Fun Home, a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, is an interesting case in terms of book banning. Where most books are challenged in the name of ‘protecting the youth,’ meaning grade schoolers, there’s significant pushback to remove this book from college curriculum. Most examples of attempted book bannings are from public libraries and school districts. Fun Home, however, was contested in a number of colleges: University of Utah, Duke and College of Charleston. The book has been compared to a “Marxist global revolution,” Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson, and has been deemed pornographic and “promoting the gay and lesbian lifestyle.”
With these kinds of things said by college students, you’d expect…..uh, actually, I have no idea what a compilation of these would look like. Perhaps some commie lesbian upheaval, with a bunch of women in the nude having sex while simultaneously initiating insane, widespread killings. Actually, though, it’s a graphic memoir about how Bechdel processed the grief she experienced surrounding her father’s death, and how she navigated her own queerness alongside the posthumous reveal of her father’s.
Fun Home is a delve into Bechdel’s childhood, and how differently she views it after her father dies. It’s a recounting of her self-discovery as a lesbian, and the pieces of her father’s story as a gay man she’s managed to retrospectively piece together. She’s tackling hard stuff: her father’s suicide, the intolerance of her mother, the abuse of her father from when she was young, the unethical nature of her father sleeping with much younger men, sometimes teenagers, and the way she processes learning her father was gay only after he died. It’s a very open story, and I think it’s beautifully composed; the art is gorgeous and it’s shockingly vulnerable. To put your story into the world like this, especially surrounding something like your parent committing suicide, is not easy. It’s truly a look into her mind, and I think it’s a wonderful book.
What it wasn’t was 246 pages of mass-murdering lesbian communist porn. You may see a boob in passing. There are very few sexual scenes, and those that are there, are not there to arouse, they’re a part of her journey as a lesbian. Pornography exists to please the consumer in some way. Usually, it aims to arouse, but that’s not at all what’s happening in this book. She’s recounting her life’s story, not trying to get you off in a single panel. I would be so embarrassed if I went to my professor to complain about two panels of this supposed porn. I think I would have to drop out of college. The thought of being so thoroughly shaken by this narrative that I would tell my teacher to remove it from the curriculum is humiliating to even think about.
There is, unfortunately, no big communist revolution, and certainly nothing that you could even logically try to connect to Hitler or Manson. The villainization of this story exists because it’s a dive into queerness, and society is disgusted by queerness. There is less objection to the discussions of her father soliciting a minor than there is to the ‘abrasive lesbian pornography’ that there are maybe two panels of. Here, her narrative of self discovery is something to be repulsed by, something to shock you and make you complain to your university about how they’re ignorant of conservative students. The complaint here is for a violation of students’ “Christian moral views” in their college curriculum, when you could easily be reading passages of Mein Kampf in other classes. This self discovery is the ultimate offense, the most disgusting piece of literature that people find themselves setting their hands on, and it’s simply a memoir of vulnerability.
