Fun Home in the context of the Lavender Scare

 Fun Home in the context of the Lavender Scare 

Coincidentally, while reading Fun Home, I am also learning about homosexuality, communism, and homophobia during the 1940s-1960s for a project in history class. I found such specific parallels between Alison Bechdel’s view of her dad, Bruce, and the general sentiment towards gay men at the time. First off, for some context, in the 1950s a fear of communism within the gay community was rampant in the United States in the form of the lavender scare. During this time, the Cold War left Americans fearing that communism was seeping into the country through any –supposed– weakness . The red scare was a panic that people, especially those on the left, were encouraging communism and, thus, were going against our country. Similarly, the lavender scare was a panic that gay and lesbian people were more vulnerable to blackmail and threats and, therefore, could be used to push the communist agenda on America. Here was the thought process behind this: These people didn’t want others to know they were gay, so if someone found out that they were gay, they could blackmail them into peddling the communist agenda; By extension, they should not be allowed to work in the government in any way due to this vulnerability (“Lavender Scare”).

The most common stereotype of this time was the softness of gay men. This was seen as a threat to masculinity and traditional gender roles. Because of this, people started attacking gay men, saying they were vulnerable and thus could not be trusted in the government or in important jobs. Additionally, during this time, homosexuality was classified as a mental illness in the category of sexual perversion. There was a false belief that people who were gay had never come of age sexually (United States). A lot of this book also directly reflects the societal belief of the time. Bechdel's father is constantly shown as never having come of age, always making mistakes, and continuously repressing parts of himself, unlike Bechdel who has proudly built a career on her identity and spends her life trying to move forward from her childhood trauma. Additionally, his homosexuality is directly related to his relationships with young boys –sometimes minors– creating a mirage that perversion is tied into his homosexuality. Another thing I noticed is the way Bechdel refers to her father. She seems to really crave his validation in death, but there are points of the book when she calls him things that make him sound particularly feminine and gay, using this as a reasoning for his aloofness and mistakes in his life. She refers to herself as a “sissy” when wondering what type of man could love flowers so much, an instance in which she is rightfully bitter that their landscaping is getting more attention from her father than his own children are (Bechdel 90). At a different point in the book, she even calls her father the f-slur in her head, wishing she could scream to the people at the funeral when told “the lord moves in mysterious ways”, secretly believing that he killed himself due to his unhappiness about his life (Bechdel 125). Both these instances along with the constant references to his femininity as opposed to her masculinity, show how she views him: too involved in himself for his own family and too soft to care about what really mattered, mirroring the common sentiments about queer people from this time period without even realizing it.

In a way, the image Bechdel portrays of her father shows us how the homophobic world surrounding her skewed her perception of the connection between his homosexuality and his bad traits, despite being a part of the queer community. I think, to a certain extent, a lot of these moments in which Bechdel's perspective parallels society show her retrospective anger towards her father for ruining certain parts of her childhood and spending them hiding his identity from the people who needed his love. This would obviously be very different if they had a good relationship, but Bechdel seems to use these stereotypes of gay men from the mid-1900s to attack her father in a way that only she knows how. Bechdel must understand how it feels to be attacked for integral parts of your identity, but she also knows that he used his other-life as a way to compartmentalize his family into a small, unimportant section of his life. A lot of this book shows that Bechdel sees Bruce’s secret relationships and devotion to the house as a direct reflection of his constant ignorance towards his family. I think as a queer person herself, this makes her confused about her sexual identity, leading to sections of the book almost entirely based on confusion about her sexual experiences and masculinity because of her father. 

Work Cited

United States. Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government : Interim Report Submitted to the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments by Its Subcommittee on Investigations pursuant to S. Res. 280, 81st Congress, a Resolution Authorizing the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments to Carry out Certain Duties. United States Government Printing Office, 1950, https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/cand/09cv2292/evidence/PX2337.pdf. Accessed March 10, 2025.

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Accessed March 14, 2025.

"Lavender Scare." Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 8 Jan. 2025. academic-eb-com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/levels/collegiate/article/Lavender-Scare/645082. Accessed March 6, 2025.