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

Lesbian Feminism and the Erotics of the Text

One of Fun Home’s major themes is the impossibility of expressing the truth. In both the book’s narrative and its use of the visual, Bechdel expresses serious doubts about the adequacy of representation, and this troubling of the distinction between fact and fiction has been a central critical concern among scholars. From the journal that young Alison keeps, which bears the traces of her obsessive questioning about the truthfulness of her own observations and experiences, to the labyrinthian home to which Bruce dedicates his life, that establishes her father’s commitment to using “his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not” (16), Fun Home explores the permeability of the boundary between truth and fiction. In this regard, Bechdel joins a larger historical project of feminist inquiry and its challenge to epistemological certainties. As Jane Tolmie argues, Fun Home participates in a radical tradition of Western postmodern feminist theory, exploring how “knowledge is in part a product of subjectivity,” and her “narrative makes no attempt to speak for others, to fill in the gaps, to produce a perfect history” (89). This critique is executed in the formal structures of the book as well, most tellingly in how Bechdel uses the relationship between the comic panels and the words to complicate, rather than explicate, meaning. There is a dynamic relationship between the words and the images in the text, and the reader quickly learns that the comics do not merely illustrate what is being narrated. The carefully drawn panels sometimes share new details that the words cannot fully contain and other times undermine the veracity of the words being spoken. As Renata Lucena Dalmaso argues, “The reliability of the autobiographical account is problematized through the discrepancy of the visual and the textual language,” reminding readers that “any written story, fictional or non-fictional, is always already under the constraints of a discourse that will never be purely ‘absolutely, objectively true’ in any account” (565). The visual, then, serves on a first order to establish levels of experience and perception that escape the written word, keeping readers alert to the work we are doing to fill in the gaps between word and image, thus making the meanings we derive partial and subjective in our own ways.

Bechdel’s stylistic decisions also undermine the fantasy of a singular and accessible truth. Even the documentary materials—the abundance of actual letters, journal pages, and photographs included in the book—are all hand drawn rather than mechanically copied, making them, too, testaments to the work of representation and underscoring Bechdel’s mediation in their inclusion. Ann Cvetkovich has emphasized how Bechdel’s own hand, as artist, enters the frame to remind the reader that the representations—even those that are drawn from existing photographs, letters, and journals—are highly mediated by her authorial position (119). In reproducing the photographs by hand, Bechdel undermines the central promise of photography to reveal an unvarnished glimpse of the past: her visible artistic labor underscores the photographs’ constructed and alterable nature. Furthermore, these artifacts from Bechdel’s life are not given priority in terms of veracity; quite the contrary, the comics often reveal striking details not captured in the archival record, thus becoming the corrective to what is left out of the photographic record or the sanctioned archival truth; As Rebecca Scherr puts it, “what is true is usually what photographs attempt to conceal” (44).

Like Alison’s journals, which seem to trouble the idea of truth rather than to document it, the photographs often illustrate the façade Bruce was trying to cultivate, rather than reveal a truth about the past. In this way, we might consider how Bechdel’s authorly retrospective of young Alison’s doubts uses the visual not only to clarify and illustrate the “truth” of moments but also to cast doubt on others. Put another way, despite the obsessive archival detail of the book, Bechdel reveals herself to be keenly aware that what she produces can only be an example of what Scott Bravmann calls “queer fictions of the past” (4). It is not just erotic truth but also truth more generally that becomes a rather “sweeping concept” and elicits suspicion and doubt.2

In the context of such uncertainty about truth itself, the unknowability of Bruce’s “erotic truth” presents complications of an entirely different sort. Beyond the question of secrecy and duplicity lies a related, but more complex question of the incommensurability of their different experiences of queer life and queer consciousness. To put the question differently, it is not whether she can recapture the truth of his sexual identity posthumously, but rather what relationship it bears to her own: as she puts it, is Bruce “‘gay’ in the way that [she is] ‘gay’” (230)? The answer this essay proposes is “no.” It is not simply a matter of different genders or generations, but differing affective relationships to the very concept of sexuality as a set of desires, a consistent identity, and an affective register.

I want to start by examining the binaries Bechdel used to position Alison in relation to her father, near the beginning of the book: “I was Spartan to my father’s Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete” (15). Bechdel situates Alison and Bruce at opposite poles, but also as adversaries, expressed most poignantly over the question of gender. Bechdel notes that Bruce was “attempting to express something feminine through [her]” as she was “trying to compensate for something unmanly in him,” and that “it was a war of cross-purposes, and so doomed to perpetual escalation” (98). The conflict between them undermines what would otherwise seem like important parallels; a shared distance from traditional gender norms becomes a mutual antagonism and they emerge as opposites. Alison remarks that “despite the tyrannical power with which he held sway, it was clear to me that my father was a big sissy” (97); in contrast, she embraces the nickname “butch,” bestowed on her by her older cousins (96), for the fact that it is “self-descriptive, cropped, curt. … At any rate, the opposite of sissy” (97). While both Alison and her father detour from traditional gender norms, Alison embraces that opening while Bruce regards it with suspicion and anger, as when they notice a butch woman entering the luncheonette where they are eating and he asks Alison menacingly, “Is that what you want to look like?” (118; emphasis original). Leaving no room for Alison to articulate the “surge of joy” she feels at the “unsettling sight” (117) of this queer stranger, she responds “no,” but confesses that “the vision of the truck-driving bulldyke sustained me through the years … as perhaps it haunted my father” (119).

