The Queer “Third Species”: Tragicomedy in Contemporary LGBTQ American Literature and Television

A dissertation submitted to the

Graduate School

of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department English and Comparative Literature

of the College of Arts and Sciences

by

Lindsey Kurz, B.A., M.A.

March 2018

Committee Chair: Dr. Beth Ash Committee Members: Dr. Lisa Hogeland, Dr. Deborah Meem

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the recent popularity of the tragicomedy as a genre for representing queer lives in late-twentieth and twenty-first century America. I argue that the tragicomedy allows for a nuanced portrayal of queer identity because it recognizes the systemic and personal “tragedies” faced by LGBTQ people (discrimination, inadequate legal protection, familial exile, the AIDS epidemic, et cetera), but also acknowledges that even in struggle, in real life and in art, there is humor and comedy. I contend that the contemporary tragicomedy works to depart from the dominant late-nineteenth and twentieth-century trope of queer people as either tragic figures (sick, suicidal, self-loathing) or comedic relief characters by showing complex characters that experience both tragedy and comedy and are themselves both serious and humorous. Building off Verna A. Foster’s 2004 book The

Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, I argue that contemporary examples of the tragicomedy share generic characteristics with tragicomedies from previous eras (most notably the

Renaissance and modern period), but have also evolved in important ways to work for queer authors. The contemporary tragicomedy, as used by queer authors, mixes comedy and tragedy throughout the text but ultimately ends in “comedy” (meaning the characters survive the tragedies in the text and are optimistic for the future). Through a close reading of Armistead Maupin’s series Tales of the City (1978-2014), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A

Family Tragicomic (2006), and Jill Soloway’s television show Transparent, I demonstrate how these contemporary writers disrupt the tragic/comic binary in order to create a text that is closer to lived experience.

ii Copyright 2018

iii Acknowledgements

I am grateful to many people for their guidance, support, and encouragement throughout the process of writing this dissertation. Firstly, I’d like to thank my dissertation adviser Beth Ash. I’ve worked with and admired Dr. Ash since my first semester at the

University of Cincinnati, and her feedback, guidance, and ability to challenge me has been invaluable to my development as a writer and critical thinker. I am also thankful for the opportunity to work with Lisa Hogeland and Deb Meem, both of whom provided generous feedback and encouragement on this project. It has been a huge privilege to work with these three professors whose scholarship and commitment to education have inspired me so much.

I am appreciative of several other professors at UC. Thank you to Laura Micciche for showing me how to tackle a large writing project; I might still be trying to compose the perfect first sentence if it wasn’t for her dissertation-writing workshop. Thank you to

Christine Mok who read an early draft of my first chapter and provided helpful suggestions.

Thank you to Jim Schiff, Joyce Malek and Michelle Holley for their teaching guidance. Thank you to the University of Cincinnati Research Council and the English department for generously providing funding for my time at UC.

I am grateful to many friends for their support and camaraderie. Thank you to Kelly

Blewett, Joseph Cunningham, Josh Finnell Dan Groves, Niven Herro, Rochelle Hurt, Sammie

Marita, Janine Morris, Bhumika Patel, Holbrook Sample, Carla Sarr, Jacqui Simmons, Ryan

Smith, Steven Stanley, Lisa Summe, Anne Valente, and Sara Watson. Thank you, also, to my friend Laura Frank -- I called Laura the day I had the idea for this project, and she has provided insight and encouragement ever since.

iv The author Armistead Maupin distinguishes between biological family and logical family – those you are born into and those you choose. I consider myself infinitely lucky that my family is both. Mom, Dad, Danny, Lindsay, and Emma – I look up to you (Emma, you’re only as old as the amount of time I’ve been working on this dissertation, but you’re already an inspiration), and I am thankful for you every day.

Although they can’t read this (as far as I know!), I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank

Dolores and Humphrey. Their endless enthusiasm and capacity for love (and naps) is nothing short of aspirational. Lastly, thank you to Julia Koets. Julia has read everything I’ve written during my Ph.D. – from my application letter to this dissertation. In fact, the only thing she hasn’t read is this acknowledgments page, so if there are errors or unintentional omissions that is probably why.

v Table of Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………. ii Copyright Notice…………………………………………………………………………….. iii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………. iv Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………. vi

Chapter One: Introduction…………………………………………………...... 1 Chapter Two: Tales of the City…………………………………………………………. 25 Chapter Three: Fun Home……………………………………………………………….. 55 Chapter Five: Transparent………………………………………………………………. 91 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………... 130

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………... 132

vi

Chapter One: Introduction

“‘Merry’ and ‘tragical’? / … How shall we find concord of this discord?” – A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5.1.52-54)1

This dissertation explores how contemporary queer2 literature and television use the genre of the tragicomedy to represent nuanced queer characters and the complexity and multiplicity of queer lives in late twentieth and early-twenty-first century America. While widespread representation and theorizing of queerness may be a relatively new cultural phenomena, the theory and use of the tragicomedy dates back to sixteenth-century Europe when Italian playwright Giovanni Battista Guarini first argued that the genre was most fit for representing the complexities of life. Life, as he and many others have argued since, does not adhere to a tragic/comic binary. This deconstruction of the binary reflects the reality that life is both tragic and comic. Verna A. Foster, author of The Name and Nature of

Tragicomedy, writes, “the tragicomedy’s central requirement” is “to offer a more comprehensive and complex understanding of human experience than either tragedy or comedy” (Name and Nature 1). This complexity was not often present in texts about queer people prior to the contemporary period. Gay men, lesbians, and trans people, when represented at all, were often either solely tragic figures (suicidal, sickly, sad), or comic

1 Theseus, who is describing the contradictions of the play-within-the-play, speaks this line. He goes on to say that he had tears of laughter during the “tragical” scene when Pyramus commits suicide (5.1.60-64). 2 Throughout this dissertation I will use the term queer as “an umbrella term for the non- heteronormative, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and transgender people and behaviors” (to borrow Judith Kegan Gardiner’s definition in “Queering Genre”).

1 relief. But queer people’s lives, just like their heterosexual counterparts, are complex,3 and the tragicomedy is used to reflect this complexity. Through a close reading of Armistead

Maupin’s series Tales of the City (1978-2014), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family

Tragicomic (2006), and Jill Soloway’s television show Transparent, I demonstrate how these contemporary writers disrupt the tragic/comic binary in order to create a text that is closer to lived experience. This ability to disrupt binaries makes tragicomedy an optimal genre for representing the queer disruption of male/female, homosexual/heterosexual binaries, and showing how life is, as Armistead Maupin says, “an intense mixture of laughter and tears."

The trend of queer tragicomedy is particularly important to explore because of the essential role texts play in the lives of queer people. Queer people, Valerie Rohy states, “are liable to an intense library cathexis.” She continues, “What sort of people, after all, must research who they are? Those whose difference is antifamilial, somatically unmarked, culturally veiled, and potentially shaming are drawn to lonely stacks and secret research, where the archive enables self-definition” (355). It is significant that queer representation in texts is changing, and understanding this shift and the larger cultural implications is one part of the queer archival tradition. In In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies,

Subcultural Lives J. Jack Halberstam explains, “The archive is not simply a repository; it is also a theory of cultural relevance, a construction of collective memory, and a complex

3 This is not to discount the importance of these texts; Sara Ahmed’s book The Promise of Happiness demonstrates “unhappy queers as a crucial aspect of queer genealogy” (“Unhappy Queers”) and Heather Love in Feeling Backwards: Loss the Politics of Queer History cautions against ignoring representations of shame and sorrow in queer lives. I am not arguing for the erasure of these histories, but rather exploring the shift from primarily comic or tragic genres to the tragicomedy genre.

2 record of queer activity. In order for the archive to function, it requires users, interpreters, and cultural historians to wade through the material and piece together the jigsaw puzzle of queer history in the making” (169-70). This dissertation is a piece of the puzzle.

Section I: A Chronological Overview of Tragicomedy in Western Literature

The Instability of Genre Classifications

In the introduction to the essay collection Modern Genre Theory, David Duff writes, “In modern literary theory, few concepts have proved more problematic and unstable than that of genre” (1).4 Despite this, genre (“A recurring type of category of text, as defined by structural, thematic and/or functional criteria”) is important because it informs how text is understood (Duff xiii). John Frow argues that genre matters because, “[I]t is central to human meaning-making and to the social struggle over meanings. No speaking or writing or any other symbolically organised action takes place other than through the shapings of generic codes, where ‘shaping’ means both ‘shaping by’ and ‘shaping of’: acts and structures work upon and modify each other” (10). Genres change and evolve over time. Duff writes,

“[T]he perception that literary genres are dynamic rather than static entities … is the single most important factor separating modern from earlier genre theory” (232). The purpose of this section is to demonstrate how the tragicomic genre has evolved throughout its history.

Just as genre in general is a “problematic and unstable” concept, the tragicomedy in particular has challenged scholars and dramatists since its inception. Most literature about the tragicomedy, whether it is about the genre in early modern Spain or in modern

American fiction, is prefaced by a discussion of how the genre is notoriously tricky to

4 For example, Jacques Derrida deconstructs the concept of genre altogether in his 1980 essay “The Law of Genre. ” Derrida writes that “there is no genreless text,” but clarifies that “participation [in a genre] never amounts to belonging.” Instead, he writes, “Every text participates in one or several genres” (230).

3 define. Foster explains that tragicomedy, in addition to being “embroiled in controversy from the start,” is challenging to write about because there is a lack of consistent and clear terminology related to the genre. Foster also notes, “The nature of tragicomedy is difficult to define because its name has been used so variously … because the dramatic genre tragicomedy can comprise so many different modes (romantic, satiric, pastoral, melodramatic, and so on, as well as, indispensably, tragic and comic)” (1). Literary critic

Madeleine Doran, in her review of Marvin T. Herrick’s Tragicomedy: Its Origin and

Development in Italy, France, and England, expresses similar ideas about the challenges of writing a history of tragicomedy. She writes, “Anyone on the trail of tragicomedy … is on an uncertain quest” because of “the difference between word and thing. … The thing is so protean that the writer may sometimes doubt its entity” (124). However meandering the

“quest” to trace a lineage of tragicomedy, it is essential to understanding its form in the contemporary moment.

Classical Antiquity

Euripides’ play Alkêstis (produced around 438 B.C.E.) is often considered as the first tragicomedy even though the term was not yet invented. The play was the fourth in a tragic tetralogy. Normally, the fourth piece in a Greco-Roman tragic tetralogy is a satyr play, but

Alkêstis does not adhere to the usual conventions. In the introduction to his translation of the play, Carl R. Mueller describes the challenges of assigning a generic category to the play and how people have struggled with it “since antiquity.” He asks, “What is basically tragic drama doing moonlighting as a satyr play, or if not moonlighting, then at least filling the space always occupied by a satyr play?” (13). The issue, he explains, is the play has a happy

4 ending and “elements that simply don’t belong in an Athenian tragedy” (13). Mueller explains that a tragic play, as defined by Aristotle in Poetics, must have action “progress from good fortune to bad,” however, the opposite trajectory happens in Alkêstis. At the end of the play Mercury brings the titular Alkêstis back to life, and her husband Admêtos explains, “The life we once lived is now no more! Let us welcome the new! And I say to all assembled: I am a happy man!” (76). The stage direction reads, “Music. Song. Dance.” (76).

The reversal of the Aristotelian tragic narrative arc has puzzled scholars; however, some argue that the division between comic and tragic was not as strict in antiquity as it is often considered. In her essay “Aristotle and Tragicomedy,” Sarah Dewar-Watson writes, “[O]n one level, Greek theatre sustains a very formal separation of genres: tragic and comic dramatists were involved in separate competitions, and we might expect that this would militate against any blurring of generic boundaries. … On the other hand, it is apparent that the two dramatic genres kept a very sharp eye on one another. … [T]he genres stood in a close dialectic with one another” (20-21). Alkêstis is an example of genre blurred in terms of plot, but Dewar-Watson notes that genres were also mixed in plays that were tragic but featured some comic characters.

Roughly thirty years later the term “tragicomedy” would be used for the first time by Plautus Titus Maccius in his play Amphitryon (adapted between 204-184 B.C.E.); a play with both tragic (gods) characters and comic characters (slaves). In the prologue Mercury tells the audience he will change the play from a tragedy to a tragi-comedy. He states:

I’m a God: I’ll transform it.

I’ll convert this same play from tragedy

to comedy, if you like, and never change a line.

5 … I shall mix things up: let it be a tragi-comedy.

Of course it would never do for me to make it comedy out and out,

with kings and gods on the boards.

How about it, then? Well in view of the fact that there is a slave part in it,

I shall do just as I said and make it tragi-comedy. (Prologue 53-59)

Tragedies in classical antiquity were about royalty and gods, while comedies were about ordinary people, and Mercury’s prologue illustrates the conception of the tragicomedy as a mix of tragic and comic characters on stage. Several scholars have noted that Mercury was making a joke in the prologue, not proposing a new, legitimate genre. For example, Dewar-

Watson notes, “[I]t is clear from [the passage above) that the very term tragicomoedia begins life not as part of a highly developed programmatic statement about mixed genre, but as a joke” (17). Although Plautus/Mercury were making a joke, Amphitryon would be cited as a literary precedent by Renaissance dramatists and theorists to defend the tragicomedy.

Renaissance – Italy, France, Spain, England

The first person to theorize the tragicomedy was Italian author Giovanni Battista

Guarini in The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry. Guarini wrote the compendium as a defense of his play Il Pastor Fido, which had been “hotly attacked for its violation of some major neo-Aristotelian principles” (Hogan and Nickerson 1). Il Pastor Fido (The Faithful

Shepherd), first performed in 1581 and published in 1589 (Treherne), is a pastoral set in

Arcadia where every year a virgin must be sacrificed to the gods unless the spell is broken by the marriage of two people of godly descent. The play has a double plot that follows two

6 sets of lovers; one couple consists of Mirtillo (the faithful shepherd) and his lover Amarillis.

Mirtillo volunteers to take his lover Amarillis’ place when she is order to be scarified.

However, tragedy is averted when it is discovered that Martillo is a descendent of Hercules, thus the spell is broken. Il Pastor Fido is similar to Torquato Tasso’s 1573 play Aminta, but critics often view Aminta as the better work. Despite not earning high praise for its literary merit, critics agree that it influenced pastoral tradition, including Samuel Daniel’s Queens

Arcadia and Hymen’s Triumph; John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, Ben Jonson’s Sad

Shepherd, and “contribut[ed] more than a little to As You Like It of Shakespeare” (Hogan and Nickerson 3). The play also led Guarini to write his Compendium, an immensely significant text in the formation of the tragicomedy.

While Guarini interpreted “genres and their constituent elements (character, character system, plot, plot modules, pace, topoi, emotional register, intended effect on the audience)” as “plastic materials, capable of being detached, reconfigured, reversed, recalibrated, and transformed” other critics (like Giason Denores) considered them inflexible (Henke 46-47). It is unsurprising, then, that Il Pastor Fido drew much attention for its blending of the tragic and comic genres. Allan H. Gilbert, in his introduction to the

Compendium in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, explains, “Essentially [the criticism is] that the author has flown in the face of the Aristotelian tradition by writing a pastoral drama; such a work was not discussed by Aristotle, who authorized only tragedy and comedy. Still further, the tragicomedy, pastoral or not, is illegitimate, since it mingles parts peculiar to both tragedy and comedy” (504). Thus, in his Compendium Guarini proposes a

“third species” called the “tragicomedy’ which is: “the mingling of tragic and comic pleasure, which does not allow hearers to fall into excessive tragic melancholy or comic

7 relaxation” (512).5 Guarini argues that the tragicomedy creates feelings closest to those experienced in real life, an argument that has been repeated by many proponents of the genre. He explains that tragedy and comedy both go to excess, while the tragicomedy does not have too much blood and “inhumane” sights, or make the audience laugh so much that they “sin against modest and decorum of a well-bred man” (512). While Guarini’s “third species” proposal differs from what is described in Poetics, he agrees with Aristotle that comedy and tragedy should remain divided between different classes. He concedes,

“characters of high rank are fitting to tragedy, and those of humble station are suited to comedy,” but goes on to “deny that it is contrary to nature and to poetic art in general that persons great and those not great should be introduced into one plot” (508).

Guarini’s Compendium is the most referenced defense of the tragicomedy from the

Renaissance; however, several of his contemporaries wrote their own explanations for their employment of the genre. Robert Henke explains that there was a renewed interest in generic form after “editions, translations, and commentaries” of Aristotle’s Poetics were published in the 1540s. Rosalie Colie attributes the “hold that concepts of genre had on writers and their readers in the Renaissance” to “literate young men … turn[ing] to a cultural ideal which they defined as other and better than their own” (149). Additionally, the tragicomedy was “enormously popular with sixteenth century audiences,” but not everyone had the same enthusiasm and belief in its merits as Guarini. In fact, “some of the most successful playwrights and theorists are quite sheepish about their association with the genre” (Dewar-Watson 16). One example is Guarini’s Italian contemporary Giraldi

5 Amusingly, Guarini cites other successful examples of things that were created by the mixing of two other things: “horses and asses make a mule, copper and tin make bronze, and sulphur and nitre make gunpowder” (509-510).

8 Cinthio who stated that he only wrote “‘some [plays] with happy conclusions … merely as a concession to the spectators and to make the plays appear more pleasing on the stage’” and so that he conformed to the “‘custom of [the] times’” (Dewar-Watson 16). Cinthio wrote several plays that could be considered tragicomedies (Altile, Antivalomeni, Selene), but he preferred to call them “happy-ending tragedy” or “mixed tragedy” (Dewar-Watson16).

As in Italy, the tragicomedy was also very popular in seventeenth-century France, with fifteen tragicomedies being published between 1628-1634 (compared with sixteen comedies and ten tragedies) (Hammond 76). British scholar Nicholas Hammond notes that the only tragicomedy still discussed from the early modern French theater is Pierre

Corneille’s Le Cid, but he also argues, “to assess tragicomedy on these terms alone would seriously underestimate the importance of the role it played in the development of drama and indeed in the many debates between ancients and moderns over the course of the seventeenth century” (76). Although popular with audiences, the tragicomedy did not last long in the seventeenth-century French theater, and was soon replaced with plays bearing different genre categories, like “heroic comedy.” One argument for the quick disappearance of tragicomedy from the stage is that it simply became unfashionable and playwrights wanted to appeal to audiences using new genres. Hammond, however, argues that it was also the genre’s lack of a firm definition that led to its demise. As with some Italian theorists, Guarini being the exception, French writers had trouble grappling with the tragicomedy because of its lack of historical precedents and because “…nobody could agree what precisely it was” (Hammond 76). Ultimately, even Corneille would go on to change Le

Cid from a “tragi-comedie” to a “tragedy” (Hammond 76).

9 Tragicomic plays were also popular in early modern Spanish theater; however, plays that could be considered tragicomedies most often fell under the “comedie” label.

