to be his arch enemy." Snoopy and the Red Baron
The Red Baron vs. Superman
Before the 1978 Superman film, the character was associated with DC comics. Alison's interests indicate that she had been reading comics as a child.The themes in these comic books were themes of masculinity that came from her father's generation.
The 70s Were Awkward for Superman
Medium Alison and Joan
"Joan was a poet and a 'matriarchist.' I spent very little of the remaining semester outside her bed" (Bechdel 80).
The timing of Joan's appearance and Alison's family tragedy
The timing of Joan's appearance and Alison's family tragedy
"Benson and Bechdel lived together in the summer of 1980 and broke up that fall. During their relationship, Bechdel dealt with coming out and mourned her father's suicide.
Before Bechdel published "Fun Home" in 2006, she sent Benson a galley and they talked about the memoir's representation of their relationship, Benson said.
Some moments in the book weren't as Benson remembered and her self-assured sexpot persona in the musical was certainly not how she thought of herself in hindsight. Eventually, Benson said she realized that these memories weren't hers, they were someone else's memories of her and, in that way, they were very realistic.
"Does it feel as I remember it? No," Benson said. "But does it feel true to how I came across? Absolutely."
And, Benson added, as a writer herself (she's a poet and is working on a novel), she understands perspective. "Fun Home" is decidedly Bechdel's perspective.
"I suppose it would be possible for somebody to feel as though their life had been taken over by someone telling this story," Benson said, "but that isn't at all how I respond to it. I think the writer's point of view comes first always." What happens when your college sex life is on Broadway
“Believe in Yourself, Straight Up.” An Interview With Roberta Colindrez
“Believe in Yourself, Straight Up.” An Interview With Roberta Colindrez
"When I saw the show, I didn’t know that I was going to realize certain things about my family and myself and shame—because I haven’t thought about the shame of being gay in so long. In Fun Home I had the fun role. I got to be the person who’s like, “Wait, you’re gay? This is the coolest thing ever, and you don’t even know it yet.” I got to be the one who says, “You could be happy doing this. I am.” [But as a viewer] I was ugly-crying and holding on to the armrest".Full Interview
Additional Resources
Who’s Next: Roberta Colindrez, Actress
Oberlin College
Oberlin College
Alison: "I'm going to spend four years reading books and drawing. And that's fine. I don't know where I got this insane idea I need to throw myself out into the world."
Little Alison: "And It's not the world anyway it's Oberlin College." (Fun Home the Musical 19).
In 1970 Oberlin became one of the first colleges in the United States to create co-ed dormitories.
"In the early 1970s, lesbian and gay students at Oberlin held campus dances, published articles and magazines about gay and lesbian issues, held “consciousness-raising” groups, spoke out about sexism and anti-gay attitudes on campus, and formed important political organizations that endure today. Oberlin Gay Liberation, founded in 1971 as Oberlin’s first gay student organization, endures through multiple name changes as the Oberlin Lambda Union. The Women’s Collective, co-founded by a lesbian couple in 1972, endures as the Baldwin Cottage Women’s Collective." Oberlin College LGBT Community History Project
Butch identity and representation in Fun Home
Butch identity and representation in Fun Home
"When Sydney steps out and sings "Ring of Keys" or when I say the word "butch," I say it with the color of, like I'm saying the word supermodel. Because from my lens, the word butch is the most beautiful adjective I can come up with. "Oh my God, she was an old-school butch!" Like satisfying words coming out of your mouth. Still, it gets titters because the word "butch" is a punch line. For every other show that has ever existed, "butch" and "dyke" have been a punch line for the end of a gay man's joke. So now we are taking that word, like the word queer, we're owning it and saying, butch is a beautiful thing. When Sydney starts to sing about seeing this, there's a laugh about the ring of keys, but the worm has turned by the end of that song and people are wrecked because they realize that she's seeing something beautiful. To watch the audience make that transition within 18 bars of music is profound. It really is something, and it never ceases to move me while I'm onstage. I get to watch it every night. " Fun Home Tony Award nominee Beth Malone opens up about portraying Broadway's first openly butch lesbian protagonist
“I was Spartan to my father’s Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete… Not only were we inverts, we were inversions of each other. 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 cross-purposes, and so doomed to perpetual escalation.” Fun Home
Writing 'Changing my Major'
Writing 'Changing my Major'
"The musical is also about how terrifying childhood can be, and why sex is so important to self-discovery. After a college-age Bechdel has sex with her girlfriend for the first time, she sings “Changing My Major to Joan,” which has the funny, joyful lines: “I’m changing my major to Joan / With a minor in kissing Joan / Foreign study to Joan’s inner thighs, a seminar on Joan’s ass in her Levi’s.”
"While it’s not done for easy titillation, Kron, who co-founded the Five Lesbian Brothers theater company, feels moments like that vital to show female intimacy. “It’s easier for people to think lesbians are not sexual,” she says. “There was a point where it was Jeanine who was saying, ‘They have to kiss!’ It tracks her stepping into her true self, and her father not. Her father is having sex, but that moment of her having sex, it’s a moment that she’s able to own and he’s not. It’s not about her falling in love, it’s about her having sex.” After the musical Fun Home, Broadway may never be the same
Adult Alison
"Did you ever imagine I'd hang onto your stuff, dad? Me neither. But I guess I knew that someday I was going to draw you" (Fun Home the Musical, 11).
Who is Adult Alison
Who is Adult Alison
"I employ these allusions,” she writes, “not only as descriptive devices, but because my parents are most real to me in fictional terms. And perhaps,” she reflects, “my cool aesthetic distance itself does more to convey the arctic climate of our family than any particular literary comparison.” How Alison Bechdel Understands Her Life as Fiction
A conversation with three Alison's
Accomplishments outside of Fun Home
1.) 'The Bechdel test' was created by Alison Bechdel.