Bruce’s clearly articulated derision and the panic Bechdel portrays in his eyes suggest a refusal born of internalized homophobia, so in these scenes we might read him as a lost queer soul, a would-be queer kin whose self-regard and outlook have been distorted by the confines of his small-town, pre-Stonewall life.3 Alongside this narrative of queer identity thwarted, however, Bechdel subtly offers another one, a version that offers an expression for both Bruce’s and Alison’s queerness in more self-actualizing terms. This second story inhabits the domain of the literary as a place where the erstwhile antagonists can meet. On numerous occasions Bruce is depicted with his nose in a canonical volume; an avid reader, he is shown devouring the works of Western Literature’s Great Men: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Camus, James Joyce, and Leo Tolstoy are but some of the authors whose volumes make a notable appearance in the book. While he and Bechdel’s mother, Helen, are both English teachers, her role in the profession is only briefly mentioned in passing; in contrast, Bruce is shown in the classroom, visibly frustrated by his students’ lack of interest. The mentorship Bruce cannot offer Alison as father, he provides as teacher, and the literary becomes a singular space of communion between them. In high school, Alison experiences a “sensation of intimacy” she describes as “novel” (199) when her father begins to see her potential as an “intellectual companion,” and she discovers that the books he encourages her to read are, in fact, enjoyable (198).

This rapport develops significantly as her reading habits evolve: “We grew even closer after I went away to college. Books—the ones assigned for my English class—continued to serve as our currency” (200). Literature provides the means for intimacy that had heretofore been impossible, a site for tutelage and occasional mutual recognition. Alison is titillated by the copy of Colette’s autobiography that Bruce gives her; he loans her his copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and when she is assigned Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he instructs her that she “damn well better identify with every page” (201). But while the literary forms the basis of any intimacy Alison and Bruce share, it is also central to how each of them defines their own sexual identity—and these sexual identities are, in fact, distinct and somewhat incompatible, despite their shared germination in the printed word. It is not overstating the case to say that Alison’s lesbian identity is brought into being by the literary. This story line is recounted in text that both floats above the panels and, at times, fills text squares within the comics themselves: “My realization at nineteen that I was a lesbian came about in a manner consistent with my bookish upbringing”; accentuating the textual basis of this identity, she underscores that this was “a revelation not of the flesh, but of the mind” (74). The narration continues: “I’d been having qualms since I was thirteen … when I first learned the word “lesbian” due to its alarming prominence in my dictionary. But now another book—a book about people who had completely cast aside their own qualms—elaborated on that definition. That first volume led quickly to others. A few days later I screwed up my courage and bought one” (74–75).

What to make of the fact that Alison’s questions about her sexuality are inspired by the dictionary? Her discovery of the word “lesbian” offers up a world of possible identification beyond the lonely confines of the nuclear family. Bechdel depicts the story of sexual knowledge through language, a path to recognition that is significant and specific as a form of lesbian public life. And despite her “qualms,” any initial hesitation proves temporary, as the lure of the literary and the sense of collective identity it offers is too great: “One day it occurred to me that I could actually look up homosexuality in the card catalog. I found a four-foot trove in the stacks which I quickly ravished” (75). Notably, the “ravishing” Alison is doing is a completely cerebral sort. The language of sexual conquest is directed not at a human object but a textual one—or, more broadly, a concept, a possibility of occupying public space that becomes articulated, and thus imaginable, by way of the printed word. And the public nature of this private revelation is significant: “And soon I was trolling even the public library, heedless of the risks.”

Bechdel is careful to demonstrate how Alison’s political awakening and her sexual initiation are impossible to separate, as both emerge through an engagement with lesbian feminist print culture. Here, the comics fill in what the words leave out. We see Alison in various stages of absorption with foundational texts in lesbian feminist political culture: Word is Out (1978), Lesbian/Woman (1972), The Well of Loneliness (1928), Our Right to Love (1978), and Masters and Johnson’s Homosexuality in Perspectives (1979), to name a few. Subsequent panels include other titles, such as Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Lesbian Nation (1973), and Dream of a Common Language (1978). This mix of fiction and memoir, clinical and popular, and widely read and obscure titles not only traces the emergence of lesbian consciousness for Alison but also produces an entry point for Bechdel’s readers into an archive of lesbian literary and social life. Alison’s coming into being as a lesbian via these textual encounters is in keeping with the important role that consciousness-raising has played in making room for, and even inventing, lesbian consciousness. Here, Bechdel extends that gesture toward a new generation of readers. Those of us whose lesbian identifications were formed, like Bechdel’s, in relation to a political consciousness that was decidedly literary and scholarly may recognize ourselves in these panels; others, particularly those coming out in the digital age, may be learning for the first time of the archives that formed the basis for lesbian feminist identity for many in earlier generations. What I am suggesting, then, is that even as Bechdel recreates on the page Alison’s coming to lesbian consciousness via a lesbian archive, she offers her readers an archive of lesbian print culture, introducing twenty-first century readers to a series of texts that defined an identity for Bechdel and for many like her. Lesbian feminist identity is transmitted from author to reader; Fun Home now participates in the very work that it depicts these earlier tomes as doing, keeping such texts in conversation with readers and underscoring the degree to which lesbian identity could be linked to a literary and political form of consciousness-raising that may no longer be true for the generations reading Fun Home today.

