Challenges and Bans

Such widespread acclaim for Fun Home makes it understandable why many libraries would purchase the book and why many teachers and professors would consider it for the classroom. Yet almost as soon as the book was offered in public libraries, it was challenged by some patrons. Among the first was the Marshall Public Library in Marshall, Missouri, where both Fun Home and Craig Thompson’s semiautobiographical graphic novel Blankets (2003) were challenged in the fall of 2006 by a patron named Louise Mills, who first saw them, she said, in the new arrivals section of the library. In a public hearing on October 4, 2006, she said she worried the books’ comics format would attract the attention of children who could see adult imagery in them (Sims), and she said, “My concern does not lie with the content of the novels [sic],” but rather with “the illustrations and their availability to children and the community” (“Graphic Novels Draw Controversy” 13). Yet in the same hearing Mills asked, “Does this community want our public library to continue to use tax dollars to purchase pornography? … We may as well purchase the porn shop down at the junction and move it to Eastwood,” adding, “Someday this library will be drawing the same clientele” (Sims). The library removed both books from the shelves while they reviewed the complaints, and in the same hearing where Mills spoke, more than three-fourths of the community speakers expressed concerns about the books while the remainder supported the library’s purchases and questioned the claim that these books were pornographic.

Asked in February 2007 about the challenge and the library’s response, Bechdel said, “The issue is not, as I understand it, the content of my book, but the fact that there are pictures of people having sex—not just pictures, but comic pictures, which everyone interprets as somehow geared toward or particularly appealing to children. And that’s true, kids love funny drawings. So do grown-ups” (“Newsmaker” 22). However, Bechdel did not think this sufficient reason to ban books from libraries and said that, if given the opportunity to address that community in Missouri, she would ask them what they were afraid of: “What exactly is it in these images that you’re concerned about? What’s going to be the result of a child looking at these images?” (“Newsmaker” 22). Although Bechdel herself did not investigate homosexuality through the library until she was in college, she imagines that it would not have harmed her to do so as a child and argues that “libraries are these points at which people learn about the world”—that access to information, including information about homosexuality, is “hugely important” (“Newsmaker” 22). At any rate, the plan at the Marshall library was to keep Fun Home away from the children’s section, shelving it in adult biographies instead (Oder 20).

On October 11, 2006, a week after the public hearing, the Marshall library board voted 7 to 1 to remove Fun Home and Thompson’s Blankets from the shelves until the library’s trustees developed a policy regarding the selection of materials, which it had previously lacked, at which point their status could be revisited. Five months later, at its meeting on March 14, 2007, the library’s board of trustees unveiled their new selection policy. Under this policy, well-reviewed books such as Fun Home could be acquired by the library and offered to patrons, provided they were appropriately shelved. Thus Fun Home was returned to the adult section, which it had been intended for all along, and Thompson’s Blankets was moved to adult fiction, in contrast with its earlier placement in the young adult section because of its adolescent protagonist (“Marshall Keeps Graphic Novels” 29).

However, this would not be the only challenge to the availability of Bechdel’s Fun Home in a public library, nor did such challenges cease soon after the graphic memoir’s publication. In 2016 the American Library Association released its list of the ten most-challenged books in the previous year, and Fun Home was among them for its “graphic images” (Waxman 1). It was the seventh-most-challenged book of 2015, coming behind John Green’s Looking for Alaska, a young adult novel challenged for its language and sexual content; E. L. James’s S&M bestseller Fifty Shades of Gray; two books about transgender teens; Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; and the Bible.

Librarians routinely make the case that they exert every effort to select high-quality books that provide patrons with a wide range of reading options, even if some patrons find some books objectionable. It could be added that, when it comes to libraries, no one is forced to check out a book whose contents they might find offensive. A different issue emerges when books become required reading, and Fun Home has also been challenged when it has been assigned as part of the curriculum.

An early example came in 2008, when a graduate teaching assistant assigned Fun Home for a sophomore-level course on literary genres at the University of Utah (“Anti-Porn Group”). A student was offended by the images of sexual acts in the book and contacted a Salt Lake City–based group called No More Pornography, which started an online petition to protest the assigned book. Despite this protest, the chair of the English department, Vincent Pecora, defended the book and the professor, saying that if professors chose only “novels that have a moral point of view that we agree with, we might not have a whole lot of literature to teach.” The instructor, Jennilyn Merton, said that while the graphic memoir does contain depictions of sexuality, its purpose was not to “create porn addicts with state tax dollars instead of educating its’ [sic] students” as claimed by No More Pornography, but rather, she said, that sexuality has been part of literary coming-of-age stories by such authors as Kate Chopin and James Joyce. In addition to not avoiding sexuality as part of the human experience, she said, “[i]t also helps us understand the ongoing violence that happens around people’s sexuality. If we can’t talk about that, then I don’t think we can be responsible citizens” (“Anti-Porn Group”). Her chair, Pecora, pointed out that the University of Utah allows students to request an alternate assignment for religious reasons or to leave the course without penalty and take another that fulfills the requirement. According to reporter Sarah Dallof, “The student in question accepted an alternative assignment but would like to see further changes. The university has no plans [to] make any. It says while a student has the right not to read the book, other students in the class have the right to judge for themselves.”