Sofie Kluge notes that although the term “tragicomedy” was becoming increasing acceptable around the turn of the seventeenth century, “simultaneously, the term was gradually being replaced by the term comedia” (298). Geraint Evans explains that comedias could have tragic elements in them, and that in many instances plays would be referred to as both tragedia and comedia. Evans argues:

Even if [plays from the period were] described simply as comedia, one reason for

considering many plays as tragicomedies is that they combine danger, laughter,

grief and happy endings, while juxtaposing high and low social orders with

correspondingly high and low linguistic styles to produce an art form which

appealed to a wide cross section of the public, but appalled prescriptive theorists of

theatre. (59)

Kluge explains that the term comedia was used instead of tragicomedia because it did not outwardly violate Aristotelian genre principles, and Evans also points out that Spanish playwrights were less concerned with what label they used. He writes, “On the whole, the

Spanish playwrights did not theorise what they did, they simply did it, and thus genre terminology usually lacked precision” (63). The playwright most associated with the genre is Lope de Vega, who used the actual term “tragicomedy” for many of his plays. De Vega, and other playwrights in his “school” (including Luis Vélez de Guevara and Tirso de Molina) adhered to Guarini’s idea of the tragicomedy by including characters of low rank in tragedies and characters of high rank in comedies. Their work differed from Guarini’s ideal because they sought to inspire extreme emotions in the audience, whereas “Guarini looks

10 to tragedy for the movement of feelings but not the disturbance of them, for the serious pleasure of tragedy but not its sadness, for its danger but not its death. From comedy, he is prepared to take laughter but not excessive laughter” (Evans 63).

Guarini’s Compendium was familiar to Spanish writers who sought to defend the genre. Ricardo de Turia6 wrote Apology for Spanish Comedies in 1616, “much of which plagiarizes Guarini,” and argued that critiques of the tragicomedy were invalid because they were based on rules for the tragedies and comedies, not separate genre (Guarini’s

“third species”). Similarly, Francisco de Cascales referred to tragicomedies as

“hermafroditos”7 and “monstruous de la poesía,” in his 1617 text Tablas poéticas, “indicating that they were neither tragedies nor comedies in the Aristotelian sense, but a mixture of both dramatic genres” (Kluge 297). At a time when Italian and French writers adhered to

Aristotelian principles of separating comedy and tragedy, Spanish theorists tried to

“reconcile the hybrid form of tragicomedy with classicist standards” (Kluge 301). This created a view of the Spanish as having a “misunderstanding or even ignorance of classical poetics” and led Lope to say, “France and Italy call me ignorant.” In his essay “The Politics of Golden Age Spanish Tragicomedy,” (1987) Walter Cohen writes of the how the tragicomic tradition in Spain is still disregarded in contemporary scholarship. Cohen critiques Marvin T. Herrick’s “standard survey” of the genre titled Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England. Herrick notably leaves out Spain, and

6 The author’s real name is Pedro de Rejaule y Toledo. 7 De Cascales’ personification of tragicomedy, as well how he connects it to sex, reminds me of the poet Kazim Ali’s essay “Genre-Queer: Notes Against Generic Binaries” in which he articulates the connections between gender and genre. He writes, “The text is a body because it is made of the flesh and breath and blood of a writer […] genre and gender are both reading practices, resulting from ‘authorial intention’—the author’s desire to bracket and frame the text, control (or contribute to the control of0 how the text is received, read, ‘understood’” (28 – 29).

11 Herrick argues this is due to “linguistic chauvinism” which “reflects, reproduces, and reinforces the characteristic marginalization of Spanish society, culture, literature, and theatre, and the accompanying underdevelopment of scholarship on these topics” (156).

In early modern England tragicomedies generally adhered to Guarini’s assertion, following Aristotle, “that characters of high rank are fitting to tragedy, and those of humble station are suited to comedy” (508). Foster explains, “In Renaissance tragicomedy, whatever may be the case in tragedy, the individual’s self-worth and the meaningfulness of his suffering are ultimately affirmed, thereby confirming his potentially tragic stature, according to Renaissance theory most decorously and universally represented by a protagonist of high rank” (Name and Nature 12-13). The English playwright John Fletcher advocated on behalf of Guarini’s tragicomedy and, along with his collaborator Francis

Beaumont, wrote many plays that he labeled as “tragicomedy.” Fletcher “was probably the most eminent practitioner of tragicomedy in seventeenth-century England (Hogan and

Nickerson 5). Fletcher’s tragicomedies adhered to Guarinian conventions of the tragicomedy because the tragic characters were noble, and because the plays did not “allow hearers to fall into excessive tragic melancholy or comic relaxation” (Guarini, Compendium

512). Using A King and No King and A Wife for a Month as examples, Foster writes, “In

Fletcher’s tragicomedies the audience’s feelings are excited but not harrowed as they are by tragedy because the dramatist somehow prepares us for comic dénouement” (“Ford’s

Experiments” 100). In his essay “Not Hornpipes and Funerals: Fletcherian Tragicomedy,”8

8 Williams’ title references Sir Philip Sidney who criticized the mixing of tragedy and comedy in his The Defence of Poesy: “But, if we mark [supposed tragicomedies from antiquity] well, we shall find that they never, or very daintily, match hornpipes and

12 William Proctor Williams explains that although Fletcherian tragicomedy is comic in the sense that they are “hopeful in outlook,” they are not comic in terms of humor. Of a line in

The Faithful Shepherdess (Fletcher’s adaptation of Il Pastor Fido), Williams writes,

“Although a modern audience may be amused by a few lines such as Cloe’s comment, ‘It is

Impossible to Ravish mee, / I am soe willing’ (III, 538), it is probably not the case that

Fletcher was trying to be comic or that his contemporaries would have seen these lines as such (Cloe’s lines are simply a way of representing her nymphomaniacal tendencies on a

Jacobean stage)” (147).

Fletcher’s lack of humorous comedy is just one way that his tragicomedies differ from those of Shakespeare. One of the most apparent differences is that Shakespeare, unlike Fletcher, did not label any of his plays “tragicomedy;” this absence contributes to

“remarkable lack of agreement about which plays are, in fact, Shakespeare’s tragicomedies”

(Mowat 14). In fact, Nancy Klein Maguire argues, “Many modern Shakespeareans avoid the term ‘tragicomedy’ entirely” (1). When the term is used, it is most often applied to

Shakespeare’s late plays. The plays Shakespeare wrote at the end of his career – Perciles

(written with George Wilkins), The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Cardenio, Henry

VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen (the last three written with Fletcher) – are often grouped together by critics, but there is no agreement as to how they should be categorized (“late romances,” “romances,” and “tragicomedy” have all been used) (Richards and Knowles 1-

funerals. So falls it out that, having indeed no right comedy in that comical part of our tragedy, we have nothing but scurrility, unworthy of any chaste ears, or some extreme show of doltishness, indeed fit to lift up a loud laughter, and nothing else; where the whole tract of a comedy should be full of delight, as the tragedy should be still maintained in a well-raised admiration.” Alastair Fowler points out that “Sidney cannot have been averse to mixture, since his own Arcadia mingled heroical and pastoral” (244).

13 2). Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope explain, “The late plays are ‘romances because they bring families together; they are ‘tragicomedies’ because they bring happiness only after trial. These are real features that can be pulled out of many of [the “late plays”], but they do not appear in exactly the same way in each play” (136). Additionally, some critics argue the “problem plays” (generally considered to be All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for

Measure, Troilus and Cressida, The Merchant of Venice) are tragicomedies; Foster distinguishes between the “late plays” and the “problem plays” by referring to the former as “romantic tragicomedies” and the latter as “ironic tragicomedies” (Name and Nature 53).

Barbara A. Mowat argues that Shakespeare’s problem plays came close to meeting Guarini’s definition of the tragicomedy except that he manipulated emotions to the extreme in a way that was “in defiance of Gaurini’s strictures” (93). Foster concurs with this characterization; she explains that “evil and suffering” are “an unalterable part of the nature of things and are not negated by the plays’ happy endings” (“Ford’s Experiments” 98). For example,

Shylock’s suffering and persecution are not negated by the marriage of the two sets of lovers in The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare’s tragicomedies, Foster argues, “[have] to do with the mystery of suffering, with man in his relation to the universe” (“Ford’s

Experiments” 97-98). This existential questioning becomes characteristic, too, of the modern tragicomedy.

Although the genre differed depending on location, in general, tragicomic plays during the Renaissance usually had at least one of the following characteristics: (1) a mixing of characters from high and low classes (a “mingling of kings and clowns,” in

Sidney’s words); (2) a mixing of comic and tragic styles (e.g. a tragic plotline told in the

“familiar language of comedy”); (3) a tragedy that ends with a comic resolution (Mowat 81,

14 Guthke 10-11). Although Guarini’s Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry was very influential in early modern Europe, his vision for a “third species” that fully combined tragedy and comedy in the same moment (as opposed to juxtaposing tragic and comic characters/plotlines) was rare. In their introduction to Il Pastor Fido Hogan and Nickerson writes, “It was not really until the latter years of the nineteenth century that a handful of remarkable dramatists pushed Guarini’s theories to their logical conclusions and created a totally integrated third genre that satisfyingly fused the extremes of tragedy and comedy not only into a single drama, but even into a single scene” (6).

Modernity

The tragicomedy was “virtually non-existent through the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century,” but again became a popular genre in the second half of the nineteenth century (The Name and Nature Foster 117). Whereas Renaissance writers had to justify their decision to defy Aristotelian genre convention, modern writers unapologetically mixed tragedy and comedy, regardless of whether or not they actually labeled their plays “tragicomedy.” Modern writers like Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Dürrenmatt,

Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Anton Chekhov, and Federico García Lorca achieve Guarini’s vision for a “third species” by successfully creating an “intricate fusion of comedy and tragedy” (Guthke 46). Lorca’s brother reports that the author once told him, “If in certain scenes the audience doesn’t know what to do, whether to laugh or to cry, that will be a success for me” (García Lorca 13). In modern tragicomedy, the “fusion” of comedy and tragedy heightens the comic and tragic responses, making each more poignant. Its ability to create a complex emotional reaction, modern critics and writers argue, is a reason the

15 tragicomedy is the genre most suited to reflect the present day reality; they also argue that this “fusion” only came about in the modern period.

In his comprehensive book Modern Tragicomedy: An Investigation Into The Nature of the Genre Karl S. Guthke argues that tragicomedy “as drama which is comic and tragic at the same time throughout the duration of its action is a distinctly ‘modern,’ post-

Enlightenment phenomenon” (ix).9 Guthke is not alone in his assertion that the tragicomedy is distinctly “modern.” In his introduction to the German edition of Joseph

Conrad’s tragicomic novel The Secret Agent (1924), Mann writes, “For I feel that, broadly and essentially, the achievement of modern art is that it has ceased to recognize the categories of tragic and comic or the dramatic classifications, tragedy and comedy, and views life as tragicomedy” (96). Guthke writes, “Tragicomedy, it is asserted almost with regularity bordering on monotony, is the only adequate expression of the human condition as seen in the ‘present’” (94). In Comic Agony: Mixed Impressions in the Modern Theatre,

Albert Bermel summarizes the various reasons critics have given for the rise of the tragicomedy in the modern era. He writes:

Explainers galore have tried to account for the recent drama’s refusal to comply

with conventional genres like tragedy and comedy. The explanations, frequently laid

out in slogans and sociologese, rely on the symptoms of our century’s social turmoil,

innovations, and international disenchantments, from computerized, nonstop war

to other forms of mass communication; from untruth in advertising to treachery in

politics; from the advent of Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer,

9 Foster writes that Guthke’s book, “though published in 1966, still provides the best account of the theory of the genre” (The Name and Nature, Foster 16).

16 detective and espionage stories, to the demise of God, Satan, communism, courtesy,

restraint, literacy, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, in no special order. (2)

This belief that the tragicomedy was the only adequate genre to express modern anxiety became even more widely held after the Second World War when the “present reality” became “overshadowed … by the mushroom clouds of atomic explosions, the real ones and the imaginatively anticipated future ones of even more cataclysmic proportions” (Guthke

115). Whereas Renaissance tragedies had a “theological dimension” (to use Guthke’s phrase), modern tragedy is centered on existential and man-made (e.g. atomic bombs) anxieties. Regardless of these existential anxieties, the writer of the modern tragicomedy ultimately presents an optimistic outlook at the end of the novel or drama. Guthke argues that the modern writer of tragicomedy, “[Writes] not with the sheer confidence of postwar

Pollyannas but with that bravely intelligent hope against hope with which even Thomas

Mann’s Doctor Faustus concludes” (118). Whereas Renaissance tragicomedy often ends with the union of two otherwise tragic characters, modern tragicomedy often ends with an optimistic, but ambiguous future for its comic characters.

Three other modern literary modes – satire, dark comedy, grotesque – are often conflated with tragicomedy because they can inspire similar complex emotions in the audience. Foster explains that these modes can be present in tragicomedies, but as long as they do not “predominate” the play/novel then it remains a tragicomedy. She writes,

“When the grotesque or the satiric is incorporated into tragicomedy, it tends to be local, contributing to the emotional complexity of the play but by no means determining its genre or accounting for its total effect” (The Name and Nature, Foster 15). Guthke distinguishes between satire and tragicomedy by explaining that satire wants to point out what is wrong

17 in the world, whereas the author of tragicomedy wants to “leave his audience not only in a state of indecision as to whether to laugh or to weep, but also a more profound and disturbing disorientation to the human condition” (70). The grotesque, Guthke writes, presents a “vision of an absurdity … which defies all intellectual efforts to clarify and elucidate its possible meaning in terms of human understanding,” whereas tragicomedy presents the audience with a recognizable reality.

Generic Constants

Despite differences between tragicomedies in different periods, there are characteristics of the tragicomedy genre that remain constant. In The Name and Nature of

Tragicomedy, Foster articulates the “recognizable likeness[es]” that persist throughout the history of the genre. “Tragicomedy’s central inherent requirement,” Foster argues, is “to offer a more comprehensive and complex understanding of human experience than either tragedy or comedy and to evoke in its audience a more complicated response, pleasurably tragic, painfully comic, to that experience” (1). Like Guthke, Foster agrees that comedy and tragedy are “formally and emotionally dependent on one another” and the mixture of the two enhances each, thus the audience’s emotional response is heightened. The creation of tragic and comic responses, sometimes in the same moment, is another fundamental characteristic of tragicomedy. A tragic response, according to Foster, is “intense emotional involvement and a painful awareness of the ironic discrepancy between what is and what might have been”; a comic response includes “laughter, both critical and sympathetic, a wry appreciation of incongruity, some degree of detachment, including the ability to observe one’s own responses and the dramatic means by which they are created” (14). The

18 combination of effects differs depending on the text/production, but tragicomedy is

“deliberately contrived in its overall design and in its individual segments to evoke such complex and simultaneous engagement and detachment, by its mixture of tragic and comic elements in situation, characters (often within a single character), dialogue, and visual effects” (14). In other words, the author of tragicomedy is very deliberate in creating a mixed response in the audience, and in doing so more accurately reflects the reality of life outside the text.

The Contemporary Queer Tragicomedy

Tales of the City, Fun Home, and Transparent all meet the “central inherent requirement” of tragicomedy: each text mixes tragic and comic responses and produces a

“more comprehensive and complex understanding of human experience” (The Name and

Nature Foster 1). As I argue in the first section of this introduction, this is particularly significant for queer texts because representations of LGBTQ people have been notoriously reductive (e.g. queer characters as one-dimensional stereotypes). As will be shown, each example mixes tragic and comic plotlines throughout the text, and each also mixes tragic and comic responses in the same moment, and often tragic and comic attributes in the same character. As Foster points out, tragicomedy as a “distinguishable and theoretically significant new genre” has happened twice: in the Renaissance and modern period. While the contemporary queer tragicomedy is different than both Renaissance and modern tragicomedy, it maintains a “recognizable likeness” that connects it to previous iterations of the genre.

19 My definition of the contemporary queer tragicomedy draws on characteristics from the Renaissance and modern period and can be broken down into the following essential elements:

1. Like the modern tragicomedy, the contemporary queer tragicomedy

consists of comic figures (i.e. regular, non-noble people) in a tragic

universe.

2. Like Renaissance tragicomedy the tragedy is related to real-life issues

(familial exile, social/institutional discrimination, AIDS) rather than the

existential crises of modern tragicomedy.

3. As with both Renaissance and modern tragicomedy, the contemporary

queer tragicomedy ends in comedy, both in terms of plot (as in the

Renaissance), and in terms of optimistic outlook (as in the modern period).

4. The comic ending in Renaissance tragicomedy usually meant lovers (or, a

pair of lovers) uniting in marriage, but in the queer tragicomedy comic

resolution involves pivotal moments in the lives of many LGBTQ people:

finding community (or, “chosen family”), and coming out (as Judith Kegan

Gardiner argues in “Queering Genre”).10 The comic ending of queer

contemporary tragicomedies is not defined by normative life markers like

10 This comic ending serves as an example of queer temporality. Queer temporality, as argued by J. Jack Halberstam in In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subculture Lives, “has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space” (2).

20 marriage and children, but instead present alternatives to

heteronormative time.11

5. As with modern tragicomedy, the ending is often “unfinished” (to use

Foster’s term) but optimistic in outlook and emphasizes queer futurity.12

Queer futurity, in other words, is optimism that the future will be better; in

the contemporary queer tragicomedy the ending of the text generally

leaves its audience with the impression that the queer character’s story

continues and that there is reason to be optimistic for their future.

Section II: Primary Texts

I chose Tales of the City, Fun Home, and Transparent as the primary texts for this dissertation not only because they each illustrate the contemporary queer tragicomedy, but because of several commonalities that make them particularly conducive to discussion.

Firstly, each of the texts reached, and continues to reach, large audiences (specifics of their distribution, critical reception, and audience size are discussed in respective chapters).

Tales of the City, although lacking in much critical scholarship, is hugely popular in the

LGBTQ community. Maupin’s Tales continues to be re-printed (a Tales of the City Omnibus was published in 2016), Netflix is developing a continuation of the television version of the

11 Interestingly, Halberstam cites Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy Waiting for Godot as in example of queer temporality: “Waiting for Godot can be read … as a defamiliarization of time spent: a treatise on the feeling of time wasted, of inertia or time outside of capitalist propulsion” (In A Queer Time, Halberstam 7). 12 José Esteban Muñoz theorizes queer futurity in his 2009 book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. “Queerness,” Muñoz argues, “is primarily about futurity and hope” (11). Muñoz contends that “queerness is always on the horizon,” and that “queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (11, 1).

21 series that was on PBS (Littleton), and there is renewed attention on Maupin who is currently on an international press tour promoting his new memoir, Logical Family. Fun

Home garnered substantial critical praise and became a regularly required book on many college campuses. The success of the musical Fun Home, which recently completed its national tour and has been adapted for the stage in several different countries, continues to turn Bechdel and her graphic memoir into a household name (queer and non-queer households alike). Transparent, like Fun Home, is also well known by queer and heterosexual audiences. The series falls into the “prestige TV” category, which means it has amassed much discussion about both its merits and its problematic aspects. This includes critical journal articles, popular media websites (e.g. Vulture and The AV Club), and less- formal “think pieces” published online. The current status of the series is unknown because of the allegations of sexual harassment against Jeffrey Tambor. Tambor seemed to announce resignation from the series in November 2017, after claiming the set had been

“afflicted” with “a politicized atmosphere” that made him feel like he could not return to production (Nyren). However, in December 2017 his publicist clarified that neither

Amazon nor Tambor have made a “final decision” regarding his status as the show’s protagonist (Bradley). It remains to be seen if the series will continue with Tambor’s

Maura, without Maura, or not at all. Of course, how the creators choose to handle the situation will affect future readings of Transparent as tragicomedy, but as a stand-alone four season series it remains a paramount example of the genre in the contemporary period.