Bechdel adeptly reverses the temporal move of much queer historical work; even as Alison seems to be, at first, the lonely figure looking to the past for connection, here Bechdel makes a move toward the future, as if to say to present and future readers, would-be and emergent queers, “here, I offer you this.” As importantly, Alison discovers a lesbian identity—through text—that is not lonely at all. Instead, it is a personal identity that has a public place. In a burgeoning lesbian/queer scene at college, the world of the mind, previously a realm of isolation in the “artist colony” that is her familial home, can be an opening to community with meaning and connection to others. Alison’s sexual identity, Bechdel insists, is necessarily a political one. This is not just because being, or becoming, a lesbian puts Alison at odds with the norms and behaviors expected of her but also, quite clearly, because the lesbian identity she claims is linked to an erotics of power that extends beyond the library to both the bedroom and the community. She begins to contribute to the production of queer print culture, writing articles about HIV for the campus newspaper and working on flyers for gay community events. When Bechdel writes that “the notion that my sordid personal life had some sort of larger import was strange, but seductive,” she depicts Alison standing awkwardly next to a punch bowl while figures dance in the background beneath a “Gay Dance” banner (80). In the next panel, Bechdel recounts that “by midterm I had been seduced completely”; Alison is in bed with Joan, “poet and ‘matriarchist,’” gazing with what looks like astonishment at Joan’s naked sleeping body, the bed strewn with books. The lesbian identity that Alison claims is epistemologically explosive: “I lost my bearings. The dictionary had become erotic. Some of our favorite childhood stories were revealed as propaganda … others as pornography. In the harsh light of my dawning feminism, everything looked different” (80–81).

Alison’s meaning of lesbian extends far beyond the limited corporeal arrangement of sexual acts the term presumes to label. “Lesbian” is a word inextricably linked to the production of knowledge and the emergence of a critical consciousness. The centrality of the textual is particularly striking when Alison comes out to her parents. We see college-age Alison at her typewriter, with a text box featuring a concise excerpt from the letter she is composing to her parents: the simple declarative phrase “I am a lesbian” (58). This moment stands in stark contrast to the fraught journals of Alison’s youth, in which even the most factual, perfunctory descriptions of her day are marred by the repetition of a compulsive “I think” and then a “curvy circumflex” she invents to signify the fundamental unreliability of her own truth claims (142). Despite her earlier wariness of even the simplest declarative assertions, here she goes boldly forth in her announcement of lesbian-as-fact. She offers this truth as unquestioned and unquestionable, even though as Bechdel points out, she had not yet had sex with anyone. As Alison explains: “My homosexuality remained at that point purely theoretical, an untested hypothesis. But it was a hypothesis so thorough and convincing that I saw no reason not to share it immediately” (58).

This declaration prompts a series of “difficult letters with my mother” and then “a staggering blow” in a phone call when her mother reveals that “your father has had affairs with other men” (58). Their epistolary exchange has, for Alison, astonishing power; Bechdel interprets a causal relationship between her “doleful coming-out” and her father’s death four months later, and she questions the motivation for her earlier confession, putting its relevance into question: “Why had I told them? I hadn’t even had sex with anyone yet. Conversely, my father had been having sex with men for years and not telling anyone” (59). In this way, as in others, Bruce and Alison appear at first to be alike but in fact are rendered opposites. Rather than see a connection to her father’s queer desire, she attributes a profound importance to the fact that her sexual identity is unconsummated, “hypothetical” and staggeringly intellectual. His, on the other hand, bears little relation to the acts he has been engaging in for years. Put differently, the relation between Alison’s gay consciousness and that of her father cannot be one of identity. She claims a queer identity in the absence of queer sex, and he has a history of queer sex in the absence of a queer identity. They are not, then, gay in the same way.

“Modern to His Victorian”

This seemingly simple acknowledgment of their different kinds of gay identity carries a surprising amount of textual and critical weight. The fraught relationship between Bechdel’s desire to claim her father as her own, and her recognition that, regardless of the depth of her exhaustive archival detail, this claim can only be tenuous and partial—this fraught relation is the animating force of the text. We could consider Bechdel’s quest to discover Bruce’s “erotic truth” to reflect the desire, in lesbian and gay studies, to unearth gay ancestors or find evidence of lesbian attachments in long-ago historical moments. As Bechdel is quick to point out, this quest, and the book it inspired, is less about the possibility of recovering the truth and more about living within the sustained desire for it; that is, when Bechdel admits that “‘Erotic truth’ is a rather sweeping concept. I shouldn’t pretend to know what my father’s was,” she points to the difficulty of recovery, the impossibility of knowing the past (230). However, this self-admonishing gesture leaves open a related question about whether it is the fact of historical obscurity or the very “sweeping” nature of the concept of erotic truth that makes it unrecoverable. Does Bruce have an erotic truth whose definition would be legible to Alison, if only the archive were to offer the right traces? Or is a constitutive truth about erotic life simply that its actual contours remain opaque, defying our attempts to map it precisely?

Quite a bit of critical work has examined the search for queer ancestors as an affective project. As Love has argued, over the past few decades the focus of such historical work has shifted from asking if and where gay, lesbian, and queer people existed in the past, to analyzing the fervent desire to find them. Such work asks “What relation with these figures do we hope to cultivate?” (31). Love discusses “the queer impulse to forge communities between the living and the dead,” noting that “the longing for community across time is a crucial feature of queer historical experience, one produced by the historical isolation of individual queers as well as by the damaged quality of the historical archive” (31, 37). Bechdel’s desire to recuperate a recognizably queer version of her father’s life demonstrates a desire to claim him not just as biological but as spiritual kin. Importantly, however, she names this desire as not a need for community but for exclusivity: “just a way of keeping him to myself” (230). Love focuses on the solitude and the shameful feelings within the gay figure looking to the past and asserts that the “social marginality and abjection” of queer historical subjects “mirror our own” (32). What is remarkable about Bechdel’s text, in fact, is that Alison’s entry into consciousness of her lesbian identity is not about shame and solitude at all; quite the contrary, it is about political community and, perhaps for the first time, belonging. Indeed, this is one crucial way that, contrary to Alison’s desire, Bruce’s experience is revealed to be unassimilable to her own. What interests me then is not that the book recuperates Bruce as somehow the same as Alison, but that it delves deep into how he was irretrievably different.

