Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home is the tale of a dysfunctional family in running a funeral business and addresses sex, sexuality and suicide. Just the sort of thing you’d expect young people about to start college to lap up.
You’d be wrong, though, especially with regards to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Not that it’s the board of the private university founded by Methodists and Quakers that objects; it’s the incoming students.
Fun Home is a labyrinthine, autobiographical novel which deals with some sticky subjects, not least the author’s relationship with her tyrannical father Bruce, who hides his homosexuality and ultimately throws himself under a bus.
Add to that Bechdel’s portrayal of her own burgeoning sexuality and the scenes in which she comes out as lesbian to her parents, and it’s an at times difficult read that has rightly scooped a clutch of awards since its publication in 2006.
A bit too difficult, it seems, for some of the freshmen due to start at Duke University this fall, who were assigned Fun Home as part of their summer reading package.
According to the Duke Chronicle, freshman Brian Grasso posted on the university’s Class of 2019 Facebook page that he was not going to read the book due to “the graphic visual depictions of sexuality”. He added: “I feel as if I would have to compromise my personal Christian moral beliefs to read it.”
He said that Duke’s decision to put the book on the reading list was “insensitive to people with more conservative beliefs” and added it was “like Duke didn’t know we existed”.
Grasso told the Chronicle that he’d had a lot of support from his fellow freshmen. He said that many students who had messaged him about his stand and were in agreement with him, either on Christian or moral grounds.
“There is so much pressure on Duke students, and they want so badly to fit in,” he told the newspaper. “But at the end of the day, we don’t have to read the book.”
Others who publicly backed Grasso included Bianca D’Souza, who said she did not find the sex and nudity appropriate reading.
And Jeffrey Wubbenhorst said that while he might have been willing to read the book in prose form, the fact that it was in graphic novel format “violates my conscience due to its pornographic nature”.
The book was put on the reading list by the Duke Common Experience Selection committee, made up of students and faculty members. Ibanca Anand, a student member of the committee, told Duke Today: “The book is a quick read but not an easy one; it made me uncomfortable at times, which I think is one of the most telling reasons why it’s so important for students to read. It has the potential to start many arguments and conversations, which, in my opinion, is an integral component of a liberal arts education.”
Another committee member, history professor Simon Partner, told USA Today: “I think it will be a great vehicle for conversations among the incoming class about art and storytelling; about personal and sexual identities; about truth and lies, and the harm both can cause; and about judgment and forgiveness.”
It is, of course, not the first time that Fun Home has fallen foul of moral objectors. In its year of release, there was a campaign in Marshall, Missouri, to get it removed from public libraries because it was deemed inappropriate. Two years ago, a similar situation to Duke’s arose when a conservative group objected to its inclusion on the College of Charleston freshman reading list.