2.) She first gained recognition with her comic strip, Dykes to Watch out for.
3.) In 2014 she was the recipient of the MacArthur Genius award.
4.) She released another memoir about her Mother entitled, 'Are You My Mother.'
"Make this part look rugged...
mm mm
Allegheny Plateau
This dark shaded strip bum bum bum is the front
Paint the long ridges and valleys below
Mm mm
Our town is this...dot (Fun Home the Musical, 44)."
"Not knowing everything is sometimes a good thing in a memoir: a mystery or quest is better than laying out all the facts.” Does she still feel that writing it helped her psychologically? “Yes, I do, though when young people ask me if it was cathartic, and I say ‘yes’, they don’t really know what I mean. They just want to go home and write their diaries and feel better themselves. I wrote diaries, too, for years. But I also did therapy for years. And I pushed myself to engage with my family in an honest way for years. And all that stuff was part of writing the book. I remember being so excited when I read about Virginia Woolf getting her mother out of her head by writing To the Lighthouse. I felt the same after Fun Home. I had been haunted by my father and I no longer was. I took him off my hard drive. He was using up all my RAM.” Fun Home creator Alison Bechdel on turning a tragic childhood into a hit musical"
Christian & John
"My brothers and I couldn't compete with the astral lamps and grandoles and hepplewhite suite chairs. They were perfect" (Bechdel, 14).
Era of American Bandstand
Era of American Bandstand
"The show that evolved into American Bandstand began on Philadephia’s WFIL-TV in 1952, a few years before the popular ascension of rock and roll. Hosted by local radio personality Bob Horn, the original Bandstand nevertheless established much of the basic format of its later incarnation." History of American Bandstand
American bandstand was apart of a larger phenomena of TV talk shows in the 1970s and 80s.
Growing up in a Funeral Home
Growing up in a Funeral Home
"Growing up in my father’s funeral home was like living in a world split between two halves. Because when the mourners were gone and the dead were buried there would be a brief pause in our house. Life throbbed with a different sort of hospitality." What it is like to grow up in a funeral home
Raincoat of Love and the Partridge Family Influence
Raincoat of Love and the Partridge Family Influence
"Small Alison's brothers hand her a tambourine. Then she turns and sees: Bobby Jeremy and his backup singers, the Susan Deys!" (Fun Home the Musical 49).
The Partridge Family is an American musical sitcom starring Shirley Jones and featuring David Cassidy. Jones plays a widowed mother, and Cassidy plays the oldest of her five children, who embark on a music career. It ran from September 25, 1970, until March 23, 1974, on the ABC network as part of a Friday-night lineup.
1970s as the decade of Television
1970s as the decade of Television
The 1970s saw the emergence of 'the family sitcom.' TV shows like, The Brady Brunch, The Partridge Family, the Beverly Hillbillies, The Jeffersons and One Day at Time. All of these shows were popular during Bechdel's childhood.
The Seventies: TIME's take on Television
Childhood Trauma & Additional Resources
Childhood Trauma & Additional Resources
Alison Bechdel's childhood trauma revisited with songs
Roy & Mark
"Alison, your father has had affairs with men" (Fun Home the Musical, 58).
Bruce. "Sherry. Want some?"
Roy. "Is it good?"
Bruce. "Yeah"
Roy. "Okay, sure." (Fun Home the Musical, 30).
Sherry is a literary device used in Truman Capote Novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms to convey homosexuality. This book was first published in 1948 and given the extent of Bruce's literary education and sexuality could have been a book that he read.
"The novel tells the story of thirteen-year-old Joel's journey from New Orleans to his long-lost father's home in the Deep South and the eccentric characters that will populate his life from then on. It's a coming of age story, a coming out story, and also just a super addictive read. The visions of decadent plantations, ex-slaves, and eccentric relatives create an unmatched ambience. You'll either be compelled to buy one-way ticket to tour the bayou… or compelled to run screaming in the other direction." Summary
Bruce as a sexual predator
Bruce as a sexual predator
Bruce. "Hey Mark. Is that you?"
Mark. "Oh. Hey, Mr.Bechdel.
Bruce. "You wanna lift?"
Mark. "I'm not goin' far."
Bruce. "I'm happy to give you a ride. Let me move these groceries. Get in." (Fun Home the Musical, 45).
The success of Fun Home rests, then, on a highly misleading tearjerker of a storyline meant to make us deplore the benightedness of an ignorant age, even as we congratulate ourselves on our more inclusive times. But in turning a frank memoir into a slick stage musical, the truth becomes expendable. “Tragically Conflicted Gay Man Commits Suicide” makes for a better dramatic hook than “Pedophile Accidentally Dies Crossing the Street.” Looking Backward
Bruce's behavior towards Mark results in a visit a psychiatrist at Danville State Hospital.
"Danville State Hospital for the mentally ill, located one mile southeast of Danville, Pennsylvania, opened in 1872 as the "State Hospital for the Insane at Danville". About
"In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed the diagnosis of “homosexuality” from the second edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual" (DSM).
"When Alison’s father, Bruce, went to court for “furnishing a malt beverage to a minor” (175), the charges were dropped to just having to attend counseling for six months. Alison states in her text “a whiff of the sexual aroma of the true offense could be detected in the sentence.” (180), in other words the magistrate could have charged him with sexual assault if they wanted to dig a little deeper into his relationship with said minor, but chose not to. There are probably many reasons as to why they didn’t dare charge him with anything exceeding a young boy’s sip of alcohol." Privilege in Fun Home
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