I was glad that the first reader brought up Bechdel’s ponderings about her own objectivity in characterizing her dad, and how much of his identity is just her wishful thinking. One of the reasons I think I like this novel so much is that it doesn’t fall into the trap that many books dealing with sexuality do; excessive labeling with no thought about the labels themselves. So often, a character will decide that he or she is “gay,” with no real explanation of what they are actually naming in themselves. I’m of the opinion that human sexuality is way too complex to be accurately described by the terms “gay,” “straight,” or “bisexual,” and so most authors who use these terms are inherently problematic to me.

And at first, I felt like Fun Home was veering in that same direction. Alison of the story, in fact, discovers the label before she even has the experiences normally associated with it: “a revelation not of the flesh, but of the mind” (pg 74). But there’s a difference here; Bechdel is not, as an author, saying that lesbians are actually a discrete  class of people, not suggesting that there was anything that truly seperated her from others, but simply portraying how she self-identified and how it helped her find belonging.

The reason I suspect that the Bechdel of today has a more complex view of sexuality is that she puts it in her book, but she lets this theory come from her fathers’ mouth, not hers. At one point, he asks, “Do you have to put a label on yourself?” (pg 211) Alison doesn’t seem to gain much from his words when he says them, but they’ve obviously stuck with Bechdel the author, shown in the later musing that the first reader noted: she recognizes that she may have been hasty “to claim him as ‘gay’ in the way I am ‘gay,’ as opposed to bisexual or some other category” (pg 230).

Although gay men and lesbians are largely portrayed in this book as true communities, seperate from the mainstream and with certain easy-to-identify characteristics, I appreciated that there are some glimpses of the idea that this is not the way things always are, or have to be. I also appreciated that Bechdel recognized those ideas were not hers at the time the story, and therefore attributes them appropriately to her father.