Yes, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic Is Banned!

Fun Home is Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir about growing up in a small Pennsylvania town with a father who ran the local funeral home (the “fun home” of the title) and harbored a secret: he was a closeted gay man. Through meticulously drawn panels and literary references to Joyce, Fitzgerald, and Camus, Bechdel traces the parallel arcs of her own coming out as a lesbian and her father’s hidden life, which ended in what she believes was suicide. The book won widespread critical acclaim, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was adapted into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical.

Despite its literary accolades, Fun Home has been one of the most frequently targeted graphic novels in the country. In 2022, the Wentzville School District in Missouri and Rapid City Area Schools in South Dakota both pulled it from shelves, with one parent in Rapid City calling it “pornographic” and part of a “Marxist Revolution.” A high school principal in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, removed it in January 2023 after community complaints. The Council Rock School District in Pennsylvania removed it from high school libraries that same year, and in 2024, administrators in New Jersey’s North Hunterdon-Voorhees School District restricted student access. The objections almost always center on a handful of panels depicting sexual content between women.

Why You Should Read This

Bechdel built something rare here: a book that’s simultaneously a detective story about her father, a coming-of-age memoir, and a piece of literary criticism, all told through some of the most carefully composed panels in comics history. Every frame is loaded with visual detail that rewards rereading. She cross-references Proust and Icarus and her own family photos, and none of it feels pretentious because the emotional stakes are so personal.

The people trying to ban this book fixate on maybe four pages out of 232. They skip the grief, the family dysfunction, the slow realization that your parent was living a lie. They skip the part where a young woman sees herself clearly for the first time and has to reconcile that clarity with a father who never could. That’s the actual subject of Fun Home, and it’s one of the most honest accounts of family ever put on paper.

Bechdel drew her own pain with a Rapidograph pen and turned it into something that thousands of readers, queer and straight, recognized as their own story. The panels that get the book banned are the ones where she finally stops hiding. That’s the whole point.