Jun 8th, 2006
Alison Bechdel Offers Soul Candy for Queerspawn
Today is the official release date for Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.
Bechdel is coming out — again, and in a different way. Loyal readers of her long-running comic, “Dykes to Watch Out For” already know about her sexual orientation.
This time, the story is about her own life — or more specifically, coming of age with a gay father who lived in the closet.
She had me at “all rights reserved.”
I had been curious about this book since I first heard about it last fall. Once I picked up the book I couldn’t stop. I wondered: was it just me and my obsession in taking in queerspawn stories? I soon learned that no, it wasn’t “just me.”
Be warned: if you are having guests over and you plan to actually interact with them, do not leave this book out in plain sight. I made that mistake when I had friends over for dinner, and one of them casually picked up my advanced copy and disappeared for a couple hours. Oh sure, my friend’s body remained on my couch, but the rest of her had been transported somewhere else. Somewhere in the 1970s, soaking in all the beautifully painful and complex truth that Bechdel preserved for herself, and has now bravely chosen to share with us.
My hope for this book, is an increased awareness of Second Generation “kids” who are right in front of our noses — right there, out and proud as being LGBT themselves, but not out about their parentage. I continually run into very out LGBT people who tell me (quietly) they had a parent who was also LGBT, but they dismiss it with comments like “it’s complicated.” They don’t think it really “counted” because their queer parent was always closeted, or they didn’t find out until after the parent died, or the closeted parent is still alive but destructively unsupportive of their offspring who dare to live a life outside the closet.
Until this book was announced, who knew Alison Bechdel’s dad was gay? And if we didn’t know about Bechdel’s family, what other queerspawn are flying below radar?
I hope Fun Home gives more second gen’ers permission to be out, no matter how “complicated” their family history.