While it is perhaps a stretch to locate Bruce as a queer historical subject, given his proximity to Alison’s present, he is, of course, always located in a more distant past—that late Victorian era that marks his aesthetic tastes as well as his many passions. His gay solitude stands in marked contrast to her lesbian community. As I argued above, her first discovery of lesbian identity comes to her through reading, and Bechdel’s representation of this period is one of plenitude; through books, Alison discovers that she is not alone. Her sense of curiosity and her quick discarding of isolation and shame are demonstrated in panel after panel showing her surrounded by books that offer insight, ideas, and commiseration. Alison reads her way into an identity in which she recognizes herself in a broad range of other people and genres. Her emergent lesbian consciousness takes public shape when she gets to college and becomes part of a queer community. She’s shown attending a gay dance, participating in a meeting of the campus gay union, writing articles on HIV for a publication, and listening attentively as women plan to attend a lesbian folk concert. She nods, playfully, perhaps sheepishly, at her exuberant discovery that her sex life would have political meaning: one panel shows her overhearing someone else explain, “Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice” (80), and Bechdel draws Alison to show her as utterly absorbed in “this entwined political and sexual awakening” (81). Alison’s identity as a lesbian is forged in relation to a print history and a political present, and this collective consciousness—the sense of belonging to something expansive and laden with generative possibility—plays a noteworthy role in her seduction by the idea of “lesbian” itself.

How, then, to answer the question Alison poses: Why had she told her parents she was a lesbian? Her conviction that there would have been no reason not to share this “thorough and convincing” hypothesis is rather remarkable. For many individuals, evidence of one’s queerness, however thorough and convincing, is accompanied by the realization that there are a number of compelling reasons not to share it immediately, particularly with one’s parents. Alison herself signals these reasons when she describes her trepidation at looking for lesbian books at the bookstore and at the library, and when she uses words like “qualms” and “risks” to indicate the social pressures that impose shame and encourage secrecy around queer identity. Again, here the pictures tell more than the words; Bechdel’s narrative voice is accompanied by an image of Alison in a co-op bookstore reading a book with almost comical signs of surreptitiousness: she’s wearing a trench coat with the collar up, while a shadowy figure lurks in the background, and a text bubble above her face holds only a large, bold exclamation point (74). Moreover, as we will learn, her decision to share this with her family flies in the face of a family history of isolation and secrecy. When Alison asks why her father has never told her about his “affairs with other men,” her mother replies, “Your father tell the truth? Please” (59).

Given the decidedly textual nature of Alison’s discovery of her own sexuality, I would argue that she shares this hypothesis not because she is a lesbian, but because typing the declaration “I am a lesbian” produces her as such. The emergence of her identity is not sex, but text. This is why she must write it. Her declarative gesture moves the idea of “lesbian” from hypothesis to the real. But what does it mean to claim to be a lesbian, in the absence of lesbian sex? This is the question that confronts Alison about her own “erotic truth,” and it is quite different from the one she implicitly asks of Bruce: What does it mean to have sex with men, but not to claim a gay identity? Can we read this refusal on Bruce’s part as something more complex than a reaction to homophobia? Or rather, can we read this as not just a reluctance to claim an identity but also a more fundamental hesitation about that identity’s relevance? This contrast sets up a juxtaposition that tests our sense of any simple alignment of desire and identity, an incoherence that plays a defining role in Bruce’s sexual identity as well.

While Alison’s lesbian identity comes into being through a variety of textual sites—dictionary, library, and letters, Bruce, too, stages his sexual identity through the literary, but in an entirely different fashion. Bechdel remarks that “the line that Dad drew between reality and fiction was indeed a blurry one. To understand this, one only had to enter his library” (59). This spatial realm seems to be a manifestation of Bruce’s interior life itself. The library, she describes, “was a fantasy, but a fully operational one” (61); the furniture and décor, including flocked wallpaper, velvet draperies, mahogany desk, and Canterbury atlas rack, seemed more like elements of a “period piece” than items in a 1970s family home (60–61). And yet her father is shown working at that desk, reading the books filling the massive walnut bookcase, and, most importantly, using the room as a space of private encounters with “his more promising high school students” (61). While Alison develops her lesbian identity via the public space of the library and manifests it via the textual production of her own identity, Bruce’s sexual identity is very much tied to a more general role that he takes great pains to play within the very private space of the home he has, literally, resurrected from the past: “For anyone but landed gentry to refer to a room in their house as ‘the library’ might seem affected. But there really was no other word for it. And if my father liked to imagine himself as a nineteenth-century aristocrat overseeing his estate from behind the leather-topped mahogany and brass second-empire desk … did that require such a leap of the imagination? Perhaps affectation can be so thoroughgoing, so authentic in its details, that it stops being pretense … and becomes, for all practical purposes, real” (60).

This blurry line between affectation and authenticity is key, for it revisits the book’s puzzlement with regard to the dividing line between fiction and fact but reveals how this problem has particular weight in questions of sexual identity. What if that self is created and shaped in the very performative gestures that would seem to shield it from view? Bruce’s reading, we learn, provided models for behavior he was trying to emulate; his fascination with Fitzgerald furnished a clear language for courtship letters he sent Helen before their marriage, allowing him to perform a ritual of heterosexual desire that seems born more of his admiration for Fitzgerald than for Helen herself: “Dad’s letters to Mom, which had not been particularly demonstrative up to this point, began to grow lush with Fitzgeraldesque sentiment” (63). But even as the canon of American letters allows Bruce to approximate a proper heteronormative courtship position, the library itself allows him to enact rituals of sexual seduction of an entirely different sort. The space of the library appears to transport Bruce to another time and place, allowing him to assume a particular role, that of a “nineteenth century aristocrat.” From this vantage, Bruce parlayed his readerly authority into a particular kind of noblesse oblige that “involved edifying the villagers—his more promising high school students,” with an offering that was sexual as well as pedagogical: “The promise was very likely sexual in some cases, but whatever else might have been going on, books were being read” (61). This insight is accompanied by a drawing in which Bruce is in the library with Roy, the babysitter, who figures most prominently in the book as the object of Bruce’s illicit sexual desire. Surrounded by flocked wallpaper and ornate lamps, they are drinking sherry out of small crystal stem glasses (65). This scene of sexual predation, taking place in the fantasy environment of the library, works to resignify Bruce’s status as Roy’s teacher by sexualizing their pedagogical relation based on a distinct imbalance between them in terms of age, power, and knowledge.

