Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/837897
9 What was the genesis of the story behind "Fun Home?" "Fun Home" was a story that simmered in my head for twenty years. It is about growing up with my closeted gay father who killed himself when I was in college, a few months after I told my parents that I was a lesbian. It's a very complicated, very personal, very particular story, and a story that I wasn't sure I would ever be able to tell because of the family secrets it revealed. But over the years, as I got closer to being middle-aged, I felt an increasingly insistent need to tell it, a sense that it was in fact obligatory to tell it. Partly to honor the full complexity of who my father was, instead of letting an incomplete official record stand. What was the real Bruce Bechdel like? My father came of age in the 1950s, in a small town in rural Pennsylvania. A time and place where it was impossible for him to be open about his sexuality. He got married and had kids because that's what people did. He was a super energetic, creative person, and kept himself very busy teaching high school English and collecting antiques and single handedly restoring our big old house. But he lived with a tremendous pressure of shame and secrecy which took a huge toll not just on him, but on my whole family. I was born a quarter of a century later, grew up in that same town, went away to college and came out as a lesbian in the early 1980s. e world was a very different place by then, after the civil rights movement and the women's and gay liberation movements of the sixties and seventies. So that in the same moment I realized I was gay, I also realized that it was okay to be gay. I went on to live my life in a totally open way, and for many, many years being a lesbian was actually kind of my job…I wrote a comic strip called "Dykes to Watch Out For," about a bunch of lesbian friends. But a life like this was never really a possibility for my dad. "Fun Home" is about the ways that my father's life made my life possible—not just in the obvious, biological sense, but as a gay person I'm very conscious of my debt to the generations who came before me and made their way in a much more hostile world…so that by the time my generation came along it was much easier to come out. And increasingly, I'm happy to see that the very phenomenon of "coming out" is becoming kind of obsolete. More and more, people are able to completely bypass the "closet" that one presumably "comes out" from. "Fun Home" is also about my creative debt to my father. It wasn't until I was almost finished writing the book, which I had been thinking of as a book about my father's death, that I realized that was just the surface story. e deeper story is the story of how my father taught me to be an artist. My father exemplified a creative life, beauty and art and literature were salvational for him…and he transmitted this belief and drive to me. ere were a few twists and turns in which I made it my own, as younger generations must do, but in the end my book itself becomes evidence, proof of the creative legacy my father left me. Q&A with Alison Bechdel PHOTO BY ELENA SEIBERT