Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

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From the story “Fun Home: a family tragicomic” by Alison Bechdel, we discover Alison and her father are both homosexuals which in turn leads to her father having a very difficult life. He could never really express his true self due to the time period that he lived in. Because of these pressures that he faced while growing up he did not put the same pressures on his daughter Alison while she was growing up. When she revealed to her parents that she was a lesbian her father did not disapprove of her lifestyle choice, but instead he embraced it and opened up to her about also being a homosexual. This book was very interesting, as it shows how hard life was for homosexuals before any gay movement rights were put in place. Today it is different and homosexuality is much more accepted then it was in the past. Alison and her father both experience huge societal pressures due to the fact that they are unconventional. Society of the time and the resulting expectations forced the father into a heterosexual role. As a result of his experience, he did not put the same pressures on his daughter. Bruce Bechdel was from a small town called Beech Creek. Bruce enlisted in the army but always knew that he would return home one day to run his family funeral home business when his father passed away. While Bruce was in the army he knew that would be one of his only opportunities to explore with the same sex. In that time period homosexuality was not accepted, especially in the small town where he lived. In Beech Creek his family and all of his relatives lived there and had lived there for a long time. While Bruce was in the Army there were a lot of social pressures to be straight, for example one of the army guys asked Bruce while he was reading a book “You got a playboy stuck in there?” This shows the pressures other men put on you while in the army. When Bruce came back from the

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