That Bruce is shown handing Roy a copy of The Great Gatsby is suggestive because Bruce himself is a Gatsby-like figure. Within his private library, he establishes a relationship with the teenage boys he courts and sustains an alternate identity where he is not simply a high school teacher and part time funeral director, but a worldly aristocrat whose authority extends into the sexual. Bechdel makes this comparison explicit, arguing that Bruce fueled his “self-willed metamorphosis from farm boy to prince” through the “colossal vitality of his illusion” (63–64). Like Gatsby, Bruce’s life ends abruptly and prematurely, unable to sustain the burden of such illusions. But Fun Home asks whether the “vitality” of the illusion may functionally bring it to life. Once the illusion takes material form, who is to make the distinction between the “real” Bruce and the false one? The books, the desk, the library did exist, and the books were consumed avidly, arguably producing and transforming Bruce as he read them.

To be clear, in looking at the archive Bechdel assembles, it is not hard to see the influence of Cold War homophobia in his adult sexual identity: the secretive encounters hidden behind the pictures of the “perfect” heteropatriarchal family, the clandestine affairs and the cruising scenes in New York City fit right into the hidden-in-plain-sight paranoia of Cold War homophobic propaganda. These are, certainly, formative conditions of his sexual experience. And yet, I would argue that readers must attend to how Bruce’s desires are shaped by his role as an aspiring Victorian, not solely by Cold War–era homophobia. Bechdel describes his obsessive focus on restoring their once-dilapidated Victorian home as his “passion in every sense of the word. Libidinal. Manic. Martyred” (7). The contrast she has already established, being “modern to his Victorian,” locates him as an anachronism, not just interested in but also passionately devoted to the affective registers of that bygone period. And finally, she aligns him not with the hypermasculine twentieth-century writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but with the queerer figure of Marcel Proust. Bechdel regards her father as a “pansy” like Proust, and noting Bruce’s passion for “silk flowers, glass flowers, needlepoint flowers, flower paintings,” Bechdel asks, “what kind of man but a sissy could love flowers this ardently?” (90). She takes this as a sign of her father’s failure to measure up to the masculine norms embodied in the “grimy deer hunters at the gas station uptown,” and “where he fell short, [she] stepped in” (96). Her father’s interest in young straight men mirrors Proust’s own habit of depicting such forbidden attractions by fictionalizing them and transposing their gender. In true Victorian fashion, Bruce’s “deviant” behavior hides in plain sight, visible to the knowing observer. Like his questionable “domestic inclinations”—gardening and decorating—his illicit sexual activity is hardly a secret at all, but a barely hidden truth; his police and trial record, the photographs in the family archive, and Helen’s own awareness of his affairs suggest not simply that he was closeted, but that his desires and behavior were not organizable within the juridical, linguistic, and cultural frameworks of mid-century sexual norms. While it certainly may be that the normative pressures of Bruce’s historical moment lent his desires their unspeakable quality, I would venture to say that the silence around them also speaks to something more profound—that the acts themselves, and the particular contours of his desire—were unassimilated and unassimilable into the ideological and linguistic frameworks available to him.

In noting Bruce’s parallels to Proust, Bechdel admits to having a certain fondness for Proust’s preferred term, “invert,” and she acknowledges her anachronistic use of the term by calling it “antiquated” as well as “imprecise and insufficient” before claiming that perhaps, in the case of her family, it suffices after all (97–98). It is worth exploring what it might mean to think of Bruce in such terms, especially given that antiquated modes of style seem very much in line with his affective register. In other words, I want to linger on the difficulty, as Cvetkovich and others have noted, in deciding how to characterize Bruce: “something more than a pedophile, suicide, or tragic homosexual” (113), to push the nominative register back in time to Bruce’s own affective historical home.

Elizabeth Freeman has explored the inadequacy of the concept of generations to describe the ways that sexual identifications change from one era to the next. What she calls “temporal drag” usefully names how forms of identification from previous historical moments continue to hold meaning and become sources of attachment and identification in the present. The sense of temporal drag also marks a being out of step with the dominant sexual identifications of queer definition of a particular moment (728). While Freeman is interested specifically in the political work of lesbian and feminist generations, she reminds us that the paths of identification can lead backwards in time as well as sideways into the available identities of the contemporary moment. More specifically, she invites us to think about the ways that past identifications can be revivified in later historical moments, not solely as camp or critique, but as ways of making meaning of experiences that feel out of sync with the possibilities of the present. Her work reminds us, too, that identity forms have their own histories but are not inexorably contained within them. Their shelf life extends longer than we might imagine.

