HISTORY
FUN HOME history
The inspiration for Fun Home first took root in 1980, when author Alison Bechdel came out as a lesbian to her parents at the age of 19. Shortly after coming out to her parents, Bechdel's father experienced an untimely death, through which her mother revealed to Alison the artifice with which her father had been operating in reality. The revelation that her father had been living his life as a closeted gay motivated Bechdel to be proactive in her honesty about her sexuality, which is something she attributes much of her work to.
In an interview with NPR in August 2015, Bechdel put words to this pursuit of openness as a product of the way her father dealt with his sexuality and explained how that inspired her autobiographical work, Fun Home, as well as her personal life:
“I do feel like in many ways, my life, my professional career has been a reaction to my father’s life – his life of secrecy. I’ve been like all about being out and open about being a lesbian since I came out in, like, 1980. It’s been my career. Like, I write this lesbian comic strip for many, many years. That was my job – a little bit to my family’s horror at first, but all got used to it eventually” (NPR—FIX CITATION)
To listen to the full interview about the process of creating Fun Home the novel and the music for "Fun Home" the musical, click on the window below.
ALISON BECHDEL history
Alison Bechdel was born on September 10, 1960, to Bruce and Helen Bechdel in a small town in Pennsylvania called Lock Haven. Bechdel is the oldest of three children and lived with her brothers and parents in a remodeled mansion that doubled as a funeral home, which was the family business that her father took over when her mother was pregnant with her (“Alison Bechdel”).
With the influence of her English-teaching father and actress mother, Bechdel was raised in an environment stimulated by creativity, in which she recalls she was often encouraged to pursue drawing as a child. Quoted in her Boston Globe Magazine interview, Bechdel recalled being given stacks of blank printer paper by her father and filling them with sixty to seventy pages of doodles, which initiated her journey as a cartoonist. Later, Bechdel went on to leave high school early and began her college career as a student at a small college in Massachusetts called Simon’s Rock College. Two years later, when Bechdel transferred to Ohio’s Oberlin College, she continued to pursue her drawing, despite her professor’s focused attention on her work that they perceived as more serious (“Alison Bechdel”).
Bechdel finished her degree at Oberlin in 1981. At one point, Bechdel admitted that more than her academic accomplishments, the achievement she esteemed most highly during her college years was her coming out as a lesbian (“Alison Bechdel”). This revelation not only liberated Bechdel from the familial and societal constraints that oppressed her throughout her adolescence, but also established the platform from which she would derive much of her professional work, which is discussed in more detail later.
After finishing at Oberlin, Bechdel moved to New York City, where she worked a myriad of jobs, landing one in particular that sparked her solidified interest in graphic literature. Working for a feminist newspaper called WomaNews, Bechdel completed tasks ranging from contributing to the production of the paper to writing an occasional review in it, and during this time period, her first cartoon was born. What started as a doodle in the margins of a letter to a friend sparked the interest of one of Bechdel’s co-workers and quickly gained momentum with a greater following to become what is now Dykes to Watch Out For. For about a year, Bechdel created her cartoons as single-panel features, and eventually ventured into creating whole strips, which allowed her the freedom to “say something,” as she put it (“Alison Bechdel”).
Following this emergence of the graphic novel genre in her career, Bechdel continued to pursue the practices of graphic novelists and still continues to do so today.
GRAPHIC NOVEL history
In 1895, Richard F. Outcault’s single-panel cartoon, titled The Yellow Kid, swept through America, giving rise to the first steady appearance of comics that would continue to influence the nation through the realm of entertainment. Around this time, in addition to the growing film industry and experimentations with radio, the comic strip became a very prominent form of entertainment, acting for many families as the only other print entertainment in their homes besides novels.
As more comics were incorporated into publications, the fascination with them grew and likewise, so did their role in selling the newspapers, according to publishers at the time. Within a few years, the comic became very dominant in American culture. Even in the 1920s, when radios were more accessible, the public still seemed to prefer the comic strip, because it communicated to such a broad range of people and provided a visual medium that was nonexistent with radio.
As the years went on, comics acted not only as a source of entertainment, but also as a log of historical current events.