The texts are also similar because they each pushed the boundaries of what is expected within their medium (fiction, graphic narratives, television). Before it became a

22 series of novels, Tales was published as a newspaper periodical in the San Francisco

Chronicle, and later the San Francisco Examiner. Tales was revolutionary for its original readers because of how many unashamed queer characters appeared in a major, non-gay publication (as opposed to something like the Bay Area Reporter, an LGBTQ newspaper).

Furthermore, Maupin made a column that was initially meant to serve as a fun and entertaining read, and used it as a platform to show mainstream readers some difficult realities faced by LGBTQ people. Similarly, comics are not usually the medium people go to for literary story telling and comics do not generally receive high critical phrase for their literariness (with some exceptions, such as Art Spiegelman). However, Fun Home is as literary as it is artistic (it “quietly succeeds in telling a story, not only through well-crafted images but through words that are equally revealing and well chosen,” writes Sean Wilsey of The New York Times’ “Sunday Book Review”). Fun Home, as is discussed in Chapter Two, plays a large part in the changing perception of graphic narratives because of how it exceeded expectations of literary quality. Transparent, similarly, goes beyond what is expected of a twenty-five minute, family-centric, “comedy” television show (Transparent is categorized as a comedy for awards shows). Generally shows that fit within those parameters do not grapple with serious topics, but in four seasons of Transparent topics have included sexual abuse, the Holocaust, the Israel/Palestine conflict, et cetera. Even in a post-Sopranos world,13 it is rare for a family-centered “comedy” to be so ambitious in scope.

Certainly the fact that Transparent was produced for Amazon TV, as opposed to network or cable television, allowed for innovation in what is expected from a twenty-five minute show (for one, lack of commercial breaks is conducive to complex narrative).

13 Sopranos is widely cited as the beginning of a “golden age of television” (Reese)

23 In a 2009 essay about Fun Home, Monica B. Pearl describes Bechdel’s book as part of a broader narrative about queer lives. She writes, “[Fun Home is] a novel of mise-en-abyme, a microcosmic story of the larger culture, a story of how one used to but no longer has to hide away one’s unacceptable or inappropriate identity, and marry conventionally to bury it” (291). This dissertation shows how all of these primary texts are microsomal stories that illustrate the changing representation of queer people in literature and popular culture, and how the tragicomedy genre is integral to this evolution of representation.

Chapter Break Down

In Chapter One, I demonstrate how Armistead Maupin’s series Tales of the City is connected by a “family likeness” to historical examples of the tragicomedy, as well as how the series is an early example of the contemporary queer tragicomedy. In Chapter Two, I discuss Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home and its musical adaptation, specifically comparing Bruce’s tragic narrative with Alison’s tragicomic narrative. Lastly, in

Chapter Three, I focus on Jill Soloway’s television show Transparent and explore how the series uses concepts of queer temporality and queer futurity as comic devices.

24 Chapter Two: Tales of the City

But I think the greatest challenge of a writer is to be able to combine the serious issue and serious concerns with comedy. I feel tremendously bored by pure drama or pure comedy. I think either thing is essentially an empty medium. I’ve always felt that the mix of those two elements came closest to really approaching how I feel about life, which is an intense mixture of laughter and tears. - Armistead Maupin

In 1976 Armistead Maupin first published his weekly series Tales of the City in a Bay

Area newspaper, the Pacific Sun, but he was given strict instructions not to let the number of homosexual characters exceed thirty percent. Maupin’s managing editor was so intent on enforcing this rule that he kept a chart in his office with a list of “homosexual” and

“heterosexual” characters (Michael 11). Despite the initial restriction, Maupin was able to create a fictional world that reflected the reality that queer people do, in fact, exist. It was the characters within that thirty percent who garnered attention for Maupin and contributed to him becoming a literary and social icon during the last two decades of the twentieth century.14 In the 41 years since Maupin’s periodical (originally titled The Serial) first appeared in the short-lived Pacific Sun, it has evolved into a nine novel series translated and distributed internationally; an award-winning mini-series aired in the

United States and United Kingdom; and a musical performed in San Francisco. The series can be found on various lists (comprised by reader polls) of favorite “gay-novels” of all time, and Maupin himself often earns a place on lists of LGBT icons (for example, he placed

21st in The Advocates’ 2007 list of “40 Greatest LGBT Heroes of the Past 40 Years”). A recent testament to Maupin’s place in popular culture is the use of one of his quotations as an

14 Of his publicized relationship with his partner of 12 years, Maupin states, “Terry and I were in the couples section of People together – as a couple. And we saw it as a political act to show that two men could be happy together and free to build a life with each other” (Gale 75).

25 epigraph for the documentary series I am Cait.15 In addition to widespread commercial success,16 Tales also has a cult following, as evident through fan tributes like the long- running walking tour of the series’ locales still available today in San Francisco, or the guide to 31 bars and restaurants visited by characters. The early years of the Tales preceded a time when readers could easily share writing they liked by clicking on the now ubiquitous social media links; however, Maupin’s devoted followers took to Xeroxing his columns to mail to friends in other parts of the country, earning him the nickname “the

Xerox Dickens” (Gale).

Although hugely popular with LGBTQ readers, there is not much critical scholarship investigating Maupin’s work and he has not earned literary accolades. Unlike Fun Home and

Transparent, Tales of the City is not widely known among heterosexual audiences. It may seem paradoxical to claim that Maupin is one of the most famous un-famous contemporary

American writers, but I will outline how his relevance and popularity within the LGBTQ community makes him so. First, Tales of the City is an important series for millions of

LGBTQ readers around the world. Author Josh Kilmer-Purcell writes, “For a lot of gay men,

Mouse [a nickname of the protagonist] was our first gay sighting – the first time we spotted a gay man in our culture who wasn’t hidden behind euphemisms, villainously perverted, or tragedy-bound” (Michael 11). Through the inclusion of “gay characters in mainstream storylines” Maupin was able to address an array of important LGBT issues in an unprecedented way. In fact, Kilmer-Purcell writes, “there are few topics in modern LGBT history that we didn’t hear about first from Maupin” (12). In a 1992 interview with the

15 “The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives” (Tison). 16 Maupin’s series has sold six million copies and has been translated into ten languages (Miller, “Armistead Maupin’s”).

26 now out-of-print journal Christopher Street Maupin pointed to the ability of the series to reach a large and diverse audience. He stated, “I was communicating gay themes and gay concerns to the readers of a so-called family newspaper. I hear from people in their twenties and thirties today who tell me that they used to read about the characters Michael or Mona when they were twelve years old and picked up the family newspaper every morning” (Hunt).

Second, Maupin was the first fiction author in the United States to write about the

AIDS epidemic in America ("Timeline").17 Not only was he the first, his work was unique because he was writing about the crisis as it was happening and while it was being ignored by the government, the medical community, and the media (Shilts xxii). As Randy Shilts wrote in the prologue to And The Band Played On, “Newspapers and television largely avoided discussion of the disease until the death toll was too high to ignore and the casualties were no longer just the outcasts.”18 Through its publication as a periodical, Tales of the City entered the homes of people who might not otherwise choose to read about the epidemic. The series also worked to counter the narrative that HIV and AIDS only affected perverse gay men who deserved it because of their sexual deviance. Today the series remains a testament to how things were for many people during the peak of the crisis; it

17 In an interview published in Christopher Street the interviwer tells Maupin, “In 1983, in Babycakes, you dealt with the issue of AIDS. Before that book, I don’t recall seeing AIDS dealt with in fiction.” Maupin replies, “Babycakes, as far as I know, was the first fiction anywhere to deal with the AIDS epidemic” (Hunt 8). 18 Interestingly, Shilts worked at the San Francisco Chronicle while Maupin was also there. According to Warhol, “Shilts’ book borrows shamelessly … from Maupin’s narrative method in its episodic accounts of individuals’ experience with gay culture and with AIDS; it was itself originally serialized in The New Yorker,” however Shilts does not reference Tales in his book.

27 stands in contradiction to attempts to rewrite a history where the government cared about thousands of gay men dying.19

Lastly, in addition to the cultural significance of Tales, the series also serves as a prime example of how contemporary queer writers use the tragicomedy genre to more accurately reflect a range of LGBTQ experiences. The belief that the tragicomedy reflects the human experience more closely than either tragedy or comedy is one that dates back to the earliest defense of the genre, the 1599 pamphlet Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry by

Giambattista Guarini, and was taken up by Verna A. Foster in her 2004 book The Name and

Nature of the Tragicomedy. She argues that the “central inherent requirement” of the tragicomedy is “to offer a more comprehensive and complex understanding of human experience than either tragedy or comedy and to evoke in its audience a more complicated response, pleasurably tragic, painfully comic, to that experience” (1). This “family likeness”

(as Foster calls genre commonalities) exists in all periods of the tragicomedy, despite changing understandings of the genre. Tales, and the other texts I discuss in this dissertation, adhere to this “central inherent requirement” while also reimagining the tragicomedy. The queer tragicomedy, as defined in the introduction, is a text that incorporates both humor and tragedy to show the difficult realities faced by queer individuals, but ultimately the text ends in a way that illustrates resilience and queer futurity. In this chapter I will show how Maupin’s series shares a “family likeness” to historic examples of the genre through his depiction of tragedy and his use of humor for

19 This is not to suggest that AIDS only affects gay men or that it is no longer an issue. While AIDS has declined in the United States by 19% as of 2014, there are still 1.2 million people living with HIV in the United States (“U.S. Statistics”). The World Health Organization reported that 36.9 million people globally were living with HIV/AIDS in 2014, with Sub Saharan Africa being the most affected region. A staggering 34 million people have died from AIDS, according to the World Health Organization (“Global”).

28 comic relief. By tracing examples of queer futurity in Tales from its debut in 1976 to its conclusion in 2014, I will also show how the series is an early example of a queer tragicomedy.

The San Francisco edition of Pacific Sun only ran for five weeks, but in that time

Maupin’s series caught the attention of Charles McCabe, a popular columnist for The San

Francisco Chronicle. McCabe, described by Maupin’s biographer as “crusty” and

“homophobic,” believed The Serial “was just the sort of ‘vulgar crap’ the Chronicle needs to attract a younger readership” (Gale 53). Maupin was then taken to meet the editor of the paper, Charles de Young Thieriot, who insisted on changing the name of the periodical to indicate its fictiveness: The Serial became Tales of the City and first ran in daily 800-word segments in the Chronicle on May 24, 1976. Tales’ first year in the Chronicle was a success: it attracted attention from Newsweek and other major media outlets and was imitated by other newspapers (without success, according to Gale). The Chronicle renewed Maupin’s contract and the second installment of the series began in February of 1977, followed by the third installment, Further Tales of the City, in 1981, and the fourth and final installment,

Babycakes, published in the Chronicle in 1983. Harper & Row published each of the first four installments as a paperback in the United States, and Corgi (an imprint of Transworld

Publishing who became part of the Random House Group in 1989) published them in the

United Kingdom.20 The San Francisco Examiner published the fifth book of the series, titled

Significant Others, in 1986; paperback and hardcover editions of the novel were published

20 An import of the American publication of Babycakes was seized by the British customs agency for “conspiracy to import indecent material,” despite Babycakes having been distributed by a British publishing house already.

29 in 1987 and 1988, respectively. Sure of You, Maupin’s sixth book in the series, published in

1989, was the first to follow the form and structure of a novel rather than a periodical. Over two million copies of the series in novel form were sold by 1996. Maupin published Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener during an eighteen-year break from the series, but then he returned to the series in 2007 with Michael Tolliver Lives. HarperCollins published Mary

Ann in Autumn in 2010 followed by The Days of Anna Madrigal in 2014.

The series is both a periodical and a series of novels. Although the first four of the nine books were published as installments in the newspaper, the following five books extend a similar form: short chapters, constant shifting of perspective, chapters ending in

“cliff-hangers” (as they would in the newspaper to keep readers coming back for more). In

“No Time to be Idle: The Serial Novel and Popular Imagination” Shawn Crawford explains that serial publication “reached its zenith during the Victorian era” and has experienced fluctuating periods of popularity and decline since then. Crawford broadens the understanding of the serial to incorporate other more contemporary mediums, such as television. However, in terms of serialized fiction he credits Maupin with “leading the renaissance” of its renewed popularity since the 1970s.21 While the publication of Tales of the City as a periodical may have earned Maupin the "Xerox Dickens" nickname, the nickname could also refer to a Dickensian approach to breadth of characters and certain plot elements. Like much of Dickens' fiction, Tales encompasses a vast cast of characters

21 Other post-1970 serials include: Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities in Rolling Stone (1984-85); Stephen Kings’ The Green Mile was released in installments once a month for six months (1996); Julian Fellowes’ Belgravia (2016); and recently (in 2013) the San Francisco Chronicle picked up another series titled Click City by Heather Stallings about “the lives of tech millionaires, PR managers, cyclists, and hackers, who live in communes to save on rent” (Hurley).

30 contained (for the most part) within a city. 22 Also similar to Dickens is the highly coincidental way all the characters either come across one another at some point in the text or have an inadvertent effect on each other's lives.

In “Making ‘Gay’ and ‘Lesbian’ into Household Words: How Serial Form Works in

Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City,” one of the few critical pieces about the series, Robyn

R. Warhol explains that Tales “employs the characteristic conventions of Victorian serialized domestic novels – wild coincidences, melodramatic events, open-ended plots, recurring characters, and cliff-hanger action” (379). Warhol argues Maupin’s use of the serialized form aids in the process of bringing queer lives into mainstream culture; she writes, “serialized domestic fiction has a performative force of its own.” She continues: “It opens up an imaginative world of gay sex and desire that had not made its way into mainstream discourse before and would therefore have been literally unimaginable to many of the series’ original readers” (393). Warhol argues that readers of the series

(whether they were reading as it was published in the newspaper or when it came out in volume form) became very emotionally invested in the Tales’ “familiar characters.” This had the effect, she continues, of “making AIDS a family matter, even in heterocentrically configured and otherwise emotionally (and – one presumed – medically) well-defended homes” (396-397). What allowed readers to become so invested in the series, Warhol contends, was the “deployment of serial conventions.” She writes:

Tales of the City works to make AIDS real for an audience comfortable with the genre

of realist, sentimental fiction; if its ultimate aim is to make that audience more

comfortable with homosexuality, it is also to make the reality of AIDS excruciatingly

22 Dickens' London, however, was much larger than Maupin’s San Francisco (a 7 mile by 7 mile city).

31 uncomfortable for a readership that might not be equally touched by the factual

accounts running side-by-side in the newspaper with the series’ installments. (396)

While I agree with Warhol’s conclusion that Tales is remarkable because of how it brought

LGBTQ issues into “mainstream discourse,” I argue that it was the tragicomedy genre that contributed most to this feat. The tragicomedy allowed for Maupin to alert readers to personal and systemic tragedies faced by LGBTQ people, while simultaneously balancing out the difficult subject matter with comedy. Maupin introduced readers to a web of characters in 1978 and readers still cared about those characters long after the stories were serialized (as evidenced by the millions of copies the non-serial books sold) – this engagement with the characters has allowed Maupin to bring up important LGBTQ issues for more than four decades.

In Tales the central location for the web of characters is the “well-weathered, three- story structure made of brown shingles” on Barbary Lane owned by the whimsical landlady

Anna Madrigal. Mrs. Madrigal, as her tenants call her, serves as a maternal figure for many of her tenants23 and forms relationships that continue long after the tenants move on from

Barbary Lane. The first installment of the series establishes four of Mrs. Madrigal’s tenants as main characters whose perspectives are featured in all of the nine books: Mary Ann

Singleton, Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, Mona Ramsey, and Brian Hawkins. While each installment in the series includes other reoccurring characters, they exist primarily in relation to these core five.

The series begins with Mary Ann in San Francisco, there for an eight-day vacation, calling her parents to tell them she is not coming home. The third sentence of the book

23 As long as one is willing to consider a woman who grows her own marijuana, names it after legendary women, and distributes it freely to her “children” as “maternal.”

32 reads, “On the fifth night, she drank three Irish coffees at the Buena Vista, realized that her

Mood Ring was blue, and decided to phone her mother in Cleveland” (Tales 1). This sentence encapsulates two characteristic features of Maupin’s series: specific mention of

San Francisco places (a nice feature for those who went on to create Tales of the City inspired walking tours) and pop culture reference points that locate the series in a specific moment (a Pet Rock makes an appearance in the next chapter).24 For followers of the series reading at the time of publication this likely has the effect of making the text feel directly relevant to their lives and the moment in which they are living. Maupin’s decision to start the story with Mary Ann, a character by means of whom readers are introduced to other characters, worked to fend off alienation of readers who would not entertain the idea of a gay main character. However, it is only a few (short) chapters before Mary Ann brings the reader to Michael when she tries to pick up his boyfriend in the produce aisle of a

Safeway. From there the two characters’ storylines become intertwined for the entire series.

The “mainstream storylines” were often outlandish, bizarre, compelling, and reminiscent more of a soap opera than deft critiques of late-twentieth century politics and culture. For example, in More Tales of the City, Mary Ann dates a man with selective amnesia that was brought on by a traumatic experience involving a cannibalistic cult based in San Francisco’s famous Grace Cathedral; Mary Ann, a budding investigative journalist, helps him unravel the mystery. Then in Further Tales of the City, Jim Jones secretly returns to San Francisco after the Jonestown massacre, lives in Golden Gate park, seduces a gossip

24 Mary Ann’s mom begins the conversation by telling her about “this crazy man on McMillan and Wife who was strangling all these secretaries;” this is an especially funny cultural reference considering the star of the show, Rock Hudson, will serve as inspiration for the closest movie star in Further Tales of the City.

33 columnist and abducts a main character’s twin children and takes them on an Alaskan cruise before being exposed by Mary Ann in a breakthrough moment in her television reporter career. However, as Kilmer-Purcell points out, despite these outlandish storylines the LGBTQ characters face issues relevant to LGBTQ people in the "real world” (Michael).

Among such are: coming out as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans; being rejected by family; and building non-biological families. Although the heterosexual and cisgender characters are also involved in serious plotlines (such as Mary Ann's battle with ovarian cancer in

Mary Ann in Autumn), generally the traumatic issues pertaining to LGBTQ characters are located in a fictive world with entertaining and comedic plotlines. By having an overall easy and fun-to-read narrative Maupin is able to introduce important and otherwise invisible topics faced by LGBTQ individuals in the late-twentieth century. Kilmer-Purcell refers to this as Maupin's "subtle power … to “break ‘gay news’ to [a] mainstream audience in such an entertaining and nonthreatening way that [it] avoids the militant backlash of more overt activism” (Michael 12).