Following Freeman, I would argue that Bruce fits a late nineteenth-century model of sexual personhood, a product of a certain era that is no less impactful than Alison’s own emergence as lesbian in the context of late 1970s lesbian feminism. How, then, might “antiquated” models of sexual meaning offer interpretive possibilities for Bruce? David Halperin argues that the modern concept of homosexuality is an amalgamation of several older forms of desire, affect, and identity. The distinct characteristics of these earlier and older forms, though now outdated and subsumed into the category “homosexual,” nevertheless produce contradictory meanings, contributing to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called the “unrationalized coexistence of different models” of sexual identity (47). In particular, Halperin reminds us of the specific and distinct forms of affiliation and desire that are collapsed and confused within the concept of male homosexuality: effeminacy, pederasty, male love, and inversion (92). In contrast to Alison’s sexual consciousness—more closely aligned with late twentieth-century understandings of queer feminist desire—I would argue that Bruce’s erotic landscape draws from the categories of earlier forms of desire between men that predate the homosexual-heterosexual distinction. Pederasty, Halperin explains, “refer[s] to the male sexual penetration of a subordinate male—subordinate in terms of age, social class, gender style, and/or sexual role” (95). In the examples Halperin provides in terms of ancient Greek and Roman pederasty and early modern European sodomy, sex is “hierarchy, not mutuality,” and what each partner gains is predicated on his structural position in that hierarchy. I quote Halperin at some length here:

Although love, emotional intimacy, and tenderness are not necessarily absent from the relationship, the distribution of erotic passion and sexual pleasure is assumed to be more or less lopsided, with the older, “active” partner being the subject of desire and the recipient of the greater share of pleasure from a younger partner who figures as a sexual object, feels no comparable desire, and derives no comparable pleasure from the contact (unless he is an invert or pathic and therefore belongs to my fourth category). The junior partner’s reward must therefore be measured out in other currencies than pleasure, such as praise, assistance, gifts, or money. As an erotic experience, pederasty or sodomy refers to the “active” partner only.

(97)

A version of this eroticization of power and the acknowledgment of differences in investment and payoff in the sexual relation offer a potential narrative understanding of Bruce’s sexual involvement with the teenage boys he pursues. While Bruce’s pursuits are blatantly predatory and criminal, Bechdel points to the way that these legal definitions do not exhaust the emotional and psychic meanings of their relations. While we cannot know what Bruce desired, nor what Roy (or the other teenagers) desired, we come closer to the question Bechdel asks as she recopies the luxurious centerfold photo of Roy: “Why am I not properly outraged?” (100). Instead of indignation or condemnation, what Bechdel feels, she says, is an identification with the “illicit awe” that her father felt, one that leaves its trace in the photograph (101).

Read within this context, Bruce’s cultivation of sexual exchanges within the space of his Victorian mansion indicates an erotics of power that is intimately tied to the numerous facades he cultivated through his attention to appearance, detail, and ornamentation. Here it is worth dwelling on the spatial arrangements of sexual roles made conceivable within the private space of the Victorian home. Michel Foucault characterizes the library as a “heterotopia” connected with “temporal discontinuity” that served a particular purpose in the nineteenth century as “a place of all times that is itself outside time” (“Different Spaces” 182). According to Foucault, the library serves as a space that “suspend[s], neutralize[s], or reverse[s]” normative relations, a space that is “outside all places” while being “actually localizable” (178). Being “outside of time” means, for Bruce, moving beyond the imaginative limitations of rural Pennsylvania and Cold War homophobia, even existing within a different set of relations between desire and identity. To consider Bruce a pederast is to distinguish him from the specific deviant type, the invert, as well as from the emergent category that would supersede it, the homosexual. As George Chauncey and others have described, men of the Victorian period who had sex with other men were understood to be participating in a kind of perversion, but the male partner who continued to perform as the active, penetrating partner, and who performed the social roles expected of men in public, was not considered deviant in the way that an effeminate man would have been (Chauncey,“ History of Male Homosexuality” 91–92). Within the concept of inversion, what is more significant than the sex of one’s object choice is the (mis)alignment of one’s culturally imposed gender role with one’s sex. Within this logic, Bruce’s desire to have sex with teenage boys is deviant, but because he maintains a masculine role, both socially and sexually, he is not entirely defined by those desires, at least within the logic of sexual inversion.

Admittedly, Bruce’s claim to masculinity is complicated; Alison regards him as “lacking” in relation to the hunters they encounter at the gas station (96), for example, and regards his “ardent” love of flowers as rendering him a “sissy” (90). At the same time, her comic panels routinely depict him as an intimidating physical presence in the home, and the sense of control he exerts and the threat of violence he exudes challenge her description of him as a “sissy.” The comics show Bruce topless, muscular, and sweating as he labors on the house, offering a rather vivid display of masculine strength, competence, and even dominance, and power. He might, then, fit the type of the pederast rather than the invert.

In any case, the crucial point is that the invert and the pederast are distinguished by separate behaviors and gender identities, and neither is entirely collapsible into the logic of homosexuality, as defined by object choice. As Chauncey has argued:

Sexual inversion, the term used most commonly in the nineteenth century, … referred to a broad range of deviant gender behavior, of which homosexual desire was only a logical but indistinct aspect, while “homosexuality” focused on the narrower issue of sexual object choice.

(“From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality” 116)

In contrast to the pederast, the Victorian invert is a passive sexual partner who enjoys submission to a dominant male. According to Halperin, sexologists of the late nineteenth century, unshackled by the definite distinction between homo- and heterosexuality, often made an important distinction between pederasty and passivity; pederasty, he explains, might qualify as an example of perversity, which is to say, it was “merely the result of vice, which might be restrained by laws and punished as a crime” (95). Passivity, on the other hand, was the “‘inversion of the sexual instinct’” and indicated “perversion in a man” which “originated in a pathological condition, a mental disease” and “could only be medically treated.” Thus, the male whose desire to sexually penetrate another man, but who continues to assume traditionally masculine behavior in his dress and manner, might be performing a “monstrous” act but was not, in this way, sick or perverted. This desire could, in fact, be attributed to “his excessive but otherwise normal male sexual appetite” (96).

