Historical Context

Fun Home the musical follows Alison Bechdel split across three times of her life as she recalls her relationship with her father and his subsequent suicide. Her youth in the late 1960s, her early adulthood in the early 1980s, and the 2000s when she is recalling her life and writing her memoir. Queer history, much like Bechdel’s past, was also turbulent. On June 28, 1969, in New York City in Greenwich Village, the NYPD raided the Stonewall Inn, a known LGBTQ+ establishment. At the time there were laws against people of the same sex dancing together or wearing clothing made for the opposite sex. This was used as justification to arrest patrons. A crowd began to form outside of Stonewall as the night went on. Those arrested and pulled out of the inn began to resist the police officers with the encouragement of the jeering crowd. Violence broke out and the crowd overwhelmed police, who were forced to call in reinforcements. The conflict lasted into the next day as more and more people joined the riots from around the Village as word spread. This would become known as the Stonewall Riot or Rebellion and is the foundation of modern Pride celebrations.

The 1970s and early 1980s were a different time following Stonewall, there was an explosion of queer life underground in major cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco. On progressive university campuses gay student unions were created and expanded, including Oberlin College’s Gay Liberation Front. But there was also pushback in the election of social conservative Ronald Reagan to the presidency, and on the horizon the first signs of a “rare cancer” among gay and bisexual men in New York and San Francisco. Bechdel only hints at the outside events that affect queer people in America but it can be seen in how she writes about New York as a child versus as an adult. There is a generational gap between the two and even between Bruce and Alison’s experiences. The distinction between Bruce’s discovery of his sexuality in a pre-liberation, closeted society, and Alison’s recognition and public celebration of her lesbianism highlights the widening generation gap between queer people. Alison can come out, find a queer community at her college, and bring a girlfriend home, each a considerably bold assertion of identity in comparison to her father’s shame-based controlled sexuality. According to Bechdel, Bruce’s response to Stonewall was “to burrow even deeper underground,” a “prisoner of his own generation.” At the core of both the graphic novel and the musical Fun Home is the desire to acknowledge and accept one’s truth, something vital to the queer experience.