In the first installment of Tales of the City, Anna Madrigal (Mrs. Madrigal to most) tells her beaux, and the reader, her theory that San Franciscans were “citizens of Atlantis” in their last incarnations. She explains, “We all lived in this lovely, enlightened kingdom that sank beneath the sea a long time ago. Now we’ve come back to this special peninsula on the edge of the continent … because we know, in a secret corner of our minds, that we must return together to sea” (240). For Mrs. Madrigal and all the other main characters

(and most minor characters) San Francisco is Atlantis, an “enlightened kingdom” where they are more free to be themselves without the judgment they faced in their place of origin. The city, the reader comes to understand, is a place for those that have either been

34 exiled or chose exile because they live outside the mores of society.25 However, despite the rose-tinted view of San Francisco that the reader finds in most of the books (a critical view of how the city has changed due to the tech industry is presented in 2014’s The Days of

Anna Madrigal)26 the city does not shield them from various forms of tragedy.

As stated in the introduction, our understanding of what can be considered tragedy

(both in the sense of dramatic and literary works, and in real life) has shifted over time.

Aristotle defined the dramatic tragedy as something that happens to nobility. In his 1949 essay titled “Tragedy and the Common Man” (published soon after Death of a Salesman was first staged) Arthur Miller explains that the “modern man” is not considered an appropriate subject for the focus of a tragedy because he is “below” it. This leads, Miller argues, “to the inevitable conclusion … that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly placed, the kings of the kingly, and where this admission is not made in so many words it is most often implied.” However, Miller goes on to argue, “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were” (3). As tragedy scholar Adrian Poole explains,

“The world has been flattened; everyone’s equal, nobody’s different, so no particular death

(or life) can be distinguished from any other” (75). In other words, whereas once the genre of the tragedy only depicted kings and noblemen, the tragic form in the American modern era now extends to ordinary lives. Furthermore, tragedy is no longer defined by a stage

25 Of course, many people in San Francisco have been there their entire lives and instead of it being Atlantis it is just where they are from. Interestingly, the only characters who are from San Francisco are members of the Halycon family. They are generally uptight, judgmental, and preoccupied with maintaining their status as a wealthy “old” San Francisco family. Their name suggests they view themselves as belonging to the halcyon days of San Francisco before hippies and homosexuals migrated there. They now live just outside the city. 26 The New York Times Book Review described the first novel as “[a]n extended love letter to a magical San Francisco,” while the Los Angeles Times called the most recent novel “[a]n elegy – for San Francisco.”

35 covered in corpses,27 but includes the myriad of ways that individuals suffer during their lifetime. By this more contemporary definition, what happens to many of the characters in

Tales of the City can be considered tragic, despite the characters not being highbred nobility.28

The series explores the many ways that the “common man” is subject to tragedy just as much as kings were in pre-modern texts. In Tales of the City “the common man” can be understood as the common queer: stories of violence and familial rejection are experiences shared by many LGBTQ individuals. Maupin incorporates tragic phenomena into his series, such as homophobia, transphobia, and gendered violence. He also includes tragic events that occurred while he was writing his column and books, (e.g. the Jonestown Massacre and the AIDS epidemic). The acts of violence and rejection experienced by the characters in

Tales are representative of tragic realities because, as Poole explains, a “tragic act” is “not an isolated event, any more than Lucrece is an isolated victim” (98).

In 1981 one of Maupin’s storylines involves a car full of people brutally attacking

Brian and Michael while shouting, “faggot” and “cocksucker.” As they are repeatedly stabbing Brian, Michael screams, “Please… please don’t… he’s not gay! He’s not gay!” (334).

This fictional incident is similar in several ways to an unfortunately real incident described by Shilts in his biography of Harvey Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street. Shilts recounts the murder of Robert Hillsborough who was stabbed to death by a man shouting “faggot” over and over. Maupin provides a fictional account of real tragic violence. He shows that even in

27 This rule of tragedy has also been broken throughout history, with deaths occurring in the middle of the play or even before the play beings (as in Antigone). 28 With the exception of one minor character: an English nobleman who marries a lesbian and moves to San Francisco, drives a cab, and becomes an active member of the BDSM community.

36 San Francisco, the supposed “gay capital of the world,” violence exists against people presumed not to meet the sexual norm. The incident is a jarring reminder to readers that even in “enlightened kingdom[s]” tragedy can happen to the “common man.” This scene, and many others equal in violence and horror, also forces non-queer audiences to confront tragic realities in their typically light, morning entertainment. As Warhol writes, “Tales of the City uses the conventions of serial form to render gay and lesbian life familiar not just to those whose world is being represented in the series, but also to the homophobic mainstream audiences of the San Francisco Chronicle and of the nationally distributed reprinted novels” (391). While portraits of happy queer relationships and LGBTQ culture feature frequently in the series, Maupin’s inclusion of the violent realities of homophobic culture, alongside comedic storylines, ensures that audiences to some extent confront tragedies commonly faced by the queer individual.

A storyline in the first installment of Tales of the City serves as an example of when comedy is entwined with tragedy and helps make the scene more memorable for the reader. Michael’s parents (whom he is not out to) are visiting from Orlando29 and he is nervous about their response to his adopted city, especially because they are there over

Halloween weekend. Maupin writes, “If he was careful, very careful, he could ease them through it, protect their fragile, Reader’s Digest sensibilities from the horror of The Love

That Dares Not Speak Its Name. Maybe. In this town, he thought, The Love That Dare Not

Speak Its Name almost never shuts up” (262). After taking them to some “safe” tourist attractions Michael tells his mom that San Francisco is “an amazing city.” And then:

29 During the time I was writing, a tragedy in Orlando happened: a gunman murdered 49 people, primarily queer Latina/o/x people, in a gay dance club.

37 Almost on cue, the [drag] nuns30 appeared. “Herb, look!” [says his

mom].“Goddmanit, Alice! Don’t point!” [responds his father]. “Herb…. they’re on

roller skates!” “Goddamn if they aren’t! Mike, what the hell….?” [says his dad]. Before

their son could answer, the six white-coifed figures had rounded the corner as a

unit, rocketing in the direction of the revelry on Polk Street. One of them bellowed at

Michael. ‘Hey Tolliver!’ Michael waved half-heartedly. The nun gave a high sign,

blew a kiss, then shouted: “loved your jockey shorts” [referring to his outfit during a

dance contest at a gay bar earlier in the novel]! (264)

Although this incident doesn’t result in him being outed and is a brief comedic moment,

Maupin doesn’t let the reader forget that family alienation and the fear of being outed to those that are supposedly closest to you is a tragic reality. Maupin is a master of writing scenes where the comic and the tragic mix. In a New York Times review of Maupin’s 2017 memoir Logical Family, Jim Grimsley writes, “There is a good deal of what one expects from

Maupin, wit and heartache rolled up into a tidy package, so that any anecdote can bring an ache of longing and a belly laugh all in the same paragraph.” For decades Tales of the City has used fictional characters to represent how real life cannot be separated into comedy or tragedy.

In addition to showing that violent acts committed by strangers against LGBTQ people represent a tragic reality, Maupin also reminds readers in several storylines that sometimes family perpetrates the most violent crimes. In Maupin’s most recent and final

Tales novel, The Days of Anna Madrigal the reader is finally given the landlady’s full origin

30 The nuns, in this instance, are men in drag and seemingly early representatives of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the “leading-edge Order of Queer Nuns” that officially formed in 1979 and continues today.

38 story that includes stories from her life before she transitioned. The reader is given glimpses of her backstory throughout the series (this novel is the first in the series to not be entirely in “real time”). In the original installment, Maupin hints that Mrs. Madrigal has a mysterious secret when she is forced, by blackmail, to reveal something to her lover. All the reader is privy to at that time is her insistence that, “It is worse than you think” and her lover’s insistence that she is “still beautiful” (Tales 333, 352). Maupin had to keep Mrs.

Madrigal’s “secret” because the editors would not allow a trans character in a “family newspaper” (Robinson). In the following installment of the series Mrs. Madrigal discloses to her tenant Brian, and the reader, an abbreviated version of her life story. In the third person she explains, “Oh he looked like a boy, all right. All the appropriate plumbing was there. But she never stopped feeling like a girl, a girl locked up inside a boy’s body” (More

103). She goes on to recount in brief how she moved to California and worked as a migrant laborer, served as a private in the Army during World War II, married and had a daughter whom she “desert[ed]” when the child was two, and finally, after fifteen years of “drifting from city to city, a miserable, self-pitying creature,” spent her life savings on a sex change procedure in Denmark. Mrs. Madrigal’s origin story was published in the newspaper in

1977; The Days of Anna Madrigal was published thirty-seven years later in 2014. It is remarkable to note that Maupin wrote a nuanced, trans character who was quite often the backbone and hero of the series more than thirty years before there was mainstream recognition of trans individuals. Although trans rights and visibility have increased significantly in the years since Maupin first introduced Mrs. Madrigal to readers, there is still a long way to go.31

31 Evidenced recently by North Carolina’s House Bill 2 that legalized draconian measures to

39 While Mrs. Madrigal’s account of her story was only about a page and a half in the novel (and one small part of an installment in the paper), The Days of Anna Madrigal centers almost entirely around her, now ninety-two years old. The novel weaves two storylines related to Mrs. Madrigal: that is, her early teenage years in Depression-era

Winnemucca, Nevada, where her mother ran a brothel, and her present-day RV trip with

Brian to Winnemucca and Burning Man. The story of young Andy Ramsey, who later becomes Anna Madrigal, includes several influential characters, such as a prostitute named

Margaret who would secretly give Andy women’s clothing. The most pivotal character, however, is a friend of Andy’s named Lasko. One day Lasko propositions Andy, saying,

“C’mon. We won’t kiss or nothing, I promise. We’re buddies, right? We’ll do it like men”

(Days 160). Andy refuses Lasko because “Lasko had wanted a boy, and Andy had not been up to it,” and their friendship ends. In a later chapter, the narrator explains a realization that Andy has years later, “when he was no longer Andy”: “Had Andy mustered the nerve that night to show Lasko his Wondrous Wisteria toenails – just unlaced his shoes and flat- out showed him – Lasko might have saved face, knowing he was more of a man than Andy, and the tragedy might have been averted” (179). The “tragedy,” as the reader discovers, refers to Lasko’s suicide and Andy’s own implication in a series of events that led to Lasko’s prevent trans individuals from using appropriate restrooms (under the guise of “protecting women and children” from predators). The bill was subsequently repealed, but sixteen states have since presented similar legislation (none of which have passed). It remains to be seen just how destructive the Trump administration will be for trans people, but just over a year into his presidency there have been attempts to ban/discharge trans servicemembers, undo federal protections for trans students, and make it easier for workplace’s to discriminate against trans people. According to several trans advocacy organizations, violence toward trans people, especially trans women of color, has increased in the last correlation with increased visibility and politicization (Astor). Five reporters for Mic, an online media company, created a database tracking homocides of American trans people since 2010. They found that the chance of homicide for young (15 to 34 years old) black trans women is 1 in 2,600 (compared to 1 in 12,000 “young adults”) (Talusan).

40 death. Lasko’s parents send him to Andy’s mother’s brothel to have sex with Margaret (who was “more mother to [Andy] than his own mother”) in order to “fix” him. After Andy and

Lasko have a confrontation in which Lasko insults Margaret by talking about her “nympho” reputation, Andy decides to get revenge by writing a letter to Lasko’s parents, exposing him as a homosexual (183). Using his mother’s stationary and forging her name, Andy writes that Lasko must never return to the brothel because he “made an indecent advance toward my son” (188). Andy, regretting his revenge, goes to find Lasko in his garage (where his father makes him live because of his sexual transgressions) to apologize, but before he can he finds Lasko’s “body slumped like a sack of potatoes … [his] face, already gray and waxen with death” (Days 201).

The series of events leading to Lasko’s death reads like a tragic drama: the betrayal, the last-ditch attempt to avert tragedy, the culminating suicide, which in retrospect assumes inevitability. In Poetics Aristotle states that the best tragic plots follow logical steps where events have a “cause and effect” (as opposed to “episodes or acts [that] succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence”) (39). Furthermore,

Aristotle explains that the best tragedies have plots that come as a surprise, despite following a cause and effect trajectory. In the story of Lasko, the reader knows something

“terrible and pitiful” (to use the words Aristotle associates with tragedy) is coming, but his lifeless body is still a surprise that leaves the reader with the parting image of a terrible death. Another aspect of the storyline that adheres to Aristotle’s definition of an effective tragedy is that it was Andy who betrayed Lasko. Aristotle explains that tragedies are the most “terrible and pitiful” when someone the character knows and trusts commits a betrayal. While Andy is the one who betrays Lasko by outing him to his family, the reader

41 also recognizes throughout the series that often it is the queer individual’s family who commits the greatest betrayal by negatively reacting to their gender/sexuality (much like

Lasko’s family).32 Throughout the series queer characters are betrayed by those once closest to them, their families, and this makes the plot all the more tragic in the Aristotelian sense.

As with Lasko, the tragic situations depicted in the series primarily involve individuals struggling to be treated with dignity by their families, their communities, and by the culture at large. This theme is shared with the older versions of the tragedy that only pertained to royalty. Arthur Miller writes, “I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing – his sense of personal dignity” (4). For Lasko, the only way he believed he could

“secure” his sense of dignity was to commit suicide and avoid the life of shame he would bring to his family because of his homosexuality. Lasko’s story is peripheral to other main characters in the series, but Maupin nevertheless deploys it in order to depict ongoing struggles that queer people face throughout their lives. In their struggles these characters become tragic heroes since they demonstrate, as Miller says, “the indestructible will of man to achieve … humanity” (7). Miller explains that a connection between modern tragic heroes and those of centuries past is that both have an “underlying fear of being displaced,

[and of] the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world” (5). The characters in Miller’s plays and novels have an existential

32 Sarah Schulman explores this phenomenon in Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences. She writes, “The specifics and dimensions of familial homophobia are broad and vast. They can range from short-sighted slights to varying degrees of exclusion to brutal attacks that distort the gay person’s life to direct and indirect cruelties that literally end that person’s existence” (3).

42 struggle against indignity, whereas in the queer tragicomedy existential threats are secondary because of the actual threat to existence.

Similar to the way Michael’s fear of being outed to his parents combines elements of tragedy and comedy (as seen in the chapter that includes the roller-skating drag nuns), The

Days of Anna Madrigal is a combination of both tragic and comic plotlines, with the tragic

Lasko storyline in Anna’s youth and the comic storyline in her present. In the present storyline Anna travels to Winnemucca with Brian to find closure with her troubled past.

She also goes to Burning Man to meet up with her much younger roommate, a trans man named Jake. When Anna first arrives at Burning Man, she sees a “pedal-drive tricycle” that is decorated to resemble a Monarch butterfly. She tells her friend Wren about the unique journey Monarch butterflies make every year. She explains that Monarchs are the only butterflies who migrate, but because the migration is so long no single Monarch can complete the journey on its own. Instead, “Their children do it. Their grandchildren.

Somehow they know exactly where to go and specifically where to land. Somehow – it’s in them. The new generation winters in the same tree every year without ever having seen the tree” (256). Anna later learns that Jake and his friends built the “wondrous human- propelled creation with… flapping jack-o’-lantern wings” to honor her for being a pioneer for trans people (258). The “creation” has a place for Anna to sit as she is transported through a crowd of admirers chanting her name. Anna is honored as a cherished elder in the community who helps the new generation know how to move forward in their journey.

The novel ends with the image of Anna as part of a Monarch, a symbol of how queer people move forward and thrive despite hardship.

43 In the latter half of the series, after the main period of the AIDS crisis in the United

States, Maupin demonstrates how, despite tragedy, the narrative arc in the queer tragicomedy still moves toward a comic ending that is characteristically “unfinished” and optimistic. Maupin first writes about the AIDS crisis in Babycakes (first published in The

San Francisco Chronicle in 1983). In Significant Others (published in 1986 as a periodical)

Michael tests positive for HIV. The next installment, Sure of You, was published in 1989 and largely focuses on Michael living with HIV. Michael’s narrative in Sure of You opens with him at the nursery, Plant Parenthood, which he runs with Brian. Brian hears Michael’s beeper and reflects, “He had long ago accepted the beeper as a fixture in both their lives, but it was Michael for whom it really tolled. Every four hours” (7). The beeper reminds

Michael that it is time to take his azidothymidine (AZT),33 but he “refused to jump to the beeper’s commands. It was his way of keeping the poisonous drug in its place” (7). Later in the book Michael’s beeper goes off in a bar, prompting the man next to him to say, “I’m set to go off any second.” Michael replies, “Last night at Big Business, there were enough to start a symphony” (62). This scene, one of several scenes related to AZT, shows how advancements in HIV treatment impacted gay men living with HIV in the nineteen-eighties.

A positive diagnosis previously meant almost certain death from the virus, but AZT opened up the possibility of blocking AIDS and living a full life. In Sure of You, Maupin shows a community of men who expected their lives to be cut tragically short, but who were given the possibility for a “comic” future. Sure of You ends with Michael expressing his uncertainty about the future in a letter to his mother. He writes, “I don’t know how much

33 AZT was the first drug introduced to treat people with HIV. Although not a cure, it blocks the virus. The Federal Drug Administration approved it in March 1987, seven years after the virus was first discovered (Park).

44 time I have left – whether it’s two years or five or fifty – but I don’t want to be taken back to

Orlando when it’s over. This is my home now … This wouldn’t be so important to me if I didn’t believe in families just as much as you do. I have one of my own, and it means the world to me” (249). Although uncertain about how effective AZT will be, this letter shows, again, how Michael finds family and happiness outside of his biological family, a characteristic of the queer tragicomedy. Indeed, the AIDS crisis in America is a defining period of queer temporality, as Halberstam explains in A Queer Time and Place. She writes:

The constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here, the present,

the now … Some gay men have responded to the threat of AIDS, for example, by

rethinking the conventional emphasis on longevity and futurity, and by making

community in relation to risk, disease, infection, and death (Bersani 1996; Edelman

1998). And yet queer time, even as it emerges from the AIDS crisis, is not only about

compression and annihilation; it is also about the potentiality of a life unscripted by

the conventions of family, inheritance, and child rearing” (2)

Sure of You shows how men who have HIV and AIDS built community during and in the wake of the AIDS crisis, but ultimately what solidifies Sure of You as a tragicomedy is the optimist tone in which the novel ends: Michael makes plans for the future, and in his final line he tells Brian, “Life goes on, Sport” (260).

After Sure of You Maupin did not think he would write any more of the series. It was not until 2007 that Maupin decided to continue Tales with Michael Tolliver Lives. Maupin explains, "I started out with the idea that I wanted to write a standalone novel about a middle-aged gay man who had survived AIDS. It became very clear to me early on that I had such a middle-aged gay man in the person of Michael Tolliver, and that people knew his

45 history very well, and that would add a resonance to whatever I wrote" (Peitzman).