Similar institutional support for an instructor assigning Fun Home and other challenged works in a graphic novels course occurred in 2015, when a student enrolled in an elective course on graphic novels and objected to four of the ten assigned books, including Fun Home. Saying “I expected Batman and Robin, not pornography,” student Tara Schultz at Crafton Hills College, a community college in Yucaipa, California, requested that four of the assigned texts—including Satrapi’s Persepolis, volume 1 of Brian Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man, and volume 2 of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman in addition to Bechdel’s memoir—be removed from the reading list. Her professor, Ryan Bartlett, refused, saying, “I chose several highly acclaimed, award-winning graphic novels in my English 250 course … because each speaks to the struggles of the human condition …” He added that the course had been reviewed and approved by his college’s administration and board, and after reviewing the student’s complaint they supported his inclusion of texts with mature content for a college audience and denied her request (Murphy 15). Schultz and her parents had asked the administration not only to have the books removed from the course reading list but also from the college bookstore, or at a minimum to label them so that students would be aware of potentially offensive content—a practice at odds with the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, which believes that such labeling could prejudice readers against particular books (Murphy 15). Initially the college proposed that a disclaimer regarding the books’ mature content be added to the syllabus, but this move was vigorously opposed by the National Coalition against Censorship and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (a nonprofit organization designed to support the First Amendment rights of comics creators, publishers, and retailers), and the college backed away from requiring a disclaimer on the syllabi (Maren Williams, “Case Study”).

Another significant challenge to a college involving Fun Home came when the College of Charleston in South Carolina gave copies of the book to two thousand incoming first-year students in 2013 for its summer reading program, College Reads. The university did not require students to read the memoir—indeed, many an English professor has lamented that some students don’t read even when it is required—but it nonetheless encouraged students to read Bechdel’s book before matriculating so they could participate in campus events connected to it. In response—prompted by South Carolina Republican representative Garry Smith, who said parents had expressed concerns about the book’s content—the budget committee at the statehouse in Columbia voted to cut $52,000 for the following academic year from the College of Charleston—precisely the amount allocated for their summer reading program (Lauren Williams 12).² While the college cited academic freedom and the importance of exposing students to a variety of ideas, and though even Smith’s fellow Republican representative Jim Merrill said the bill “might make us feel better, but it’s kind of stupid” (Maren Williams, “South Carolina”), the proposed budget cut was ultimately approved by South Carolina’s House of Representatives. The state’s Senate failed to pass the measure but instead required colleges to allow for alternative assignments when students have a “religious, moral or cultural belief” that would lead them to object to an assignment, and also required the two schools to use $70,000 (the amount the house voted to cut) to teach American documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution, mandating not only the study of but also “devotion to American institutions and ideals” (McLeod).

In response to the furor over the state’s actions, the cast of the Broadway adaptation of Fun Home traveled from New York City to Charleston to perform selected songs from the musical free of charge, supported in part by Bechdel, with ticket sales from the two back-to-back shows going to the university (Margolin). Todd McNerney, chair of the college’s theater and dance department, noted that no taxpayer dollars were used to bring the show to Charleston but still worried that South Carolina legislators might punish them “for presenting a piece of artistic work” contrary to their values (Knich). Indeed, Representative Grooms did just that, saying in response to the shows, “If lessons weren’t learned over there, the Senate may speak a little louder than the House. There would be a number of members in the Senate that would have a great interest in fixing the deficiencies at the College of Charleston” (Knich). This was not the first time state legislators in South Carolina had threatened to cut funding to universities over the content of their courses, but the dozens of students who rallied in support of LGBTQ students agreed with Bechdel, who said that Grooms was “severely out of touch” (Knich).

In 2015, Duke University also encouraged incoming freshmen to read Fun Home, and this time the furor arose not from state legislators (the North Carolina university is private, not public) but from students who objected to the book’s content and images. Discussion among the incoming first-year students was facilitated by a Facebook group and initiated by Brian Grasso, who posted that he would not read the book “because of the graphic visual depictions of sexuality,” adding, “I feel as if I would have to compromise my personal Christian moral beliefs to read it” (Ballentine). Many of Grasso’s future classmates agreed, some citing similar religious convictions, others giving moral objections. One student, Jeffrey Wubbenhorst, said that the fact that the book’s content was visual as well as verbal led him to decide against reading Bechdel’s book: “The nature of ‘Fun Home’ means that content that I might have consented to read in print now violates my conscience due to its pornographic nature” (Ballentine). Other new Duke students, however, defended the summer reading book selection committee’s choice. Such students pointed to its literary qualities and argued that the book would open them up to new perspectives and introduce them to topics with which they might be unfamiliar. This had been the hope of Sherry Zhang, a senior who served on the selection committee, but she acknowledged that new students were free to choose not to read the book, adding that she hoped they would at least talk about their choice (Ballentine).

