Lunamania

Now that Alison Bechdel is with a large publisher, her work is no longer relegated to indie bookstores and is getting some positive mainstream media attention. Yay. I've read a couple of reviews of Fun Home that broadly characterize the book as "lesbian daughter explores her relationship with gay dad who ends up dying (was it a suicide or not?) soon after Bechdel comes out." Oh, but it's so much more. I have many thoughts which in my fantasy world would be shared with you faithful readers in the vein of Michiko Kakutani or the wonderfully snarky Manhola Dargis. However, this is Lunamania and I have neither their skillz nor time, but here are my random thoughts.

First, this dyke comic strip writer totally put herself out there. Hello--Ms.Bechdel might as well be wearing a sign that says "Hi, My dad was a pedophile. Oh, and I like girls too." I mean who actually asks for that kind of attention? And how daunting is it for writers (or anyone for that matter) to tell stories of their families without it being a) traumatic for all involved, b) trite and done already, and/or c) just boring. Anyway, in some circles Bechdel is a lesbonic icon on par with Melissa Etheridge and Ellen. She could have continued comfortably with Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF for those in the know), but decides to share with the world that her father not only had sex with other men, but had relationships with the babysitter and his students? Oh and she incidentally pushed that graphic novel genre to a whole new level. Makes me wonder what I will ever accomplish with my life.

Second, Bechdel is a genius at drawing/telling the many conflicting truths that make up life -- and queerness in particular. Her primary framework is her relationship with her dad, but there's something in there about complicating just what it means to be "gay" or "queer" and what we make of our communities and familes. Bechdel illustrates her father's bad choice/s and the not so fun consequences with a complicated empathy that reveals the book to be not some Jerry Springer-esque story of a pedophile's daughter--which leads to point 3. There's a lot of talk of how this is a gay dad-gay daughter reconciliation story, but that's not quite it. Dad chose to continue sleeping w/young men and making regular visits to Chelsea, but never identified as gay--at least in the current Chelsea/Castro boy sense of the word. But he was definitely queer in that his choices about his sexuality were outside of the normative understanding of a hetero-nuclear family. I guess nowadays we'd call him on the DL , downe or MSM. There's some point I'm not articulating there about the evolution of queer identities and communities. Need more headspace to name my point.

Third, there are some masterful pages about a girl coming of age and reflecting on the intangible signifiers of queerness that in many ways have nothing to do with who one sleeps with. There's a scene where a 10 yr old gender queer Bechdel visits New York. She doesn't name this as her lesbionic awakening, but she does feel some post-Stonewall "liberation" that she juxtaposes with drawings informing the reader that this was right around the time patient zero emerged with what was not yet known as HIV. She also shares a memory of a visit to some construction crew doing blast mining or somesuch enviromentally sound activity. She's with her two brothers and upon catching a glimpse of a pin-up calendar, she senses some sexualized danger. She takes her younger brother aside and demands that he call her by a boy name. She doesn't explain that she wants to pass or why she feels anxious, but the safety in boy-ness was obvious even to her 10 yr old self. It's a sick world we live in.

Fourth, Catherine and Laura went to see Bechdel read and apparently she is a genuinely nice person who geeks out with Photoshop. I mean what more could I want? OK, I want Moe to be less neurotic and to buy/knit/find a new shirt.