Although concerned that he would "disappoint" readers by not using the "old format,"

(Michael Tolliver Lives is told from a first-person perspective, as opposed to the third- person perspective used in all other books in the series) Maupin believes the novel was successful in "address[ing] directly the people who had survived and what they’d gone through if they were still around when they thought they were going to be dead"

(Peitzman). That Maupin chooses to have Michael survive one of the greatest twentieth- century American tragedies shows his commitment to constructing the long narrative arc of his series as a tragicomedy.

Beyond Michael’s survival, Maupin writes the AIDS narrative as a tragicomedy by regularly using comic relief when discussing the epidemic. Fittingly for a tragicomedy, AIDS is first introduced in the text as part of a comedic scenario filled with miscommunications worthy of a much more lighthearted situation. At the beginning of Babycakes Michael goes to a restaurant called The Sausage Factory (a real restaurant that has been in business since the 1960s) after his shift at an AIDS hotline. When Michael tells his waiter he works at a “switchboard,” the waiter tells him about his friend who also works at a switchboard and is always exhausted (to which Michael agrees it is exhausting). The waiter goes on to tell

Michael about how a man would call the switchboard every other day while his wife was at

Dancercise class (another mark of the times) and say, “‘Yeah, that’s right, flop those big balls in my face.’” Michael responds, “Wrong place” and feels a “faint smile work its way out.” To which the waiter asks, “Dial-a-Load?” (20). This sitcom-esque mishap turns very quickly into a serious discussion about the virus, and in doing so serves as an example of comic relief in reverse (where generally humor breaks the tension of a serious discussion

46 or situation). Despite the humor preceding Michael’s somber reflection about the epidemic, the general effect of counteracting a serious tone with a bit of comedy remains. This effect occurs often throughout the entire series, especially in chapters focused on a tragic event.34

Comic relief, Poole argues, makes pain bearable and allows readers to engage with the tragedy. He posits that this could be why, even in the most tragic dramas (like Antigone and King Lear), minor characters provide comic relief. He further argues that comedy is necessary for the play to be rounded in “tempo, mood, texture, focus, or perspective,” an observation that also applies to Maupin’s fiction (73). In addition to these benefits of comedy on audience response and the overall structure of a body of writing, comedy can also be used to highlight injustices and express outrage. Sarah Blacher Cohen, a scholar who focuses on American Jewish fiction, explains how comedy emerges during periods of great struggle. She writes, “Historians of American humor have shown that the greatest burgeoning of American comedy occurred during the Jacksonian democracy, from the Civil

War years to 1900, and in the 1930s. That two of these periods were times of great duress for the country strongly suggests that travail gives rise to humor, which expressed people’s rage at the senseless turn of events and dissipates their gloom” (1). In Tales of the City, even when the tragicomic narrative arc is not apparent to the reader, humor is prevalent and serves a function in the sections that read like tragedy. Maupin, like writers of the tragicomedy before him, heightens the emotional response to both tragedy and comedy by mixing them throughout the series.

34 More examples of comic relief can be found in the chapters following the homophobic attacks on Briand and Michael. While in the hospital both Mary Anne and Michael use humor to lighten the horrifying situation (Further 349 – 351).

47 The emergence of humor to both “express rage” and lift the spirits of disenfranchised people is found not only in Maupin’s fiction, as in The Sausage Factory chapter, but also in the lives of “real” people during the AIDS crisis. ACT UP activists

Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston explain, “ACT UP’s humor is no joke. It has given us the courage to maintain our exuberant sense of life while every day coping with disease and death, and it has defended us against the pessimism endemic to other Left movements, from which we have otherwise taken so much” (Reed 189). Describing her experience caring for men dying of AIDS during the 1980s, comedian Lea DeLaria states, “It was ultimately the stand-up that kept me functional. It was there that I could truly rage. In front of laughing audiences, I could vent frustration over the fact that we were losing our greatest men: our artists, our thinkers, our composers, our actors, our citizens” (Beck).

Referring to Depression-era humor, Cohen writes, “By reading exaggerated versions of their own psychic mishaps in the domestic and occupational spheres, they discovered a degree of mirth in their own adversity” (2). Lawrence E. Mintz, a scholar of humor, makes a similar argument about the place of humor in modern-day America writing, “Our contemporary humor confronts virtually everything that is important to us in ways that make us understand ourselves and our society more thoroughly, more deeply, more meaningfully, and at the same time in ways that make it easier to cope with our often disturbing reality” (viii). Tales is full of examples of characters finding “mirth in their own adversity”: characters regularly lighten the tension of tragic situations by making a joke; and characters regularly find joy in small moments of comic relief (as Michael does during the misunderstanding at The Sausage Factory).

48 In Significant Others Michael accompanies his friend Charlie, who is dying of AIDS, to a wake of one of their many friends who have died of the disease. On the way there Michael spots a parking space (the difficulty of parking being one of San Francisco’s constant problems) but Charlie says, “Fuck that,” to which Michael replies, “We’re not gonna get any better.” Then Charlie shows Michael his handicap parking sticker and Michael refers to it as one of the “perks of the eighties.” Charlie says, “Right, win a parking space and die” (313).

This deployment of gallows humor underscores Henri Bergson’s assertion that “the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart” (5). The reader, along with

Charlie and Michael, are able to laugh at this grim joke and enjoy a moment of pleasure while at the same time recognizing the “senseless turn of events” that made the moment possible. By using humor even when writing about tragic circumstances, Maupin makes it easier for the reader to continue reading the series.

In the introduction to his book Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict

(2006), Paul Lewis explains that humor serves to make the audience reflect on whether or not one should “relax and forget about this” or “wake up and deal with THIS!” (17). While the jokes in Tales certainly provide comic relief, much of the humor, especially in the books published during the apex of the AIDS epidemic, also call attention to the severity of the crisis. When Michael and Charlie arrive at the wake, Michael confesses that he “never know[s] how to act at these things… Whether to laugh.” Charlie tells him, “You’d better laugh at mine.” He goes on to describe the funeral he has planned: “I’ve fixed it so you will

[laugh], actually. I drew up the plans while you were gone. I won’t spoil it for you, but it involves several hundred yards of mock leopardskin and an Ann-Margret impersonator”

(314). Charlie is able to get Michael to joke around and smile at the wake by making light of

49 his dire circumstances, but for the reading audience it also reminds them that Charlie sees his imminent death from AIDS as an inevitability. In one moment of comedy he reminds the audience of the futility people with AIDS feel (an emotion that is further emphasized in the novel by conversations Michael has with his mother about his burial arrangements). In other words, it could inspire readers to reflect on how people need to “wake up and deal with THIS!” instead of ignoring the crisis.

While Maupin’s use of comedy functioned to make his audience more aware of the

AIDS crisis, those in power used comedy to dismiss the tragic spread of the epidemic. Lewis explains, “joking can have serious and lasting consequences” (2-3). One of the “lasting consequences” Lewis writes about was how President Reagan made jokes about gay men dying of AIDS alongside his political inaction. The Reagan administration’s refusal to acknowledge and allocate resources to fight AIDS has been well documented; 35 it was not until May 31st, 1987 that the president publicly discussed AIDS – by then 20,849 people had died. In a 1985 article for the Washington Post, Democratic representative Henry Waxman wrote: “It is surprising that the president could remain silent as 6,000 Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge the epidemic's existence (White). However, while Reagan may have been silent in the public, according to Kitty Kelley, unofficial biographer of Nancy

Reagan, he joked about AIDS in private. Kelly writes, “‘[Ronald Reagan] enjoyed mimicking homosexuals [and] added AIDS jokes to his repertoire. He loved to tell one about two doctors at the medical convention talking about treating AIDS patients… One doctor said to the other: ‘I’ve got the solution. I serve them a special dinner of crepes and fillet of sole.’

‘What does that do, [said the other doctor], it’s not a cure.’ ‘No it’s not… but the advantage is

35 Perhaps most famously in Shilt’s And the Band Played: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic.

50 that I can just slide it under the door and I don’t have to touch them’” (Lewis 195). While comic relief made it possible for readers to engage with Maupin’s series, it also made it possible for those in power to disengage from the real suffering taking place.

Maupin lambasts the lack of government intervention in the crisis in 1989’s Sure of

You. In one chapter Mrs. Madrigal reflects on Michael’s positive HIV status and the likelihood of it developing into AIDS “unless some scientist wanted the Nobel Prize bad enough to make [a cure] happen. Unless one of the Bush kids, or Marilyn Quayle, maybe, came down with the goddamned thing…” (153). The reader also learns about the grass- roots advocacy efforts by the queer community through Michael’s boyfriend, Thack, an active member of ACT UP. Discussing his decision to join ACT UP, Thack tells Michael he has to “do something.” Michael replies, “About what?” To which Thack responds,

“Everything. AZT, for one thing. How much do we pay for that shit? And Jesse Fucking

Helms36 is gonna fix it so poor people can’t even get it. And you know what those sorry bastards think? Serves ’em right, anyway. Shouldn’t’ve been butt-fucking in the first place”

(Sure 31). Thack’s outrage in the book works to highlight for general readers how the AIDS crisis is connected to homophobia and how homophobia led to the government/religious right trying to suppress the fact that there was a crisis.

In her 1988 book AIDS and Its Metaphors Susan Sontag writes, “Professional fulminators can’t resist the rhetorical opportunity offered by a sexually transmitted disease that is lethal.” She explains how the epidemic presence of AIDS in other countries predominately affects heterosexuals, but goes on to write that the epidemic:

36 In his memoir, Maupin recounts stories from his first job as a reporter at a television station run by Jesse Helms.

51 [H]as not prevented such guardians of public morals as Jesse Helms and Norman

Podhoretz from depicting it as a visitation specially aimed at (and deservedly

incurred by) Western homosexuals, while another Reagan-era celebrity, Pat

Buchanan, orates about “AIDS and Moral Bankruptcy,” and Jerry Falwell offers the

generic diagnosis that “AIDS is God’s judgment on a society that does not live by His

rules.” (61)

The idea that gay men, along with sex workers and drug users, deserved their HIV+ or AIDS status because of their “risky” behavior was a common theme that was tightly bound to the government’s inaction, and that Maupin used his series to counteract.

Maupin addresses the “rhetorical opportunity” in Significant Others through a conversation between Michael and his heterosexual friend, Brian. Brian, Mary Ann’s husband, learns that one of his former sexual partners (with whom he had a casual affair) is dying of AIDS. Much of Significant Others centers on Brian’s fear that he will test positive for HIV. Although Brian is a far cry from the likes of Buchanan and Falwell, he voices a similar ideology about who “deserves” the virus. He tells Michael that there are “innocents involved” (referring to his wife and daughter) to which Michael replies “Innocents, huh?

Not like me. Not like Jon. Not like the fags…Lay off that innocent shit. It’s a virus. Everybody is innocent” (79). By having a liberal, gay-friendly character show his bias surrounding the disease Maupin is able to highlight an insipid hypocrisy that permeated discourse surrounding the disease.

Drawing on the work of Sontag, James W. Jones explains in his 1993 essay, “AIDS has particular meanings within the United States because American culture needs to punish groups of persons who ‘choose’ to engage in culturally proscribed behaviors” (225).

52 Although the government did not explicitly try to cover up the AIDS epidemic in America, their inaction increased the scope and magnitude of the tragic reality thousands of

Americans faced. Poole explains that the tragedy “spills out beyond the confines of drama, and even of fiction, into historical writing, documentary journalism, and photography” as a way of addressing how “suffering has been forgotten and the act of reparation has come too late” as a result of government suppression (42).37 However, Maupin’s series is unique because he was writing in the midst of the authorities’ suppression; this act worked to bring awareness to people who would otherwise have been able to turn a blind eye while thousands of Americans died.

Poole argues that the modern tragedy can be used as a medium to explore the ways groups of people are systemically marginalized, degraded, and perhaps most viciously: ignored. By contrast, in Greek, Roman, and Shakespearean tragedy the characters who are not royalty are quickly forgotten or go completely unnoticed. Of Antony and Cleopatra

Poole writes:

Antony and Cleopatra recede smoothly into the legends they’ve been dying to

become; the future Emperor Augustus advances to his. What about all the others,

the nobodies who have gone missing in the course of the play? They enjoy no such

luck … Life does not go on for them. Nor do they pass into legend. (13)

By contrast, Poole explains, “These mass unmarked graves haunt the modern sense of the tragedy” (14). The modern tragedy, therefore, has the potential to draw attention to issues important to marginalized groups that are ignored elsewhere in society. Maupin’s inclusion

37 As examples of “tragedies [that were] suppressed at the time by the authorities” Poole cites, “the 750 servicemen who died in April 1944 when they were ambushed by German torpedo boats off the coast of Devon during a training exercise for D-Day,” and the sinking of the Lancastria and the Wilhelm Gustloff (42).

53 of storylines surrounding the AIDS epidemic worked to not only bring mass attention to the crisis otherwise ignored by the government, but served, and continues to serve, as an act of public mourning and remembrance.

The effectiveness of Tales of the City as not only public mourning and remembrance, but as a medium to bring LGBTQ issues into mainstream culture is primarily due to the tragicomedy genre. Without using comic relief it is unlikely an audience would have engaged, and continue to engage, with such difficult subjects. Furthermore, by showing how life for LGBTQ people can be both tragic and comic, Maupin is able to show audiences how queer individuals cannot be reduced to the tragic/comic binary seen in popular culture. Maupin’s series is remarkable because it is one of the first pieces of popular culture that showed queer people not only as complex individuals, but also as people who are able to live on despite tragedies inherent in homophobic culture.

54 Chapter Two: Fun Home

He did hurtle into the sea, of course. But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt. - Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home was adapted as a musical by Lisa

Kron and Jeanine Tesori in 2013; the show had a successful run on Broadway and won five

Tony Awards (including “Best Musical”) in 2015. In a 2017 national tour production in San

Francisco, which I attended, one of the biggest laughs from the audience happened, as it did during the Broadway production, almost directly after a line in which Adult Alison informs the audience that her father committed suicide. Adult Alison says, “Caption: My Dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town. And he was gay. And I was gay. And he killed himself. And I…became a lesbian cartoonist” (FHM 9). This was the first the audience hears of her father’s suicide, but it was also the first big laugh of the play. It struck me that one of the most humorous moments was connected to the same line that lets the audience know that one of the main characters commits suicide. The humor, it seems, comes from the juxtaposition between the seriousness of suicide and the levity of Alison being a

“lesbian cartoonist.” The contrast between Alison and her father’s fates serves as a brief moment of comic relief,38 but it also succinctly states the narrative arc of the two main characters. Alison’s father’s life ends in tragedy, but her life goes on and she becomes a

“lesbian cartoonist.”39 This chapter will show how Fun Home, both the graphic memoir and its musical adaptation, highlights the late-twentieth century shift from the tragic narrative

38 It is likely that discomfort also caused some of the laughter, or that is was a defensive reaction against the uncomfortable thought of suicide. 39 Although this exact line is not actually in Bechdel’s book, the reader of the graphic memoir learns in the first chapter that her father, Bruce, commits suicide, just as the audience learns early in the play.

55 that dominated cultural representation of LGBTQ characters to a tragicomic narrative.

Building on Verna A Foster’s research which outlines the shared “family characteristics” of

Renaissance and modern tragicomedies, I argue that Fun Home serves as a prime example of how the queer tragicomedy (as defined in the introduction) both continues the tradition of the tragicomedy genre and reinvents it for late-twentieth and twenty-first century queer culture.

Paralleling her story alongside her father’s, Bechdel shows the reader how narratives about LGTBQ people have changed in the span of a generation. This change in genre, from tragedy to tragicomedy, is important not only because of the implications for literature, but also because of the implications on a social, political, and personal level. Fun

Home shows an alternative narrative arc, one where the protagonist is able to be out, have a community, and live their life outside heteronormative structures. Young queer people look to the archive of queer literature to understand themselves and their place in society, just as Alison does in Fun Home, and it is vital they see narratives showing that they can lead fulfilling lives. While Bechdel’s memoir is certainly unique to her experience, it is also relatable and accessible to mainstream and queer audiences alike. Bechdel expresses it best in the caption of a comic she wrote for the program for the San Francisco run of Fun

Home: “That was exactly like my family, but totally different…”

The first section of this chapter focuses on the similarities between the histories of the comic/graphic narrative and the tragicomedy in order to highlight the juxtaposition between Alison’s comic character and narrative arc and her father’s tragic character and narrative arc. The second section provides an overview of the critical response to Fun

Home, as well as the controversies that surrounded its placement in libraries and curricula;

56 the controversies situate Fun Home within the tradition of tragicomedies causing outrage by not meeting audience expectations. The third section explores how Bruce’s narrative is tragic in both the historical and contemporary queer sense, as well as how Alison’s narrative runs counter to her father’s. Lastly, the fourth section shows how Fun Home, the memoir and the musical, builds on the tradition of the tragicomedy as defined by Foster.

Section One: Comix

In Fun Home the musical there is a scene where Small Alison is working on a map- drawing assignment for school. She decides to draw her map as a cartoon with “all different parts.” Her father tells her it is “visually confusing” and that it can be “better than a cartoon.” He says, “Sure, cartoons are fun but I’m showing you here how to do something substantial and beautiful. Listen to me, you have the potential to become a real artist” (35).

This conversation does not happen in the memoir, but Bechdel does emphasize the dichotomy between her father’s aesthetic and her own. She writes, “I was the Spartan to my father’s Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete”

(15). Bruce’s belief that comic art is not “real art” is emblematic of a common assumption about comics; however, with the emergence of graphic narratives in the 1960s, comic art has increasingly garnered critical praise and a place in the academy. Fun Home has contributed significantly to the acceptance of the graphic form as a complex and significant medium. The history of the comic and graphic narratives is similar to the history of the tragicomedy in three significant ways: (1) Theorists have struggled, and continue to struggle, for an adequate and agreed upon definition; (2) The medium/genre was historically dismissed as a lesser form of the medium/genre it combines. For example, art

57 and literature garnered respect when created separately, but were considered juvenile when combined into comics; tragedy and comedy were both respected genres, but the tragicomedy was considered inferior at best and offensive at worst; and (3) Defenders of both comics and tragicomedy argue that the medium/genre is actually a complex form worthy of respect and critical attention.

In 1993 cartoonist Scott McCloud published his popular text Understanding Comics:

The Invisible Art in which he set about to define and detail the history of comics. McCloud, like other comic scholars, cites the Swiss teacher Rodolphe Töpffer (1799-1846) as the

“father of the modern comic” because “his light satiric picture stories, starting in the mid-

1800s, employed cartooning and panel borders, and featured the first interdependent combination of words and pictures seen in Europe” (149). However, examples of people using sequential drawings to communicate dates back much further. McCloud gives examples such as the Bayeux Tapestry (depicting the eleventh century Norman conquest in

England), and ancient Egyptian paintings. He notes that “Trajan’s Column, Greek painting,

[and] Japanese scrolls” have been suggested and should be explored further for their connection to the modern comic (12-15). After moving through many historical examples of images being used for communication, McCloud eventually settles on the following definition for comics: “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” (9).