Graphic Novels and Libraries

Thus we see three primary situations in which Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was challenged: its purchase by public libraries, its promotion as recommended reading for first-year college students, and its inclusion in a course on the graphic novel. In each case, it was challenged because of Bechdel’s account of her recognition of her lesbianism and her first sexual experiences, coupled with the fact that this is a graphic memoir and these experiences are visually depicted in a realistic manner, which some considered pornographic.

Libraries in the United States other than the Library of Congress have always had to be selective in their purchase of materials for the practical reason that they lack the funds and the space to buy everything. In addition, public libraries have increasingly become de facto community centers in recent decades, and thus not only have collections aimed at children and young adults but also try to maintain a family-friendly environment for their patrons. As a result, most public libraries do not subscribe to magazines with nudity, nor do they carry pornographic films in the DVD section. Indeed, many public librarians will tell you that one of the challenges of their jobs today is policing patrons who use library computers to access images and videos that parents would not want their children to see.

Sexually explicit descriptions in printed matter have their own history of bans and challenges, but the emergence of the graphic novel in the second half of the twentieth century introduced a new element into librarians’ considerations. Most libraries did not purchase comic books for a variety of reasons, but even before the comics industry began limiting their content in response to parents’ and government criticism about the content of crime and horror comics in the middle of the twentieth century (Hajdu), American comic books were not sexually explicit until the arrival of alternative comix in the 1960s and ’70s, and thus were objectionable in librarians’ eyes for other reasons. But graphic novels were another matter. Unlike comic books, which are actually magazines rather than books, graphic novels are books, even if they employ the format of comics instead of poetry, prose, or drama. The history of the graphic novel is multilayered and complex (Baetens et al.), but to offer a simplified version, American comics began to mature at roughly the same time that early practitioners like Will Eisner (A Contract with God, 1978) began experimenting not only with the notion of a book in comics format but of a book with more mature content than readers who had not been following new developments in comics would expect of the form. The years 1986 and 1987 especially brought graphic novels to the public’s attention with the acclaim that greeted the first volume of Spiegelman’s Maus on one end of the realism spectrum and the gritty superhero works Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller, 1986) and Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, 1986-1987) on the other. As the public became increasingly aware that there was such a thing as the graphic novel, so too public libraries sought to meet their patrons’ interest in this new kind of book—a book they could actually shelve with other books, even if their pages resembled or even reprinted the comic books they tended to eschew.

But the dual verbal-visual nature of the graphic novel, along with how new publications such as Fun Home presented content one could never have found on a drugstore wire rack, presented librarians with a new dilemma: how to make materials with mature content available to readers without stirring up the sentiments of those who feel that visual depictions of sexuality have no place in libraries receiving their funding from the public. Returning to the controversy in Marshall, Missouri, some members of the community attacked Fun Home and Thompson’s Blankets as pornographic, saying they shouldn’t have been purchased at all, while others proposed keeping such books in an adults-only section or behind librarians’ desks away from children. One speaker drew a parallel with R-rated movies and pornographic magazines, thus unintentionally highlighting how the visual nature of the graphic novel makes such books different from text-only publications. As Bechdel said in an interview with American Libraries following the 2006 Missouri challenge, “As graphic novels become considered more a legitimate literary form, libraries are going to have to grapple with this…. But I don’t think you can use [graphic content] as a reason to ban books from libraries” (“Newsmaker”).

One way libraries have responded to such challenges, as happened in Missouri, was to argue that they are attempting to apply the same evaluative criteria to graphic novels as they do for other purchased materials. The awards and recognition Fun Home received and the fact that it continues to be taught and studied in college and universities have helped, no doubt, to make a case that the memoir is a highly literary work as well as visually well crafted, and that its inclusion of the author’s early sexual experiences is as much a part of her development as her voluminous reading. Such arguments may not mollify critics who see any depiction of sex (especially same-sex relationships) as morally unacceptable, but at least they can be presented in support of the view that libraries, in striving to offer a variety of materials for a variety of patrons, are guided by the effort to select items that possess, to quote from the classical legal defense against obscenity, serious literary or artistic value.

