CANON
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sexuality is a difficult documentary task, given its frequent privacy or intimacy, and this general secrecy can be further heightened when that sexuality is constructed as immoral or criminal or perverse.9 Throughout the graphic novel, Alison acts as a witness as both the narrator of the story and the person creating the graphic novel which reveals Bruce’s sexuality. In the musical, Alison stands with the audience as they watch the story: her eldest form acts as an audience member to her own life and to her father’s sexuality within that narrative. As forty-three-year-old Alison writes the graphic novel Fun Home throughout the show, she has the knowledge of the end of the story. Therefore, she has the capacity to witness several of Bruce’s moments within their queer context. When Bruce leaves her younger self in a hotel room to pick up a hustler, forty-three-year-old Alison can recognize Bruce’s departure for what it is, in comparison to Small Alison who remains unaware of the circumstances. In the musical, Alison’s ability to act as witness to a difficult sexuality works because she witnesses it in real time. Forty-three-year-old Alison witnesses her father’s sexuality along with the audience; she simultaneously documents it by creating her graphic novel panels as the scenes from her memories are played out in front of her. At the end of the first song, as Alison watches her Small version play “airplane” with her father, she tries to document the moment. She speaks: “Caption—my dad and I were exactly alike. Caption—my dad and I were nothing alike. Caption—my dad and . . . my dad and I.”10 However, she is unable to fully realize their relationship or their shared sexuality in the moment. She works through her own confusion with what she remembers at the same time as the audience. At the end of the next major musical number, she is able to finish the caption for that panel. She speaks, with more certainty, “Caption—my dad and I both grew up in the same small, Pennsylvania town, and he was gay and I was gay and he killed himself. And I became a lesbian cartoonist.”11 The realization of their shared homosexuality and its relation to her father’s suicide happens as Alison works through her own thoughts. During the first song, forty-three-year-old Alison sings “I can’t abide romantic notions / Of some vague long ago / I want to know what’s true / Dig deep into who / And what / And why / And when / Until now gives way to then.”12 Her father sings the same lyric earlier in the song, and again while Alison sings. Alison’s documentation of her and her father’s stories comes from an attempt to 9. Cvetkovich, “Drawing the Archive,” 114. 10. Kron, “It All Comes Back (Opening),” 4:51–5:04. 11. Kron, “Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue,” 4:06–4:21. 12. Kron, “It All Comes Back (Opening),” 4:11–4:26.