Many scholars writing after McCloud took issues with this definition. For example, in his 2010 book On the Graphic Novel Santiago García critiques McCloud’s definition for being too broad (for instance, McCloud’s definition would allow for a photo novella to be considered a comic). García argues that McCloud’s broad definition and history of the comic has “encountered little resistance, due in part to the weakness of the tradition of theoretical

58 study of the comic in the United States until very recently” (27). García also notes that in terms of the history of the comic there is a division between people who cite Töpffer as the

“inventor of comics” and those who “locate the seminal moment in the newspapers of

Joseph Pulitzer (New York World) and William Randolph Hearst (New York Journal) in the late nineteenth century, and in particular in the discovery of cartoonists like Richard Felton

Outcault, Rudolph Dirks, and Bud Fisher” (15). Most scholars of comics, García argues, go through the unnecessary task of trying to trace a history and arrive at a definition of the comic. He writes, “The obsession with a definition40 has been since its inception an albatross around the neck of the study of comics, bent on restarting the work from the ground floor.

Like Sisyphus comics scholars feel that they have to personally do it over again every time they approach the field” (ix-x). Instead of being preoccupied with a definition, he argues, scholars should instead focus their studies on the function of the comic in society.

While the exact origins of modern comics history in contested, critics are in agreement that the graphic novel emerged in the late 1960s as part of the underground comix41 scene. Underground comix were a reaction to the Comics Code that was created in

1954 by the Comics Magazine Association of America. In general, the Code prohibited inclusion of excessive violence, sex, and challenging of authority. Comics that followed the

Code had a “Seal of Approval” on their cover to show they were safe for children. Amy

40 I am reminded here of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s fourth axiom in Epistemology of the Closet. In this axiom Sedgwick explains that “gay-oriented book[s]” in the 1980s always began with a “meditation” on nature versus nurture as an origin for homosexuality. García’s frustration with comic theorists who insist on returning to the origin of comics is similar to Sedgwick’s argument about queer theorists erroneously returning to the origin of homosexuality (256). 41 Artists, including Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb, used the “x” to indicate that their work was outside the mainstream (Jacobs).

59 Nyberg, author of a book about the seal, explains the origin of the publishers’ need for a

Seal of Approval. She writes:

Controversy over comic books surfaced shortly after their debut in the 1930s. The

first group to object to comics was educators, who saw comics as a bad influence on

students’ reading abilities and literary tastes. They filled professional journals with

suggestions on how to wean their pupils from superhero tales. Comic books also

represented a threat to their authority – for the first time, children could select their

own leisure reading material. (Nyberg)

Of course, this “think of the children!” approach also meant that non-heteronormative relationships were forbidden. Among the instructions in the Comics Code: “sexual abnormalities are unacceptable”; “the treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of home and the sanctity of marriage”; and “sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden” (Williams, “LGBT Characters”). García explains that this homophobic climate was the “ideal impetus for the first gay and lesbian comics” (106). In

No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics (2012) Justin Hall discusses how the queer underground comix scene was, until recently, very insular. This insularity meant that,

“LGBTQ comics have been an uncensored, internal conversation within queer communities, and thus provide a unique window into the hopes, fears, and fantasies of queer people for the last four decades” (Hall np).

By the end of the 1960s there were “efforts to produce comics books aimed at an adult audience, or at least more adult than the typical readership of Batman, Archie, and

Donald Duck” (García 20). This new kind of comics needed a name that differentiated it from mass-produced and censored works, thus after 1976 “the term ‘graphic novel’ began

60 to appear” (García 20). In 1978 Will Eisner published his book A Contract With God and

Other Tenement Stories. Significantly, the cover featured the phrase “A Graphic Novel by

Will Eisner”; this was the first time the term appeared on a book cover. Paul Gravett, the author of Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life, writes that with this book Eisner

“threw down the gauntlet to his peers” and that the text “shone like the lighthouse-library, a beacon of inspiration to his peers” (9).

However, just as the definition and origin of comics is contested, so is the name of the genre itself: the graphic novel. As Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey note in their 2015 book

The Graphic Novel: An Introduction both Art Spiegelman and Alan Moore, two key figures in the popularization of the graphic novel, were skeptical of the new term. Spiegelman and

Moore expressed concern, in 1988 and 2000 respectively, that branding comic books as

“graphic novels” was a bid for legitimization and mainstream commercial appeal, rather than an actual shift in comics. Furthermore, they expressed concerns that any comic could be deemed a “graphic novel” despite being, in Spiegelman’s words, “no more than [a] pedestrian comic book in glossy wrappings” or in Moore’s words, “[just an] expensive comic book” (Baetens, Frey 1-2). In addition to this concern, there was also the potentially troubling issue that, just as with comics, it is hard to specifically define the genre. With regard to the “graphic” part of “graphic novel,” Gravett writes, “There is room for very different styles of art. In fact, graphic does not narrow down to drawing and illustration, as in graphics, since some artists create their comics using photos, 3D models, or found objects” (8). And with regard to the “novel” part, Gravett explains that the word “can make people expect the sort of format, serious intent, and weighty heft of traditional literature, as if a graphic novel must be the visual equivalent of ‘an extended, fictional work,’” but in fact

61 the length of “graphic novels” vary greatly and they are often works of non-fiction (such as biographies and histories) (8). Gravett concludes, “in several ways graphic novel is a misnomer, but unlike other words invented in the past42 in an effort to overcome the stigmas of humor and childishness of the word ‘comics,’ … this term has caught on and entered the language and dictionaries, for all its inaccuracies” (8). Preeminent comics scholar Hillary Chute notes that “graphic novel” is also a misnomer because many books given the label are not actually novels. In fact, she comments, many of the “works grouped under this umbrella – including Spiegelman’s World War II-focused Maus, which helped rocket the term into public consciousness – aren’t novels at all: they are rich works of nonfiction” (453). Instead of “graphic novel” Chute uses the term “graphic narrative” and defines it as “book-length work[s] in the medium of comics” (453).

The entrance of “graphic novel” into the lexicon has increased respect for comics

(although there are still plenty of people who still think the form is unworthy of serious scholarship). However, even as McCloud was writing Understanding Comics in 1992 the perception of comics was starting to change. Indeed, in the same year Spiegelman’s Maus won a Pulitzer Prize in the Special Awards and Citations – Letters category. While audiences had previously been skeptical of cartoons’ ability to represent complex ideas, people were starting to recognize that “simple elements can combine in complex ways, as atoms become molecules and molecules become life” (McCloud 45). Chute explains that comics are “highly textured in…narrative scaffolding,” and this complexity demands a lot from the reader (453). Thus, rather than a “lowbrow genre,” comics are actually a complex medium (453, 460).

42 Gravett cites, “Charles Biro’s ‘Illustories,’ Bill Gaines’ ‘Picto-Fiction,’ or even Will Eisner’s ‘Sequential Art,’” (8)

62 As will be shown in the next section, Fun Home is another text that contributes significantly to the elevation of the comic genre. One major tension between Bechdel and her father is their aesthetic tastes: Alison prefers “lowbrow” mediums such as television and comics, while her father is devoted to the literary canon and Victorian home preservation. The contrast between their aesthetics is one way in which Bechdel is associated with comedy, and her father is associated with tragedy. It is interesting to consider how Bechdel’s graphic narrative, a traditionally “lowbrow” genre, has helped elevate the genre to the “highbrow” status of which her father might approve.

Section Two: Marginalized to Mainstream

As discussed in the introduction, the tragicomedy has a long history of being dismissed as a genre inferior to that of tragedy or comedy; comics have had a similar struggle in that they have historically been considered inferior to art or literature. McCloud writes, “Traditional thinking has long held that truly great works of art and literature are only possible when the two are kept at arm’s length. Words and pictures together are considered, at best, a diversion for the masses, at worst a product of crass commercialism”

(140). Queer comics, Hall explains, have had a particularly difficult time earning mainstream recognition and were almost solely in “gay newspapers and gay bookstores, and published by gay publishers” (np). Hall explains how the relationship between queer comics and comics is analogous to the relationship between comics and literature. He writes, “LGBTQ comics have fought a long, uphill battle for recognition. While comics have traditionally been dismissed as puerile and simplistic, queer cartooning has been even further marginalized within the comics world, rarely garnering shelf space in comic book

63 stores or recognition at conventions and awards ceremonies” (np). Fun Home, however, has increased the profile of both comics and queer comics.

The shift of the comic form from a marginalized genre to a mainstream one is reflected in Bechdel’s own career trajectory. Before the success of Fun Home, Bechdel began her cartooning career with her much lesser known comic strip Dykes To Watch Out

For. Dykes was first published in 1983 and was syndicated in different “alternative” newspapers until 2008 (Gardner, “About”). In addition to both Dykes and Maupin’s Tales of the City being originally published as periodicals, the series are similar is several ways. The series are Dickensian in the breadth of characters and urban location, both are overtly political, and both situate the reader in specific cultural moments by using popular culture references. Bechdel once described the series as “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel” (Garner). Dykes centers around a group of friends, mainly lesbians, as they live their lives in a city, which, “may or may not be Minneapolis”

(Essential). Following the success of Fun Home, the New York Times ran an article about

Dykes. The author, Dwight Garner, praises the humor, political commentary, and character development in the comic strip. He writes, “These characters fret about the insignificance of their ‘little counterculture lives,’ especially when terrible things are happening in the world, and Republicans are in the White House. But Ms. Bechdel makes their lives resonate in ways that do not seem insignificant at all. Real things happen here: births, deaths, adoptions, affairs, breakups, commitment ceremonies, civil unions” (Garner). With the content of Dykes so often revolving around the characters’ reactions to “terrible things” in the world and Republicans in the White House, it is fitting that Bechdel briefly returned to the series in November of 2016 after Donald Trump was elected president. In a November

64 23, 2016 blog post titled “Same as it ever was, only much worse,” Bechdel told readers,

“Since I stopped drawing Dykes to Watch Out For at the tail end of the Bush administration, people have asked me many times if I thought about my characters, and if so, what they were up to. And I would have to be honest. No, I didn’t think about them, and I had no idea what they were doing. But last week they all started flooding back” (Bechdel, “Same”). After

Bechdel Tweeted a link to the new strip her site crashed from too many people trying to view it simultaneously (Zarum, “Alison Bechdel”). The strip, “Pièce de Rèsistance” catches up with the main characters as they meet for Thanksgiving and process the reality of a

Trump presidency and Republican-dominated House and Senate. In the comments section, which was closed off after 146 responses, many fans expressed the same tragicomic reaction: horror over politics, but delight over seeing their “old friends” (Acklin).

Although the 2016 Dykes strip garnered a lot of attention because of Bechdel’s current fame, the original strips did not largely reach mainstream audience,43 despite

Bechdel’s ambition to make lesbians more visible in mainstream media. In a strip introducing The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For, a collection of strips from all eleven volumes of the comic, Bechdel writes, “By drawing the everyday lives of women like me, I hoped to make lesbians more visible not just to ourselves but to everyone. If people could

43 Although mainstream audiences may not know Dykes to Watch Our For, a 1985 strip is the origin for “The Bechdel Test,” a popular criterion by which to measure women’s representation in popular media, such as cinema, television, and video games. It was not until the beginning of the twenty-first century that The Bechdel Test amassed widespread attention, but it is now commonly used in criticism. In an interview on Fresh Air, Bechdel said she would prefer it to be called “The Bechdel-Wallace Test” because she got the idea from her friend Liz Wallace. She states, “My friend Liz Wallace ... said, "I'll only see a movie if it has at least two women in it who talk to each other about something besides a man." That left very, very few movies in 1985. The only movie my friend could go see was Alien, because the two women talk to each other about the monster. But somehow young feminist film students found this old cartoon and resurrected it in the Internet era and now it's this weird thing” (Gross).

65 only see us…how could they not help but love us?!” (Essential XV). However, despite her hopes that it would reach a wide audience, primarily LGBTQ and feminist readers helped the series develop a cult following. Lana Wachowski, acclaimed film writer/producer/director, states, “It wasn’t until I discovered Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to

Watch Out For that I really understood what I was looking for, a queer world with stories and characters that I could recognize, that I could laugh with and care about” (np). Like other queer comics, Dykes was largely relegated to a sub-section of comics, just as books with LGBTQ characters/themes often occupy a separate space in bookstores. Dykes never moved beyond the margins in the cartooning world, nor did it “introduce” mainstream readers to lesbians, but Fun Home would go on to achieve both of these goals.

Fun Home, published by Houghton Mifflin, received widespread critical praise, both from LGBTQ outlets and from mainstream publications, in addition to receiving a great amount of critical attention in the academy. The book focuses on the entwined narratives of

Alison44 coming-of-age in rural Pennsylvania in the 1960s and 70s, and her father Bruce who was closeted to Alison (and most people) until just before his suicide. The memoir remained on the New York Times Bestsellers list for two weeks in the nonfiction category, and the memoir has been translated into multiple languages, including Hungarian, Korean, and Chinese (Bechdel, “China”).45 Time Magazine, “a mainstream barometer” according to

Chute, named Fun Home as the number one book of 2006 (Chute 453). The authors of the

44 I will distinguish between the author and the character by referring to the author/narrator as “Bechdel” and the character as “Alison.” 45 However, Chinese publishers imposed a caveat: Bechdel was required to censor a few images using strategically placed text boxes. Bechdel agreed to the censorship, noting, “I find that sort of censorship as perverse as the publisher fears Chinese readers will find these images … [but] [i]t seems like a small compromise to make to get such an otherwise very queer book published there” (Bechdel, “China”).

66 Time piece write, “Forget genre and sexual orientation: this is a masterpiece about two people who live in the same house but different worlds, and their mysterious debts to each other” (Lacayo, Grossman). In the New York Times Sunday Book Review Sean Wilsey similarly calls for readers to look beyond the comic genre and recognize the literary merit of Bechdel’s work. Wilsey exclaims, “A comic book for lovers of words! Bechdel’s rich language and precise images combine to create a lush piece of work – a memoir where concision and detail are melded for maximum, obsessive density” (Wilsey).46 Critics implored readers to look beyond the comic genre and give Fun Home a chance, a phenomenon literary theorist Jane Tolmie describes as a “re-evaluation of the role of the comic book … [and] its potential relevance to the average reader, most particularly the reader who in the past might have walked right past the cartoons to browse through the novels, those more reliable repositories of cultural seriousness” (80). Tolmie explains that it was Bechdel’s use of the literary canon, “a repository of cultural seriousness,” that helped initiate the instant critical attention on Fun Home because “like calls to like” (79).

Interestingly, the incorporation of the canon, specifically the modernist canon, also works to break down the idea of high culture (novels) and low culture (comics). Tolmie argues,

“Fun Home’s negotiations of a modernist canon do not merely aim to set up a competing discourse of high culture comic books, but also to trouble our reliance on categories of high and low, included and excluded, straight and queer, textual and embodied” (79).

Because Fun Home is a tragicomedy instead of a tragedy, it defies the conservative expectation of an acceptable ending for a queer text: suicide, illness, or madness. The next section examines how Fun Home shares generic characteristics with Renaissance and

46 Wilsey, in a somewhat backhanded compliment to Bechel, states, “Very few cartoonists can also write – or, if they can, they manage only to hit a few familiar notes.”

67 modern tragicomedies, but it is important to note that the conservative reaction to

Bechdel’s book is another example of its place within the tradition of the genre. As discussed in the introduction, the tragicomedy has a long history of inspiring outrage. In the Renaissance period, as many scholars have noted, detractors of the genre were critical of mixing “high bred” and “low bred” characters. This mixing defied the expectation, derived from Aristotelian principles, that “high bred” characters belonged in tragedies and

“low bred” characters belonged in comedies. Of course, there are comic relief characters in

Renaissance tragedies (e.g. The Fool in King Lear), but the tragicomedy disrupted broad division between classes of characters. Although no one was trying to ban tragicomedy plays in the Renaissance, as contemporary conservatives have tried to ban Fun Home, critics attempted to discredit the genre. The reaction to Fun Home is more analogous to the initial responses to Samuel Beckett’s modern drama Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in

Two Acts (first performed in London, 1955). Among many complaints sent to Lord

Chamberlain’s Office, who was responsible for licensing plays, CW Heriot wrote that he

“endured two hours of angry boredom …. [for] a piece quite without drama and with very little meaning” (Flood). Waiting for Godot, in addition to causing outrage because of its

“lavatory references” (as Lady Howitt complained), disrupted the audience’s expectations that a play have a narrative arc and a sense of resolution. In the history of the tragicomedy people have reacted strongly because the genre challenges expectations, and the conservative reaction to Fun Home shows the genre’s ability to agitate and expand what is expected of drama and literature.

In a 2008 interview with the blog Panels and Pixels Bechdel revealed her own surprise at Fun Home’s popularity compared to Dykes. She states, “Well, none of us were

68 prepared for how visible the book was going to be and how much press it was going to get.

We all sort of expected it would reach the audience that Dykes to Watch Out For did which meant the neighbors wouldn’t see it” (Mautner). The neighbors would see it, and some were outraged by the queer content. Perhaps predictably, because of the United State’s history with censoring queer content,47 Fun Home was met with some resistance. The

Marshall Public Library Board in Marshall, Missouri voted seven to one to remove Fun

Home from the shelves. Louise Mills, a community member who spoke at a public hearing regarding the book, asked, “Does this community want our public library to continue to use tax dollars to purchase pornography?” She went on to exclaim, “We may as well purchase the porn shop down at the junction and move it to Eastwood. Some day this library will be drawing the same clientele. […] Let’s not contribute to the delinquency of minors” (Sims).

The decision was eventually overturned and the books were returned to the shelves in

2007 (Harper).48 A similar anxiety about allegedly pornographic images leading to the delinquency of minors was also an issue in 2008 at The University of Utah. After a few students complained about the inclusion of Fun Home in their English course, the group No

More Pornography called for it to be removed from curricula. Thomas Alvord, of No More

Pornography, was critical of the university for “exposing people to pornography” (Dallof).

The University of Utah declined to remove the book.

The most infamous controversy surrounding the inclusion of Fun Home in university curricula began in 2013 at South Carolina’s College of Charleston. The book was part of

“The College Readers!” program. Each year a committee selects one book for incoming

47 The American Library Association’s annual report showed that in 2016 the most challenged and banned books all had LGBTQ themes or content (Salandra). 48 When asked about the Marshall Public Library issue, Bechdel said her first reaction was, “What a great honor!” (Emmert 28).

69 freshmen to read, although it is not required. Oran Smith, President of “Palmetto Family

Council,” (a conservative lobbying group whose latest cause is preventing trans people from using restrooms appropriate for their gender), objected to the memoir on the familiar grounds that it was pornographic. With a flair for the dramatic, Smith claimed, “If this book were a magazine it would be wrapped in brown paper” (“College”). The South Carolina

House of Representatives voted to cut funding for the summer reading program, $52,000, along with $17,000 from the University of South Carolina – Upstate for their inclusion of

Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio in a reading list (Borden). While objections to Fun

Home in Missouri and Utah were ostensibly about pornographic content, the outcry in

South Carolina was more overtly homophobic. Representative Garry Smith, who led the movement to cut funding, decried the memoir for “graphically show[ing] lesbian acts” and

“promoting the gay and lesbian lifestyle” (Deahl). In May 2014 the South Carolina Senate voted to reinstate the funding,49 but required that it be used for “the study of and devotion to American institutions and ideals” (McLeod). In an interview with Publishers Weekly

Bechdel points out one of the many disheartening elements of the situation, stating, “It’s sad and absurd that the College of Charleston is facing a funding cut for teaching my book – a book which is after all about the toll that this sort of small-mindedness takes on people’s lives” (Deahl). In describing the response as both “sad and absurd” Bechdel points out how the conservative response is tragicomic itself. The irony of the response replicating exactly the kind of homophobia Fun Home warns against is at once horrifying and, in an absurd way, laughable.