By this thinking, Bruce would not be gay at all, much less gay in the same way that Alison is gay. Bruce’s sexual identification calls back to a previous constellation of behaviors, affects, and desires that are not fully aligned with Alison’s, or with our own. He is, in myriad material and historical ways, very much a man of the mid-twentieth century—a reluctant father struggling with the unsanctioned desires and expectations of manhood in an era of repression. But the key to his sexual identity exceeds this singular historical register, and I would argue, the narrative demands that we contend with the degree to which our affective, desiring selves are both historically contextual and malleable. Amid the intense repression of homosexuality in medical and legal discourses, and ample examples of its persecution in mental hospitals, psychiatric wards, and jails, is it far-fetched to imagine that he might have found recourse in an earlier moment, in a very different way of imagining homosexual desire? Alison asks, poignantly, how he managed to live most of his life in this rural area, living “cheek by jowl” with his extended family (31)—but in some ways it seems he adapted by creating a world apart, one from a different era entirely.

While the book depicts Alison working to establish a common gay identity with her father, in fact what he represents is a queer identity unassimilable to our contemporary identity categories. Bechdel illuminates with agonizing clarity the truth of Sedgwick’s first axiom, “People are different from each other” (22). Elaborating on this deceptively simple statement, Sedgwick remarks the myriad ways that seemingly parallel or aligned sexual practices, preferences, and desires may—and often do—carry vastly different meanings, fitting uneasily into the identity categories available at a particular moment. Sedgwick’s point, among other things, is to explode the sense of continuity or certainty we might wish to believe adheres to these labels in the first place. To Sedgwick’s impressive list of possible differences that exist within these categories we might add something about a sexual subject’s identification, or lack thereof, with current models of identity, or their preference for atavistic models, or propensity to invent new models altogether. In this light, Bechdel’s self-described obsessiveness at retracing the contours of her childhood produces a queer archive for a father she reads as gay but for whom that reading can never really be adequate. She repeats her despair that, however deeply she goes into this archive, she can never fully solve the riddle of his identity or of his death. But as I have shown, Bruce remains an enigma to his family and his daughter precisely because his sexuality is arranged not through the contemporary identity categories of straight or gay, but through what we might consider a distinctly antiquated affective realm of sensibility; like their dilapidated Victorian home, the library, the accoutrements, the period furnishings, Bruce invented himself within a paradigm of “perversions” that do not cohere to the identity categories available to Alison. When Alison refers to her lesbian identity as “purely hypothetical,” she is indexing her identification with a subject position whose sexual identity need not cohere around sexual acts. But Bruce is instead Victorian—fluent in the acts of a prohibited desire but distinctly not interpellated by the identity category that would claim to consolidate them. An identity category consolidated into “a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology,” as Foucault describes the homosexual as an emergent category of person, demands a certain consistency and identity between desire, behavior, anatomy, and self-presentation (History of Sexuality 43). This does not rightly describe Bruce and his myriad contradictions. Alison seems both to marvel at and to condemn her father’s gift for creating the appearance of something not quite true, describing her father as a man who “used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not (16). In these scenes, we see her reaching for depth that is perhaps not to be found. Bechdel’s search for evidence demonstrates her conviction that his sexuality has an interior truth hiding behind artifice. His ability to recreate the conditions of a different mode of sexual identity, from a different historical moment, demonstrates how it is the artifice itself that produces Bruce as a sexual subject.

Queer theoretical work reminds us that identities function as “stories rather than mere labels” and follow “narrative structure” to “giv[e] meaning to experience” (Duggan 793). Bechdel’s story, ostensibly about her father, is more fittingly about her, and it is clearly determined by her own ways—our own ways—of organizing sexual desire, fantasy, gender presentation, and object choice into one seemingly coherent identity. The book rightly counts as an intervention in the queer theoretical canon; Bechdel’s nuanced analysis of the ways that Bruce resists such coherence makes Fun Home a timely complement to that theoretical work.4 One lesson of Fun Home, then, is that even intimate queer pasts do not speak the languages we use to describe ourselves, even in our most intimate and seemingly natural terms.

“Not Only Were We Inverts, But Inversions of One Another”

By way of conclusion, I offer one other, related but distinct reflection on the different ways that Alison and Bruce might have been gay. In keeping with my argument that their modes of understanding gay identity are both co-incident but mutually exclusive, I want to delve a bit deeper into the awkward interplay between these different ways of understanding gay identity. Nealon reminds us that while “roughly speaking, the inversion model enjoyed dominance in the first half of the century” and “the ethnic model rose to prominence in the second,” these two seemingly mutually exclusive conceptualizations of homosexuality “have always been deeply bound up with each other” (2). I find this a useful reminder of how the identity categories we use to describe and give meaning to our most intimate desires are still irrevocably created through social conditions, institutions, and historical practices. Perhaps it is better to say, then, that Bruce and Alison are not quite inversions of each other, but fellow travelers who approach each other from different ends of the twentieth century.

Bechdel’s difficulty in answering the question of whether her father was “gay” in the same way she is might be better understood as an ontological question about queer identity. After all, it seems pretty clear that Bruce is not at all gay in the way that she is; to the extent that it is knowable at all, his sexual desire is revealed to be as ambivalent and hidden as hers is enthusiastic and public. But the question might rather be if he was gay at all. By stating it as such, I do not mean to erase the fact of his affairs with men and teenage boys, and his weekend cruising during their infrequent visits to New York City. I mean instead to point to how his gayness is woven into the fabric of a different moment. Alfred Kinsey first published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), when Bruce would have been twelve years old. What was remarkable about Kinsey’s study was that it upended the very idea of homosexuality as a fixed and identifiable identity. Same-sex sexual contact between men was so prevalent even among self-identified heterosexual men, Kinsey’s data asserted, that the very label “homosexual” was almost irrelevant. What could “homosexual” mean in the context of a data set that indicated that such a significant percentage of self-identified heterosexual men were performing the same sexual acts as self-identified homosexual men? As Nealon argues, because his “dispassionate study of homosexuality” was “based … on statistics about frequency of sexual contact, and not on the subjective experiences of its interviewees,” his study offered a contrasting perspective to the pathologizing discourse of sexology (4). In focusing on the statistical prevalence of “certain types of individual experience within a population” rather than “describing the genesis of homosexual individuals” (4), Kinsey was working against several powerful ideas about homosexuality of the era, among them the idea that self-identified labels reliably indexed desires and acts. The force of Kinsey’s study, compiled with its astonishing statistical data about the high percentage of “straight” men having “gay” sex, suggests the degree to which “homosexual” as a category fails to exhaust the available registers for same-sex desire and sexual experience. In this light, it seems entirely possible that Bruce might have engaged in sex acts with men without ever thinking of himself as homosexual. That is, Kinsey’s argument and the data behind it make it possible to think of Bruce not simply as a shameful gay man in the closet, but a self-identified heterosexual man who also had sex with teenage boys and anonymous male partners. The point is that we cannot know, and the not knowing is interesting in its own right as well as instructive for our work as queer readers of the literary archive.

