The Bechdel test ‘was just a little lesbian joke in the 1980s. I never meant for it to be some kind of rule’

In July and August, the Gate Theatre in Dublin will bring the musical Fun Home to its stage. The production, an adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking graphic memoir, took Broadway by storm in 2015. During its New York run, it was nominated for 12 Tony Awards and won five (including best musical), and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama, with its cast album nominated for a Grammy Award.

The graphic-memoir source text looms large in the lesbian cultural canon, with Bechdel – whose beloved Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip ran for 25 years between 1983 and 2008 – breaking out of queer culture into mainstream when her surname became shorthand for a feminist analysis of cinema, known as the Bechdel test. More on that later.

Back in Dublin 1, shortly after midday on a scorching Wednesday afternoon in the city, three fans are whizzing at full tilt in the rehearsal room of the Gate. “I want to look at the shifts between the two Alisons,” director Róisín McBrinn announces, as the actors Frances McNamee (playing Alison Bechdel the fully grown author, and Orla Scally playing the teenage Alison) rehearse a scene.

The walls of the room are adorned with stage designs and mood boards. The atmosphere is efficient, focused. And then the magic starts to happen. McNamee begins singing Telephone Wire, in a scene where she and her father, Bruce – played by Killian Donnelly – take an awkward car ride together, each holding back from what they really want to say to each other, what they’re trying to reveal, and what they can’t.

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Fun Home is about family, it’s about a young woman becoming an artist, it’s about secrets, tragedy, loss and identity. In its pages, as in the musical – which is both a radical and radically successful adaptation – the things that shouldn’t be said, told, seen, come bursting out. “I love Telephone Wire,” the young actor Chloe Cody, who plays one of the child Alisons, tells me later, “It gets me nearly into tears every time I hear it.” Jodi Kaye, also playing child Alison, talks about the emotional complexity of the musical. It’s a funny show, she says, “but then other scenes are heartbreaking”. Both girls hit upon why the source text was subtitled A Family Tragicomic.

It wasn’t just about my relationship with my father around his sexuality or my sexuality. It was about learning to become an artist from my father

—  Alison Bechdel on Fun Home

A couple of days previously, speaking over Zoom at home in “the woods” in Vermont, Bechdel reminisces about Dykes to Watch Out For. It’s been 40 years since the first strip appeared. At the time she was living in New York, reading lots of lesbian and gay writers. “I was fascinated with other people’s coming-out stories,” she says. “That’s now kind of a passé genre, but for people of my generation, we didn’t know we were gay until we were late in high school or college, and all of a sudden it was just this revelation that suddenly threw everything we had known about our lives upside down ... You know, families aren’t explaining to us how to be gay, how to participate in gay culture. We stumble on to it, if we’re lucky. So I was very caught up in that in my early 20s, trying to make up for the previous 20 years when I had no idea who I was.”

The weekend after the first Dykes to Watch Out For strip was published in a feminist newspaper, Bechdel was at a dance, and felt the immediate impact of what she had drawn. “Everyone was like, ‘did you make that cartoon? Did you see this cartoon in the paper?’ It was like this instant gratification. It was very amusing.”

Fun Home came much later. When Bechdel was about 20, within a year of her father dying – the memoir is about many things, but her relationship with her father and his death are core – she could see that her upbringing (Fun Home is short for the family funeral home) “was a really good story”. But it would be 20 years before she began trying to tell it, draw it, write it down. In the meantime she became a cartoonist, and the world of comics had shifted seismically, in part thanks to Art Spiegelman’s work Maus. Fun Home “took seven years start to finish”, says Bechdel. “As I was writing the last page, when the ending of the book came to me, I suddenly realised what it was about. It wasn’t just about my relationship with my father around his sexuality or my sexuality. It was about learning to become an artist from my father. Everything else was sort of secondary to that.”