49 According to Jeremy Borden of the Post and Courier, “During the lengthy debate, senators compared ‘Fun Home’ and its author to everything from slavery to serial murderer Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler.”

70 It is apparent that those who were lobbying for the removal or censorship of Fun

Home had a problem with the (homosexual) sex in the book, not the violence of Bruce

Bechdel’s suicide (Smith, for example, “bravely” – his words – stood up against the “militant homosexuals’ propaganda machine”) (Haire). It is hard not to wonder if Smith and other conservative politicians would have fought so hard against Fun Home if the book had only been about Bruce. After all, his tragic ending was facilitated by the kind of homophobic environment that they wish to maintain. Bruce’s suicide maintains a homophobic status quo, while Alison’s story shows the threat to “traditional values” when there is increased legal and social acceptance of non-normative gender and sexuality. The threat, of course, is that queer people will live openly and expect equality under the law (although the other side would say this impinges on their religious freedom).

Section Three: Bruce as Tragedy, Alison as Tragicomedy

While many scholars have explored how the comic genre operates in Fun Home, there has not been as much critical attention regarding Bechdel’s use of the tragicomic genre. Julia Watson notes that Fun Home “hovers between tragedy and comedy,” and Jane

Tolmie argues that the text is multi-layered with a “dual invocation of tragedy and comedy”

(27, 83). Monica Pearl examines how the tragicomedy is evoked by Bechdel’s use of comics, usually seen as a light-hearted medium, to explore serious topics. She also examines the similarities between Fun Home and Henry James’s oeuvre, arguing that Bechdel’s work is

Jamesian in its “privileging of interiority” and tragicomic narrative arc. Some of James’s novels, Pearl argues, are tragicomic not in the traditional sense of ending in “union,” but in the sense that the novel “might end with the misfortune of failed aspiration, but

71 nevertheless might suggest another kind of achievement” (300). 50 Pearl reads Fun Home as having a “bittersweet” ending because Alison’s father dies, but his death ultimately enables her to “live – regardless of, even because of, her loss” (300). Watson agrees with Pearl that the ending of Fun Home is both tragic and comic, a juxtaposition she describes as “startling”

(50).

The primary exploration of Fun Home as a tragicomedy comes from Judith Kegan

Gardiner’s 2011 essay “Queering Genre: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For” published in Contemporary Women’s Writing.

Comparing the primarily comic elements of Dykes with the primarily tragic elements of Fun

Home, Gardiner argues that Bechdel queers both the comic and tragic genres by making her texts “respond to the contours of queer lives” (189). For example, instead of marriage as a fundamentally comic construction, in Dykes there are “marriages that are not happy endings, happy endings that are not marriages” (189). Gardiner also explains the ways in which Bruce’s narrative is a quintessentially “gay tragedy […] situated in the historical period of the closet, shadowed by small-town American religion and the dominant culture’s expectations about marriage, fidelity, and masculine gender roles” (198). Gardiner argues that the tragedy is the prevailing genre in Fun Home because Bruce’s story supersedes the comic aspect of Alison’s coming out narrative. Indeed, as Gardiner points out, after Alison comes out to her parents her mother discloses that her father “has had affairs with other men” and Bechdel reflects that she was “upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents’ tragedy” (58). While this may have been what Bechdel

50 Pearl does not discuss James’ 1880 tragicomic novel Washington Square. However, it is interesting to note that Bechdel mentions that when her mother was in college she starred in The Heiress, which is an adaptation of Washington Square (66).

72 felt when she came out, I argue that the text itself is a tragicomedy because Alison’s comic narrative arc is just as prominent as Bruce’s tragic narrative arc. Bechdel draws on traditional tragicomic characteristics to tell Alison’s story, and by paralleling her narrative alongside Bruce’s generically tragic narrative she shows the reader how queer narratives have evolved alongside growing support for LGBTQ Americans. The tragicomic is present throughout the text and thus emphasizes how tragedy and comedy are entwined, just as

Alison and Bruce’s stories are “entwined” (232).

Bechdel links comedy and tragedy from the outset by naming her book Fun Home.

“Fun,” the reader learns early in the memoir, is short for “funeral.” Even before this knowledge the use of “fun” in the title is contrasted with the cover images. The original, hardback edition features a small section of the fun home – a table with an ornate lamp, and a silver platter holding a calling-card with the title of the book in gothic lettering, both in front of floral wallpaper. Subsequent editions feature framed photos (illustrated by

Bechdel) on the same table with family members looking austere and not particularly happy (one edition has Alison, her brothers, and their mother, and another edition has

Alison and her father). The covers (on American publications of the book) share the same color-scheme as the book: black, white, grey, and different washes of green. The colors, images, and font choice all indicate to the reader that the text is not a comedy as something with “fun” in the title might suggest. It is worth mentioning, too, that actual carnival fun houses are not necessarily fun, either. On the contrary, carnival fun houses intend to disorient people by distorting reality (as with fun home mirrors). Before even opening the book the reader is presented with seemingly disparate tones of tragedy and comedy.

73 Bechdel opens Fun Home with entwined allusions to happy nostalgia and tragic foreboding. The illustrations in the first three panels (that make up the first page) show a young Alison playing “airplane” with her father. In the third panel Bruce is on his back on the floor with Alison atop his feet on her stomach. Bruce’s tragic narrative trajectory is first hinted at through the placement of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina by his side on the floor.

Anna Karenina is the first of many literary allusions in the text, and even readers who have not read Tolstoy’s work may know that his novel ends with Anna stepping in front of a train. Like Bruce’s, her suicide is also alluded to early in the novel. In Book I, Chapter 18, when Anna first arrives in Moscow from St. Petersburg, a station worker is hit by a train but the circumstances are unclear as to whether he intentionally stepped in front of it or not. Anna is deeply distressed and refers to the incident as “a bad omen” (Tolstoy 68).

Bruce, the reader learns at the end of the first chapter of Fun Home, commits suicide when

Alison is away at college (23). “He jumped in front of a truck,” she later tells a friend (45).

However, at the beginning of the second chapter the narrator states, “There’s no proof, actually, that my father killed himself. No one knew it wasn’t an accident” (27). Despite various reasons that could explain how he was accidentally killed (he was distracted, etc.),

Bechdel describes these as “quibbles” and goes on to state, “I don’t believe it was an accident” (28).

Along with Anna Karenina by Bruce’s side in the opening panels, the

Icarus/Daedalus myth is also referenced. In a caption box the narrator states, “In the circus, acrobatics where one person lies on the floor balancing another are called ‘Icarian games’”

(3). What is at once an image of a father and daughter playing a game is quickly disrupted by the invocation of Icarus, who, as Bechdel notes on the next page “flew so close to the sun

74 his wings melted” (4). Directly after the note about the famously tragic Greek myth, another caption states, “In our particular reenactment of this mythic relationship, it was not me but my father who was to plummet from the sky” (4). Bruce’s “plummet,” his suicide, is characteristic of the “gay tragedy” in that death, often by suicide, at the end of the novel or play is a common trope of nineteenth and twentieth century representations of gay and lesbian people. The historian Samuel Clowes Huneke explains that depictions of gay men committing suicide began in the “late 1860s, just at the moment when the earliest texts on homosexuality began to appear” (Wakefield). However, Gardiner explains that even though

Bruce’s story fits into a larger trend in the representation of gay men, Bechdel is still able to individualize him through her memoir of their lives together. She writes, “Fun Home portrays one representative of the tragedy of the closet in twentieth-century America as a single, strikingly individual gay man, even as his psychology may be seen as a representative of the era of the gay closet” (205).

Although Bechdel avoids reducing her father’s story to a one-dimensional account of the closet leading to suicide, his narrative trajectory is still representative of the queer tragedy, and is starkly contrasted with Alison’s own narrative arc. While suicide may be a trope, it is also a tragic reality that lesbian, gay, and bisexual identified youth are twice as likely than their heterosexual counterparts to have suicide thoughts, attempt suicide, or commit suicide, according to the Center for Disease Control. While the CDC does not have enough research to give exact statistics about suicide and trans youth, one study found that

25% of 55 trans teenagers had considered suicide (“LGBT Youth”). This is why, as Huneke writes in his article “The Gay-Suicide Stereotype Kills Gay People, and Must End,” it is important to consider how representations of suicide affect LGBTQ people. Huneke’s

75 research into gay suicide in literature showed that “Depictions of romantic suicides are particularly insidious because populations confronted with suicide – whether illusory or real – are more prone to it themselves” (a phenomenon called the “Werther-effect”) (“The

Gay Suicide”). While Bechdel certainly does not “romanticize” her father’s death in Fun

Home, quite the opposite, her memoir depicts a narrative arc characteristic of the twentieth-century. Importantly, however, she also shows how tragic narrative arcs are changing to tragicomic narrative arcs.

I agree with Pearle’s assertion that the end of Fun Home produces a mixed response in the reader – mourning for Bruce and the homophobic culture that haunted him, and hope and happiness for Alison who is able to thrive and live a full life outside of the closet.

This ambiguous reaction to the ending is a defining characteristic of tragicomedy, and

Bechdel’s choice to end her book with a panel that produces this response is important to its place within the genre. In addition to the “bittersweet” feeling it produces (to use Pearl’s adjective), it also solidifies Alison as a comic character because the ending of her narrative is not an ending at all, rather it is the beginning of her story. In the final panel a young

Alison is jumping into a pool from a diving board into the awaiting arms of her father. The caption reads, “But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt” (232). Not far from Bruce is a section of the pool the indents and resembles the grill of a semi-truck; the grill of a semi-truck appears in the prior panel, reminding the reader that Bruce was killed after being hit by a truck. Even with the looming truck in the last two panels, Bechel makes the important decision to end her book with the conclusion that Alison is a comic character because, in part, her father’s life enables her to live the life he could only dream of for himself.

76 While Bruce’s story aligns with the “genre of gay tragedy” (as defined by Gardiner),

Bechdel also connects his narrative to traditional conceptions of the tragic genre. Directly after a caption tells the reader that Bruce would “plummet from the sky,” another caption reads, “But before he did so, he managed to get quite a lot done” (4). As panels show Bruce restoring their home, and ordering Alison to help in various tasks (washing curtains, retrieving hammers, etc.), the captions explain that Bruce’s “great achievement arguably, was his monomaniacal restoration of our old house” (4). The narrator explains, “Historical restoration wasn’t his job. It was his passion. And I mean passion in every sense of the word. Libidinal. Manic. Martyred” (7). Accompanying this caption is a panel with Bruce, shirtless, carrying a large wooden bannister over his shoulder. The house is behind him, a black silhouette that contrasts against his figure. The image and caption depict Bruce as a

Christ figure (and in this image in particular Christ carrying the cross – a moment in the

Passion of Christ).

In “Laughter, Catharsis, and the Patristic Conception of Embodied Logos,” philosopher Dirk Westerkamp explains that the Passion of Christ has been understood in terms of Aristotelian tragedy since Early Christianity. Westerkamp cites Tertullian, Pope

Leo I, and John Chrysostomos as examples of writers who “describe Christ’s passion with notions that are reminiscent of Aristotle’s theory of mimesis, mythos, tragic catharsis, peripeteia, and anagnorisis” (235). In this sense, Bechdel connects Bruce to both the “gay tragedy” and the Aristotelian tragedy.

The Icarus/Daedelus and Passion of Christ are examples of Bechdel comparing

Bruce’s narrative to traditional understandings of tragedy, but Fun Home also has elements of the modern tragedy. Adrian Poole explains that the presence of ghosts is common in

77 both Renaissance and modern tragedy, but while the ghosts in Renaissance tragedy are often literal, as with The Ghost in Hamlet, ghosts in modern tragedy are usually figurative.

In Fun Home, there is the obvious connection to ghosts in the sense of the family owning a funeral home, but more prevalent is the sense of Alison being haunted by her father’s life and his death. Regarding ghosts in the modern tragedy, Poole explains, “In personal terms this often means what fathers and mothers have passed on to their children in the form of duties, loyalties, passions, and injuries” (35). In Fun Home, there are several moments of

Bruce trying to pass on his “injuries” to Alison by forcing her to adhere to social constructions of femininity, just as he has had to live within constructions of normative sexuality and masculinity. In Chapter Four Alison goes on a business trip with Bruce to

Philadelphia. They stop at a diner and see an “unsettling sight”: a woman with short hair,

“men’s” clothing, and a ring of keys51 dangling from a belt loop. Bechdel explains the significance of the key ring in a 2016 article titled “Lesbians and Key Rings: a Cultural Love

Story.” Bechdel is quoted saying, “When I first came out, the key ring was the first visual cue I learned of my new world, picked up through anthological surveys of lesbian dance parties. [Key rings are] a phallic symbol – they’re about potency, agency, capability”

(Cauterucci). The caption accompanying the image of the butch woman in the diner reads,

“I didn’t know there were women who wore men’s clothes and had men’s haircuts. But like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home – someone they’ve never spoken to, but know by sight – I recognized her with a surge of joy.”52 Bruce, with a stern

52 This is a pivotal scene in the Fun Home musical, and the song accompanying it, “Ring of Keys,” is the play’s most popular. It is used as part of the merchandise available as part of the show’s Broadway run (the only song to be featured), and the actress who played Young Alison, Sydney Lucas, sang it at the 2015 Tony Awards ceremony.

78 expression, asks Alison, “Is that what you want to look like?” (118). Although Alison answers no, “the vision of the truck-driving bulldyke sustained [her] through the years… as perhaps it haunted [her] father” (119). In addition to the element of tragicomic irony in that the person who “sustains” Alison is a truck driver, and a truck is what ends up causing

Bruce’s death, this is also a moment in the text that shows how Alison’s narrative might have been tragic. She might have let her father’s shame, both of his own sexuality and what he suspected in his daughter, haunt her throughout her life. She might have internalized the sense of social duty and tried to observe heteronormative behavior and deny her sexuality and preferred gender expression as her father did. Instead, Bechdel chose to actively go against her father’s legacy, his ghost, and live openly. In an interview with Terry Gross,

Bechdel states, “In many ways my life, my professional career has been a reaction to my father’s life, his life of secrecy” (“Lesbian Cartoonist”).

Bechdel’s choice to be an out lesbian who presents more masculine than feminine directly counteracts her father’s life in the closet and tragic narrative trajectory. By dismissing her father’s “ghost”, she becomes a tragicomic character whose narrative trajectory ends in the queer comedy.53 Fun Home is a non-linear narrative, so the reader knows at the beginning of the book that she “escapes” from the fun home closet and goes on to come out, date women, and find a queer community. Alison is shown discovering a literary community by working her way through the LGBTQ books from the library (“If only

I’d had the foresight to call this an independent reading. ‘Contemporary and Historical

Perspectives on Homosexuality’ would have had quite a legitimate ring” (205)), meeting

53 Fun Home shows the ways in which Alison reckons with her father’s life, and death, in relation to her own identity, but her 2013 graphic narrative, Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama shows how her mother is perhaps the more significant antagonist in Bechel’s life.

79 other queer people at college, and attending meetings at the Gay Union.54 These panels depicting Alison openly finding community are contrasted with Bruce secretly going cruising on a trip to New York City for the bicentennial celebration; where Bruce lives his queerness in the shadows, Alison is able to live in the open.

Poole explains that ghosts in the modern tragedy also manifest as “living dead” characters – characters whose lives are joyless and who feel trapped in their own version of Hell. He writes, “Images of imprisonment, silence, and madness” are used in the modern tragedy, and “the dread of being unjustly incarcerated, entombed, and forgotten invades modern imagination” (39). Readers see this isolation and oppressive silence throughout

Fun Home. In several instances Bechdel emphasizes family members’ isolation by separating characters by frame. Writing about the individual artistic pursuits of her family members (her father restored their home, her mother acted and played the piano, Alison drew, her brother played the guitar, and her other brother built models), Bechdel, the narrator, explains, “The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew. And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion” (134).

Accompanying these captions is a large panel illustration of the Bechdel family home with a silhouette of each family member in separate area of the house. The silhouetted characters are further isolated from one another through thick circular frames that highlight each family member as they are engaged in their separate passions. Although the individuals in the Bechdel family are alike in their shared “geniuses,” they remain emotionally separated as symbolically shown through their isolation in comic frames. Bechdel also uses

54 In a panel that shows Alison exiting a Gay Union meeting there is an “Anita Bryant Sucks Oranges” on the door (a detail that is also in the musical version). This is another way, albeit small, that Fun Home is linked to Tales of the City. In Tales Michael references the Anita Bryant “Save Our Children” campaign in a coming out letter to his parents.

80 windowpanes, within the comic frames, to show how remote the family is from one another despite occupying the same home. On pages 86 and 139 the reader looks in on the family from outside the house and sees characters within separate window frames, emphasizing their isolation (further stressed by the caption which reads, “Our selves were all we had”) and the way they are entrapped in their own home. After explaining that “in isolation, [their] creativity took on an aspect of compulsion” the narrator states, “My actual obsessive-compulsive disorder began when I was ten” (135). The text then shows a young

Alison going through compulsive motions to assuage obsessive thoughts. What started with obsessively trying to ensure the bathtub faucet dripped in even numbers evolved into elaborate rituals, repeated “incantations,” and hand gestures (135 – 137). In a very literal sense, Bechdel depicts a form of “madness” that was part of her childhood. Eventually the young Alison overcomes her compulsions by “set[ting] deadlines by which to abandon specific compulsions, one at a time” (149). Just as her form of “madness” developed in isolation, she also overcame it in isolation. Although the period of time in which Alison was consumed with a “dark fear of annihilation” is relatively short in her life – late adolescence to the beginning of puberty – Bechdel chooses to emphasize its importance to her development and in doing so it shows another tragic aspect of her childhood that she overcame, making her ultimately a comic character.

