Duke Students Refuse to Read Fun Home as it Interferes with Christian Beliefs

Some Duke University students are refusing to read Alison Bechdel’s acclaimed graphic memoir Fun Home because of its depictions of nudity and gay sexuality.

A university committee had chosen the book as optional summer reading for incoming freshmen, the class of 2019, reports The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper. But some students say the book conflicts with their religious or moral beliefs with its story of Bechdel, now a well-known cartoonist, coming to terms with her lesbian sexuality while growing up in the family business, a funeral home run by her secretly gay father.

“I feel as if I would have to compromise my personal Christian moral beliefs to read it,” Brian Grasso wrote on the class of 2019’s Facebook page, citing the book’s “graphic visual depictions of sexuality.”

Another member of the class, Jeffrey Wubbenhorst, told The Chronicle the graphic format of the book made it especially challenging for him. “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,” he wrote in an email. Yet another, Bianca D’Souza, said she could not bring herself to view the depictions of nudity.

Some students have defended the choice, the paper reports. “Reading the book will allow you to open your mind to a new perspective and examine a way of life and thinking with which you are unfamiliar,” wrote Marivi Howell-Arza wrote in a reply to Grasso’s Facebook post.

Grasso said he received several supportive private messages in response to his post. He thought the choice of the book showed Duke’s disregard for conservative students. “Duke did not seem to have people like me in mind,” he told The Chronicle. “It was like Duke didn’t know we existed, which surprises me.”

Duke senior Sherry Zhang, a member of the book selection committee at the Durham, N.C., school, said the committee knew the book would be controversial, and whether or not to read it is up to individual students. She hopes it will generate a productive dialogue, she told The Chronicle. “I would encourage them to talk about why they chose to read it or not,” she said.

Fun Home, published in 2006, won several major book prizes and was adapted into a Broadway musical that won five Tony Awards this year, including Best Musical. The book by the Dykes to Watch Out For cartoonist proved controversial at another Southern school as well — the College of Charleston, S.C., where its appearance on the freshman reading list in 2013 led state legislators to withdraw some of the school’s funding, then restore it with strings attached.

Barry Saunders, a writer for Raleigh, N.C.’s News & Observer, lampooned the Duke students’ objections to Fun Home in a column published today. “If it’s the subject matter that the pious frosh at Duke find objectionable,” he wrote, “you have to wonder if they’ve ever read the Holy Bible … the salaciousness in which makes ‘Game of Thrones’ look like a day in Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.”

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