It also helps when librarians are aware of the fact that comics are not just for kids. Given the history of comic strips and comic books in America, it is understandable that many people have assumed that comics are a children’s medium. One can imagine scenarios in which librarians unaware of developments within comics or the possibilities inherent within the graphic novel would wrongly assume that a graphic novel, because its pages have panels and speech bubbles instead of sentences and paragraphs, could be shelved in the children’s or young adult section. But of course, as readers in Europe and Japan knew well before most Americans, neither comics nor its cinematic cousin animation is inherently juvenile in nature, even if a great amount of material in these formats has been directed toward children. Rather, librarians have learned if they did not know already that just as one can’t judge a book by its cover, neither can its contents be determined by a cursory glance at its use of comics.

Graphic Novels and Higher Education

It is one thing to offer a book like Fun Home in a library, where patrons are free to select the books that interest them and to disregard those that do not (although as the Missouri case shows, there are patrons who believe they should have a say in what other people may choose). It is different when a book is either recommended for incoming college freshmen, as happened at the College of Charleston and Duke University, or on the reading list for a class. Even if the recommended reading for matriculating students is merely recommended, there is still some pressure to participate, given that activities around the book were planned for their first year; and if a book is assigned, certainly the instructor expects students to read it.

A few months before her high school graduation, I took my daughter for her first trip to New York City. I let her determine much of our agenda, but I insisted that we see the musical adaptation of Fun Home on Broadway. I did so knowing that, while the story would not gloss over Alison’s lesbianism or Bruce’s pedophilia, it would not be presented as graphically as in the book (which is not nearly as graphic as the sex scenes in, for instance, Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls). Had I learned, a few months later, that her new university was asking students to read it before the fall term began, I might have wondered about the wisdom of the selection, even though I’ve taught Fun Home on three different occasions.

My misgivings stem not from the quality of the book, which I believe is a masterpiece of graphic literature that deserves to be in libraries and the classroom, nor from its depictions of sexuality, which I consider limited, subtle, and appropriate to their context. Instead, my concerns about its appropriateness as recommended reading for first-year students come not just from my experience as a parent but as an educator myself. Most of my career has been spent at small, regional state universities in Appalachia and the South, but I have also taught at a large state university and at small private institutions. Among the many things I’ve learned is that students, regardless of the institution, come to college from a variety of backgrounds and worldviews—some of which may be more socially traditional or conservative, for either secular or religious reasons. Thus I’ve always been more cautious about selecting materials for my first-year students and even my sophomore classes, realizing that even if I don’t find certain subjects shocking, many students would.

For this reason, I think that the decision to promote Fun Home as a book for incoming freshmen was misguided, despite my admiration for the book. Just as some conservatives seek to impose their moral standards on others through censorship, so some liberals, thinking themselves more intelligent than those they deem to possess a false consciousness and perhaps seeking to épater la bourgeoisie, are either oblivious to the sensibilities of those who are more conservative or believe such sensibilities need to be shaken up. Fun Home is a great graphic novel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s great for students who may already be entering college with some trepidation that the liberal professors their parents have warned them about are trying to lead them away from the values with which they were raised. It is not surprising, then, that some students objected to the recommended reading, even if it’s a dangerous incursion into academic freedom for state legislators to threaten funding cuts over material they find offensive.

On the other hand, I think Fun Home is perfectly acceptable for a class on the graphic novel or other literature classes. By the time students take such courses, they have typically taken first-year writing classes or otherwise have some experiences under their belts as college students—experiences that should have gradually introduced them to more-mature subjects than they may have been exposed to in high school. Moreover, in a literature class, students can expect to read works dealing with a wide range of experiences that are part of the human condition, and part of that condition includes sexuality. Given the visual format of the graphic novel and the still-common assumption by some people that comics are for kids, I do tell students at the beginning of the semester that books like Fun Home and Watchmen contain nudity and sexual situations (as well as graphic violence in the latter) and thus shouldn’t be kept around their homes where children might encounter them, but this is more like a word of caution than a disclaimer like the one the protesting student at the community college in California requested.

I would also strongly argue against her petition to have such books removed from the curriculum and the college bookstore. Instead, I would side with her college’s president, Cheryl Marshall, who disagreed in a formal statement in support of academic freedom and an open learning environment, which may include exposure to controversial material. Banning such exposure, she argued, might reaffirm students’ values, but students cannot learn and grow if they are presented only with materials that validate their existing beliefs.

Contrary to popular belief, most university instructors are not trying to destroy their students’ faith or alter their political views to match their own. We don’t expect students to conform to our worldview or even to like everything we ask them to read. We do expect them to learn that the world includes people who are not like them who have ideas and beliefs different from theirs, but there are ways to teach this that ease students into these differences without alienating them. But of course for this to happen, academic freedom is of paramount importance, as is access to all kinds of materials in libraries—including Alison Bechdel’s finely wrought memoir Fun Home.

Notes

Works Cited