Coming Out To The Fun Home Journalism Final

Coming Out to the FUN HOME

A Graphic Memory By Sheldon Stires

Coming Out to the Fun Home When we think about another person’s life we never can imagine how much their lives can affect your own. When I saw Fun Home for the first time, it made me realize how much I can relate to another person’s story. The musical itself is about Alison Bechdel trying to figure out why her closeted gay father committed suicide and where to start her book Fun Home. After the show, I immediately read the book and was shocked to find out how a simple moment in life change your family, your friends and even yourself. A few months after I saw the show I thought it was time for me.

The musical Fun Home focuses on Alison Bechdel who decides to write a book about her dead gay father. We hear a nice tune and the show begins with only a few simple words that are used many times throughout the show. “Daddy, hey daddy come here,” Small Alison says when the show begins and we are taken through many points of Alison’s life as she reflects on her past. The show, in a nutshell, is Alison trying to figure out her father’s suicide and if it was her fault While many going into the show think its an adaption of the book Fun Home which it is but, it is really about Alison thinking that she has to do this and at the end it’s realized that the whole show is about Alison finding peace and acceptance of her past and where she feels she should start her book.

While many other shows like Wicked and The Phantom of the Opera talk about misunderstood characters and how messed up their lives are and eventually become, Fun Home was the first time I had seen a gay character on stage. Honestly as a gay person the moment I saw someone who was like me on a stage dealing with similar issues I have dealt with it was nice.

I walked into the Ahmanson Theatre only knowing that Kate Shindle (one of my favorite actresses) was in it and it had won the Tony Award for Best Musical. I sit down and learn this woman Alison was lost and didn’t think she knew her gay dad. The thing is she really did, he was gay and she was gay and, as her life had started to open his life started to close. I watched the pain Alison had gone through and how much she realized she didn’t know what her dad had gone through.

What is most striking about the show is Alison was a real person and after learning the tragedy I just witnessed was a true story it hit me hard. The fact that her father couldn’t be who he wanted to be because he didn’t feel like he could make me start to think about my own life a lot. I would spend hours on end just thinking night after night after night, just thinking. How would I do it, how would my parents react, am I punished forever? Then one night I sitting with my parents just talking and then, the words just flowed at my mouth without of thought and they both just looked at me and said “okay.” I went to bed that night shocked by what I was just told by both of them that they were fine with it. All my friends knew and for literally everyone in my life knowing who I am made me feel empowered.

Coming Out to the Fun Home At the end of the show, there is a song titled “Flying Away” I now use this as a reference that I feel I can fly free without anything holding me back. If it weren’t for Alison Bechdel or Fun Home I probably wouldn’t have come out by now. Sometimes it takes another person’s story of hurt to make you realize that sometimes you can’t always hold back and when you don’t you’ll start to feel better. To anyone who reads this and is questioning themselves or is unsure of how to come out to the people in your life, I promise you’ll quickly learn that once you start everything in your life starts to become a lot better. And when you feel like your honest with yourself you feel like you can fly away and soar above everyone else.

“Caption: every so often there was a rare moment of perfect balance when I soared above him” - Alison Bechdel

“My dad and I both grew up in the same small Pensilvania town and he was gay and I was gay and he killed himself, and I became a Lesbain cartoonist.”

- Alison Bechdel