The entire process of writing Fun Home, Bechdel says, “was a kind of crisis”, the big issue being, “how do I write this story that reveals these family secrets? How do I make these family secrets public without killing my poor mother? A lot of what was happening for me was navigating that with her, letting her know I was going to do this, showing her drafts of it, which was always excruciating, always really painful for both of us to go through that. Also, there was an aesthetic layer to that, too, because my mother was the critic who lives in my head.”

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The novel is so loaded with literary references and subtext, that as a director of the musical adaptation for the Gate, McBrinn initially toyed with a set design made entirely of books, in an attempt to “connect [Bechdel’s] baseline sources about the imagery of Icarus, and where the Catcher in the Rye connected to Joyce, what it meant for their world”. McBrinn threw that idea out after a while, realising “what I think she’s [Bechdel] saying with a lot of that, is that he [Bechdel’s father, Bruce] used those worlds to avoid facing his own, and that was significant.”

McNamee, who plays the contemporary version of the author in the musical, analysed Bechdel’s latest graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, an incredibly expansive work charting Bechdel’s own life – and the meaning of life more generally – through the exercise and fitness trends she picked up and dropped over decades. That book, says McNamee, gave her “real insight” into her interpretation of Bechdel’s personality. “I think she’s hypercritical of herself, over-analyses things, is a perfectionist, meticulous.”

These people are banning all kinds of books, about race, about sexuality, about gender, because they’re threatened by it

In conversation, Bechdel is both precise and casual. Of the famous Bechdel test, she almost shrugs at its place in popular culture, “I wrote a comic strip about two women who were trying to find a movie to go to. And one of them said: ‘I have a rule, I can only go see a movie if it has at least two women in it, who talk to each other, about something besides a man.’ This was something an actual friend said to me, and I thought it was really brilliant and really funny, because hardly any movie fulfilled those criteria ... That was just a little lesbian joke back in the ‘80s. But a younger generation of women stumbled on to it and felt like it was really expressing something succinctly about movies that they were learning. I think it was actually film students who started this. It just somehow caught on in this weird viral way, because it does explain a complicated idea in a very simple way. But I never meant for it to be some kind of rule!” Explaining complicated ideas in succinct way is definitely a key pillar of her work, I say. “Well, of comics too,” she responds.

Bechdel has also found herself the victim of an ongoing wave of anti-LGBTQ+ censorship and moral panics, with attempts – some occasionally successful – to ban Fun Home from school libraries and curriculums. “Oh man,” she sighs, “what is the matter with people? Didn’t they take history? Don’t they know how bad this is? It’s crazy. And it’s not just here in the US. Clearly there’s this authoritarian craze going on around the globe ... It’s so much just about very, very cynical politics, at least here in the US. These people are banning all kinds of books, about race, about sexuality, about gender, because they’re threatened by it. Then it’s just whipped into a frenzy by these weird conservative politicians who are outdoing one and other to be as vile as possible. And gay people, and especially young trans people, are taking the brunt of it.”

Right now, Bechdel is hard at work on another book, which began as a memoir about the role of money in her life, which she was going to use to explore ideas around capitalism, but found herself exhausted by the idea of writing another memoir. Instead, she has built a fictional character with all kinds of traits and histories distinct from herself, “For example, I run a pygmy goat sanctuary,” she says of the character in the book, and for clarification, “which is not something that I do in real life, but it does seem like a fun thing to do, to have those little goats running around.”

With Fun Home, the Gate will no doubt be reaching a queer and lesbian audience that may not often find themselves in that particular theatre, as well as fans of contemporary musicals. When Bechdel first saw the musical with an audience, she says it was “amazing to see how emotional people found it.” This connection, she says, comes back to family, “Most families – I used to think it was every family, but I’ve since learned there are some functional families in the world – think that by not talking about stuff, somehow that’s going to help, or that’s somehow a good idea. That is absolutely never a good idea. I think everyone feels this sense of liberation at witnessing a family where the secret is said out loud.”

Fun Home previews at the Gate Theatre from July 1st, opening on July 6th and runs until August 26th. gatetheatre.ie