Alison Bechdel: Her and Her Father.

     I find it amazing how they really worked off of each other throughout there whole lives together.  Her father and her were both gay, but they mirrored each other and looked at each other for what they wanted for themselves.  The author wanted to be masculine and wanted that for her father.  However, her father was very feminine.  He liked to garden, flowers, home improvement, and nice clothes.  While at the the same time her father wanted to be feminine so he look at his daughter for that.  However, she was a tomboy and didn't like feminine things.
     In the book one example is she is wearing the least girly dress and he is wearing a velvet suit.  Right there is was an indication in her life that maybe their gender roles were switched.  However, she didn't notice it then like she does now.
     The author and her father also seem to be very similar.  They may be similar because they were father and daughter but they do have a lot in common.  They are both homosexual, the like to read, and both desired for living freely with their sexuality.  I feel that the author's father handled it differently then how she handled her sexual orientation.  While her father hid it from the world and secretly had affairs the author was open about it and joined rallies and read many books on it.  She was ashamed of who she was like her father was.  I think her father bottling up his feelings led to his death, if it was a suicide.
     I sense that the author feels like she connected with her father in some ways, but when it came to how they dealt with life she disagreed.  She looks down on him for what he did to her mother and with those young boys, but she feels bad at the same time because she knows what he was living with in his mind.  She might have had an easier time because of the two different decades they were living in.  She came out in the seventies when things were becoming more open while her father was from an era where homosexuality wasn't acceptable.
     Its interesting to see that because of the one factor that they were both homosexual led to many events in the author's life.  It led to a life with a father who held so much in that he almost was violent towards her mother and to her.  It led to her parents divorce and possibly her father's death.