This week in my English class I had to read this comic strip, and I just had the craziest realization that I learned about this story last semester in my musical theater class when we took notes on the musical Fun Home. This musical is like a tragicomedy where Alison Bechdel chronicles her childhood growing up in a small town with her cryptic, perfectionist dad, and slowly realizing that she is gay, and her dad is too as well as the years after her father's suicide. Jake Gyllenhaal is actually going to be in the film adapted version of this musical. I totally just went off on a tangent, but it was important information for you guys to be able to understand my huge realization after reading my mentor text. So, my assigned reading was called In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower written by Alison Bechdel and after I read about her on Wikipedia, she's actually so cool and the comic I read makes so much more sense. So, her sexuality and gender non-conformity are a large part of the core message of her work, and she even admitted that her secret goal was to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings. Okay so now that you guys have all the background details, I'll tell y'all a little about what I read. The comic started off as this young girl describing her father as a sissy because he really enjoyed gardening and everything flowers, while she was referred to as butch and didn't enjoy girly outfits and barrettes. As she is growing up, she talks about how her father hired a man to help with the yard/ babysitting and then the help tags along on the family vacation, but later when she's much older, she finds old photos of the vacation that belonged to her dad and finds a strange, very revealing picture of the hired help. After seeing this and another photo of her father in college wearing a womans bathing suit, she put two and two together that her father was gay, and she was too. 6 months ago, I definitely would say that I was not the intended audience for this specific comic strip and even the musical, but after I took that musical theater class and learned a lot about how creators express themselves through their work and just developed a greater appreciation for the arts so now, I would say I would definitely intentionally read Bechdel's work and that's my whole spiel on this cool comic strip I read in English and how I connected it to my old musical theater class.
Real World Response: https://twitter.com/TeresaKing0314/status/1519019106329980928?s=20&t=Hbu48Dmexj4d3K0IHIDMbg
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