Fun Home ends with an apt dramatization of how Alison’s desire to know her father is met with his decided refusal to be known. There is a long scene when Bruce opens up to tell Alison a little about his sexual experiences with men. This is, she recounts, the only time they discuss their “shared predilection” (222). Seated next to her father in the front seat of the car, their two silhouettes visually mirror each other, one echoing the other as Alison asks if the books he recommended to her had been a queer nod to her younger self. Bruce responds, “It was just a guess. I guess there was some kind of … identification” (220). But this is a fleeting moment, not quite a communion of spirits or even, really, a full recognition of what they might share. When Bruce admits, “When I was little, I really wanted to be a girl. I’d dress up in girls’ clothes,” it prompts Alison to burst out in a solitary moment of exuberant recognition: “I wanted to be a boy! I dressed in boys’ clothes! Remember?” (221). But this final question is met with awkward silence. Bruce is unwilling or unable to call that memory into focus, and the two of them sit, as if frozen, staring straight ahead.

Bruce’s brief sharing of confidences elicits curiosity and trepidation that any response on Alison’s part might break the spell and end the moment. As Bechdel writes, “I kept still, like he was a splendid deer I didn’t want to startle” (220). Here, Bruce is both commanding and fragile, and their roles are once again inverted. No longer a child, Alison confesses, “I had felt distinctly parental listening to his shamefaced recitation” (221). While Bruce drives the car, Alison attempts to steer him into a mutual recognition from which he consistently veers away. Later that evening, when they are turned away from a local gay bar because she does not have a legal I.D., she says, “it could have been a funny story one day” but that instead, “we drove home in mortified silence” (223). This moment of shared confidences that Alison cultivates as mutual recognition, Bruce experiences as exposure, provoking not intimacy but shame; instead of commiseration, there is a stark failure of identity across generations. Had Bruce been able to occupy the past that Alison remembers, he could claim her not only as his biological daughter but also as his queer kin, thus making their failure to gain access to the gay dive bar a shared experience of marginalization and possibly a moment of connection and intimacy between them. Instead, Alison describes mortification—a word whose root signifies a kind of death. Notably, as they leave the bar, Alison is the one behind the steering wheel. Their silence suggests that the gap between Bruce’s sexual experiences and Alison’s is too wide to bridge, and while she wants to guide him into recognition as a partner in queer public space, Bruce is not able to accompany her there.

In scenes like this, Bechdel repeatedly undercuts the impulse to assume a similarity between Bruce and Alison, undermining the hope that we can know another person’s “erotic truth” and the assumption that queer erotic truths remain constant over time. Instead, Bechdel sets up parallels between father and daughter, only to explore how their apparent proximity reveals an alarming chasm between the truths they seem to embrace. This is illustrated most pointedly when Bechdel discovers a photograph of him on a fraternity house rooftop that seems to prefigure her own college era rooftop photograph. Placing the two photos in proximity on the page, Bechdel remarks that the visual similarities, “exterior setting, the pained grin, the flexible wrists, even the angle of shadow falling across our faces,” constitute a kind of “translation” (120), as if the photos of Bruce and Alison stand as parallel signifiers. But the gap between them still haunts, as the condition of language and of translation is haunted by the impossibility of perfect meaning; Bechdel adds, “it’s about as close as a translation can get,” which is to say, often not nearly close enough.

In reading these photos, Bechdel becomes a translator between generations and across archives; in her telling, she can find signifiers that approximate the meaning she is looking for, but the fit can never be perfect. That is, she can find evidence that the meaning of Bruce’s sexual identity resonates with hers, but it is never a seamless translation. That she calls it translation at all acknowledges the desire to communicate across difference—different times, different languages. This speaks to Alison’s desire to feel her father’s gayness to be connected to her own. But this desire to lay claim to him by recognizing shared characteristics and imagining shared experiences and desires is invariably thwarted by Bruce’s refusal to conform to the shape of the gay identity she imagines for him, as well as to the model of queer identity she comes to occupy herself. The seeming parallel eventually serves to highlight the pointed incommensurability of their queer identities.

The limited and tenuous tolerance of gay and lesbian identity we claim today has been predicated on its cultural legibility and its determined independence from historical context. Despite the robust scholarly archive on the historical contingency of identity categories, the popular notion of gayness as immutable and historically coherent remains not only intact but also fiercely defended across the political spectrum.5 It is remarkable, in light of this, that Fun Home won not just critical but also popular acclaim, with numerous awards and the status of bestseller on the New York Times, LA Times, and Boston Globe book lists, among others. Bechdel speaks to our desire to know the truth of sexuality but insists on the inherent limits of such knowledge. This humility in the face of our desire for transparency and certainty refuses the idea of continuities of desire and identity across historical and geographical registers; in so doing, it opens up the very possibilities of queer connections we might most desire.