Just as Bechdel shows how Alison had to free herself from the prison of her mind,55 she also depicts her struggle to escape from the entrapments of the family home. After describing the “Icarian games” she played with her father, Bechdel expands on further

55 OCD is often described as a “prison of the mind” (see Adam, “I Have Obsessive,” Moker, “Obsessive Compulsive”)

81 parallels between Daedalus and Bruce, including Daedalus’s maze and Bruce’s home restoration. The captions read:

Daedalus, too, was indifferent to the human cost of his projects. He blithely betrayed

the king, for example, when the queen asked him to build her a cow disguise so she

could seduce the white bull. Indeed, the result of that scheme – a half-bull, half-man

monster – inspired Daedalus’s greatest creation yet. He hid the Minotaur in the

labyrinth – a maze of passages and rooms opening endlessly into one another…and

from which, as stray youths and maidens discovered to their peril…escape was

impossible. (11-12)

Alongside the captions are images of a young Alison (and in some panels, her brothers) doing chores in the house with a worried expression indicating that her father is close behind and ready to scold her for a wrong move (her brother is shown cowering and covering his face as Bruce looms over him). While the house is read by young Alison as a maze, Bruce’s fervor for restoration can also be read as him constructing his own mausoleum. The home is simultaneously his way of creating a portrait of the idyllic nuclear family, while also building the very walls that entrap him. However, even as the fun home is depicted as a mausoleum and a kind of maze with its own versions of stray youths and a tyrant Minotaur, Fun Home distinguishes itself from the tragedy by having its protagonist escape the maze. The caption “…escape was impossible” is juxtaposed with an adolescent

Alison leaping down the front steps, coat half on, out of the house – in other words, escaping (12). The reader knows her narrative arc bends toward comedy (she is, after all, the one writing the book), despite the tragic elements contained within the house and her

82 father. The focus, again, is on Bechdel’s tragicomic narrative and the image of her leaping to her freedom.

Beyond the contrast between Alison and Bruce’s narratives, Fun Home is tragicomic in the way the text is created to evoke both tragic and comic responses in the reader. Foster argues in The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy that a “family characteristic” uniting

Renaissance and modern tragicomedies is that in each era the genre required a great deal from their audiences. She explains that in both “overall design” and “individual segments” the tragicomedy “evoke[s] such complex and simultaneous combinations of responses, including simultaneous engagement and detachment, by its mixture of tragic and comic elements in situation, characters (often within a single character), dialogue, and visual effects” (14). The contemporary queer tragicomedy also shares this important characteristic, and Fun Home shows how Foster’s theory extends beyond plays and into medium of comics. In Fun Home Bechdel creates tragic responses, comic responses, and moments when the two are entwined, and in doing so demonstrates how the queer tragicomedy works against past simplistic representations of LGBTQ experience.

A tragic response, Foster explains, is created when there is “intense emotional involvement and a painful awareness of the ironic discrepancy between what is and what might have been” (14). By positioning her father’s story alongside her own, Bechdel makes this discrepancy abundantly clear – the reader sees how, had Bruce been born a few decades later, he too could have come out of the closet and found community as Alison does. While away at college Alison comes out in a letter to her parents. In a return letter, her father writes that there were a few times in his thirties that he had considered “taking a

83 stand,” but that he had never “considered it when [he] was young” (211). His letter contrasts the era of his youth with his daughter’s. He writes:

I’ll admit that I have been somewhat envious of the ‘new’ freedom (?) that appears

on campuses today. In the fifties it was not even considered an option. It’s hard to

believe that just as it’s hard to believe that I saw Colored and Whites on drinking

fountains in Florida in elementary school. Yes, my world was quite limited. You

know I was never even in New York until I was about twenty. But even seeing it then

was not quite a revelation. There was not much in the Village that I hadn’t known in

Beech Creek. In New York you could see and mention it but elsewhere it was not

seen or mentioned. (212)

There is, of course, the added irony in the awareness that Alison would have never been born if this were Bruce’s story. Alison tries to imagine her father coming out in his youth, but finds that “it leads to a peculiarly literal cul de sac” that ends in the question “where does that leave [her]” (197)? Nevertheless, the reader is made aware of how dramatically the culture surrounding LGBTQ issues shifts in the latter half of the twentieth century, and how the lives of Bruce, and so many other people, could have been different.

Even as the reader is aware of Bruce’s own tragic life, Bechdel introduces another comic element of Alison’s narrative arc: her earning tacit acceptance from her father shortly before his suicide. There is not an unambiguously happy and cathartic scene of

Bruce embracing Alison’s newly stated lesbian identity, but there is a moment of connection between father and daughter. On a visit home from college Alison tries to

“broach the topic” but drops her first attempt when she sees the “fear in his eyes” (218-19).

Later in the week, however, they go see Coal Miner’s Daughter and Alison makes another

84 “foray” by telling her father, “I wondered if you knew what you were doing when you gave me that Collette book” to which he responds, “It was just a guess” (220). Bruce goes on to tell Alison his “first experience” was when he was fourteen, that there was a “boy [his] senior year of college,” and that he “really wanted to be a girl” when he was a child and would “dress up in girls’ clothes.” Alison responds enthusiastically, “I wanted to be a boy! I dressed in boys’ clothes! Remember?” (221). Bruce does not respond to her declaration, and instead they arrive at the theater shortly thereafter. Returning to Odysseus and Ulysses, texts referenced throughout Fun Home, the captions over silence in the car read, “It was not the sobbing, joyous reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus. It was more like fatherless

Stephen and sonless Bloom…having their equivocal late-night cocoa at 7 Eccles Street”

(221). After the movie Bruce takes Alison to a “notorious local nightspot” that had a gay bar in the back. They are denied entry because Alison is not twenty-one. The narrator reflects,

“It could have been a funny story one day. As it was, we drove home in mortified silence”

(223). Bechdel emphasizes the “ironic discrepancy of what might have been” by describing a moment when her and her father almost connected. They almost had a conversation.

They almost went to a gay bar together. However, despite the many “almost” moments that never fully materialized into an explicit bonding over their shared queerness, these panels still show how Bruce was implicitly giving Alison permission to be herself. He made an effort to connect with her, indicating that, although difficult to talk about, he accepted her.

This acceptance furthers Alison’s own comic ending – she earned a form of approval from her father before died, an act that might contribute to her own ability to move on with her life outside of the fun home. The inclusion of this scene once again stresses the comic aspect of Bechdel’s tragicomedy, but also produces a mixed emotional response because

85 the reader is painfully aware of Bruce’s impending suicide and that the father and daughter never got the “homecoming” that Alison imagined.

Similar to the way the tragic response is heightened by audience awareness of how the story might have been comic, the comic response, Foster explains, often happens in moments that are tragic. The comic response includes, “laughter, both critical and sympathetic, a wry appreciation of incongruity, some degree of detachment, including the ability to observe one’s own responses and the dramatic means by which they are created”

(14). Foster describes the tragicomedy as “a play in which the tragic and the comic both exist but are formally and emotionally dependent on one another, each modifying and determining the nature of the other so as to produce a mixed, tragicomic response in the audience” (11). Foster refers specifically to the “play,” but her definition is also particularly relevant to the comic genre. Imagery and staging is essential to any effective theatrical performance, and this requirement extends to comics. Comics are crafted in a similar way to theater performances are crafted: the creator of each must consider the positions of actors, the surrounding props, when actors enter and leave the frame/stage, and which elements must be exaggerated for the audience to see them (i.e. a facial expression). Plays, and comics, are unique genres that allow for complexity to arise from incongruity between word/text and image/staging. It is therefore not surprising that Fun Home the musical was so successful, both in terms of mainstream success and accolades, and in terms of effectively adapting one of the most striking parts of the original comic – its tragicomic genre. Not only did the play’s creators Lisa Kron (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori

(music) have a genre that was particularly apt for the tragicomedy, they had a text to guide

86 them that demonstrated ways that the audience can have ambivalent responses (sadness and laughter) to tragicomedy.

In the Renaissance and modern periods tragicomic plays “evoked mixed tragic and comic responses in its audience in a way that is both stimulating and provocative” (14).

Mixed responses can happen most poignantly in moments when the audience is inspired to feel both humor and sorrow at the same time. Fun Home the musical is not short of these moments of “comic agony” as Albert Bermel termed them. In generic terms, Bermel distinguishes “comic agony” from the tragicomedy by arguing, “The tragicomic label belongs on a work in which the tragic and comic alternate” whereas in comic agony “the tragedy and comic are interwoven ‘simultaneously, each heightening the other’; they are threads of contrasting colors in a fabric that is iridescent, neither of the colors and yet derived from both” (4). However, just as “humor, satire, irony, and the grotesque” may all be part of the tragicomedy (but do not “predominate” or else that would change the genre),

I argue that Bermel’s “comic agony” can be part of the tragicomedy without superseding the dominate tragicomic genre. In Fun Home the musical comic agony plays an integral role in making the play a tragicomedy.

As described in the opening of this chapter, the biggest laugh at both the New York

City and San Francisco shows came during the line spoken by Alison at the beginning of the play, “Caption: My Dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town. And he was gay. And I was gay. And he killed himself. And I…became a lesbian cartoonist” (FHM 9).

Within the span of a line, the audience (for the first time) realizes the tragic trajectory of

Bruce’s narrative, and laughs at the incongruity of Alison becoming a “lesbian cartoonist.”

The laughter is heighted by the darkness of the first clause of the sentence, setting the

87 tragicomic tone for the rest of the musical. The tragicomedy is “deliberately contrived in its overall design and in its individual segments to evoke such complex and simultaneous combinations of responses,” and several musical numbers succeed in this design, such as the song “Rainbow of Love” (Foster 12). Bruce and Helen are fighting after books are left on a table Bruce just varnished. Bruce tells Helen to “Take these back to the library you crazy,

// stupid bitch.” Helen then tells Bruce he needs to leave for his “appointment” or else they

“are in lot of trouble.” After Helen tells Bruce “If you’re not home for dinner I’m throwing it in the toilet,” the stage direction reads, “Small Alison has shut her eyes and covered her ears to block out the fight. Now she starts trying to sing over it” (40-41). Alison’s brother hands her a tambourine and “Bobby Jeremy and his backup singers, The Susan Deys” appear. Backed-up by Alison, her brothers, and The Susan Deys, Bobby Jeremy sings,

“Today I woke up with this feeling I did not recognize // Our happy life seemed far away and everything was made of lies. The sky was turning dark when baby I looked in your eyes

// And that’s when I knew…” (41). At this point Bruce and Helen join in and all together they sing the chorus: “Everything’s all right babe, when we’re together” (41-42). The accompanying music and choreography is up-beat and excessively cheery, and the entire number is at odds with the tense scene that came before it. The audience has to reconcile the comic, uplifting feelings the song inspires with the knowledge that it is merely trying to mask the sadness and tension in the Bechdel household; thus, the tragicomic response occurs.56

56 A commenter on a YouTube video of a performance of the song sums up the tragicomic response perfectly: “I just love how this song is both cheerful and upsetting, Fun Home is such a great story at displaying complex emotions” (Dramatic Irony).

88 The tragicomedy, whether of the Renaissance, modernity, or contemporary era, asks the audience to do a great deal of emotional and interpretive work. A tragedy provides catharsis and a comedy provides relief, but the tragicomedy demands a complex range of emotions more akin to how one feels in actual life. When a tragicomedy is successful, as is true of both the text and musical version of Fun Home, the tragic and comic elements are heightened by one another and the audience is forced to grapple with a complexity of emotions. Bryan Safi, a host of the Throwing Shade podcast that focuses on “all the issues important to ladies, and gays,” succinctly explains this phenomenon as it relates to Fun

Home in his commentary after seeing the show on Broadway: “She tells it with a lot of humor and because of that it’s extra heartbreaking” (Safi).

Conclusion: “We did have a lot of fun, in spite of everything”

In a video for MiND: Media Independence (a Philadelphia-based non-profit that produces and distributes five minute informative videos) Bechdel explains the laborious process she went through to create Fun Home. She describes researching historically accurate styles of dress and landmarks, searching through old family photos for details, photographing herself posed as each character in the book to “help [her] have an accurate drawing reference,” then sketching the book in pencil, inking over the pencil, erasing the pencil, scanning to Photoshop, filling in colors, editing mistakes, shading a separate layer, scanning that layer, combining the drawings with the shading, and finally adding the text

(“Alison Bechdel – Creating”). It took her seven years to create Fun Home. In other words,

Bechdel was incredibly precise with each drawing, each literary reference, each word.

While this is certainly a testament to Bechdel’s pursuit to be as accurate as memory allows,

89 it is also a testament to how she was deliberate in making Fun Home a tragicomedy.

Returning to Foster’s list of “family resemblances” between tragicomedies of the

Renaissance and the modern period, she explains that, “the relation between the tragic and the comic should not be haphazard” but rather a deliberate attempt to entwine tragedy and comedy (15). It is evident that not a single frame in Fun Home is haphazard. Bechdel (and

Kron and Tesori after her) were deliberate in creating a tragicomedy, and their creations are pivotal in understanding how queer artists have built on the tragicomic tradition and used it to create complex stories and characters. Bechdel nods to this complexity in the dedication of Fun Home to her mother and brothers. She writes, “We did have a lot of fun, in spite of everything” and then goes on to tell a story of her father’s tragedy, and the ways, in spite of everything, her story is a tragicomic.

90 Chapter Three: Transparent

“I’m lost, but I’m hopeful” - Alanis Morissette

In 2015, when the Amazon Video show Transparent was nominated for eleven

Primetime Emmy awards,57 news outlets were quick to ask the same question: why was it nominated in the “Comedy” category? Titles like “Why Is 'Transparent' A Comedy At The

Emmys Instead Of A Drama?” (Bustle) and “Look Out, Emmys: ‘Transparent’ is a Drama

Trapped in a Comedy’s Body” 58 (Variety) shared the thesis that the show “feels more like a drama more likely to wring tears than laughs” (Wallenstein). In February 2015, the

Television Academy issued a press release to clarify their decisions: “To clarify the difference between the ‘Comedy’ and ‘Drama’ series categories, series with episodes of 30 minutes or less are defined as a ‘Comedy’; those with episodes of more than 30 minutes are presumed to be a ‘Drama.'” Rather than clarify, the press release led to articles with titles like “The Emmys’ New Rules for Classifying Comedies and Dramas Make No Sense” (Slate).

The arbitrariness of the genre categories, and the fact that shows like Transparent and

Orange is the New Black were classified as comedies, was parodied in a 2016 episode of

Saturday Night Live, hosted by Tom Hanks. The skit was a commercial for a new CBS show called Broken about “a family of adjunct professors who are all diagnosed with depression on the same day” (Zarum, “Watch”). Stylistically similar to Transparent, Hanks and

57 Transparent won five awards that year, including “Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series” and “Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series” for Jill Soloway and Jeffrey Tambor, respectively. The following year the show was nominated for ten awards, and Solway and Tambor won the same categories. 58 This title is a play on how transgender identity is often described as someone feeling as though they are in the wrong body. It might be funny if it was a nod to difficulty of summarizing complex individual experience into a simple idiom, but I question the author’s awareness of trans issues when he refers to Tambor’s character as a “cross-dresser” (Wallenstein).

91 members of the SNL cast highlight how the tone and content of “prestige” TV streaming shows is starkly different from network TV sit-coms – there are no laugh tracks, no easy resolutions, and often, not much to laugh about.

This arbitrary approach to assigning genre categories led to a proliferation of think pieces seeking a new term that more accurately describes shows like Transparent59, including “sadcom,” “dramedy,” and “traumedy” (Aroesti, Jaffe, Nussbaum “The

Heartbreak”). I argue that a neologism is not necessary to describe Transparent; instead, the show is a reimagining of the tragicomedy. As with Tales of the City, and Fun Home,

Transparent is an example of the contemporary queer tragicomedy. The tone of the series is often somber, and characters experience personal tragedy that is symbolic of tragedy on a cultural level (e.g. the transphobia character’s fate is at once individual and representative of larger systemic and cultural transphobia), but the prevailing tone is comic in that the characters are learning, evolving, and building better lives for themselves outside of heteronormative structures.

The first section of this chapter describes the context and criticism of the series. The second section explores how Transparent is a tragicomedy in the traditional sense: the show utilizes comic relief and ends the narrative arcs with comedy. The third section explains how Transparent is an example of the queer tragicomedy, specifically the ways in which queer temporality and queer futurity function as comic devices in the series.

Section One: Context and Criticism

59 Other Netflix shows in this still-ongoing conversation include BoJack Horseman, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and One Mississippi.

92 Amazon, the billion-dollar online retailer, officially entered “the original programming arms race” in April 2013 by uploading eight comedy pilots online and asking viewers to vote on their favorites (Paskin, “Amazon Has”). In February of 2014, Amazon released five more show pilots, including Transparent. The pilot was well received by critics who encouraged viewers to watch the series. Margaret Lyons, a television critic for the New York Times, wrote in an article for Vulture that Transparent was “magnificent” and

“the best pilot in years.” The series was released in full on September 26th, 2014 and again was met with critical acclaim, but unlike network television, Amazon (like Netflix and other content-streaming services) does not release viewership statistics, so it was impossible to know how many people were actually watching it. In an October 2014 press release,

Amazon declared that the series was “already breaking records” as the “no. 1 ranked series on Prime Instant Video since the show’s launch” (“Transparent Debut”).60 Todd Van Der

Werff, writing for Vox, points to this information as one example of “Orwellian doublespeak” in the press release because “there is no real way to know [what the claim means] in the absence of numbers.” Regardless of the absence of viewership data, as Van

Der Werff notes, the show’s first season was still a success for Amazon because “people are buzzing about it passionately.” The press release announced that Transparent was renewed for another season. The second season was released in its entirety in December 2015, followed by a third season in September 2016, and a fourth season in September 2017.

60 The press release also notes that Transparent “is the most binge-watched TV series on Prime Instant Video with nearly 80 percent of all viewers bingeing on two or more episodes of the series in the same day” (“Transparent Debut”). The ability to “binge watch” television is just one way online content-streaming services is changing how people consume media.

93 As mentioned in the introduction, Amazon confirmed in January 2018 that there will be a fifth season of the show (Stack), but on February 15th, 2018 they announced that

Jeffrey Tambor was fired from the series following allegations of sexual misconduct. In

November 2017, in the midst of Hollywood’s “Me Too” movement on social media,61 three women, Trace Lysette (a Transparent cast member), Van Barnes (Tambor’s personal assistant), and Tamara Delbridge (Tambor’s makeup artist on the 2001 film Never Again) accused Tambor of sexual misconduct. Later in the month Tambor seemed to announce his resignation from the series, after claiming the set had been “afflicted” with “a politicized atmosphere” that made him feel like he could not return to production (Nyren). However, in December 2017 his publicist clarified that neither Amazon nor Tambor have made a

“final decision” regarding his status as the show’s protagonist (Bradley). Once it was announced that he had been fired, Tambor reiterated his claim that the accusations were false, and that the “toxic politicized atmosphere” led to an unfair handling of the situation.

How the show chooses to handle Maura’s storyline will have implications regarding whether future season(s) can be read as an example of the queer tragicomedy; because the season is ongoing, I will treat the first four seasons as an independent study.

The series focuses on Jeffrey Tambor’s character Maura Pfefferman, her ex-wife

Shelly (Judith Light) and their three grown children: the oldest Sarah (Amy Landecker), followed by Josh (Jay Duplass), and Ali (Gaby Hoffman). Through exterior shots used to introduce new scenes, it is evident early in the Pilot episode that the Pfefferman’s are wealthy Los Angelinos. The extent of their wealth becomes more apparent in subsequent episodes as the viewer learns that Josh is a successful record producer, Ali gets money from

61 Tarana Burke created the Me Too campaign in 2007, ten years before “Me Too” trended on Twitter in the wake of allegations against Harvey Weinstein (Garcia).

94 her parents, Sarah lives in a large, expensive home, and the Pfefferman family home is worth fifteen million dollars. Unlike television shows that are intentionally vague in location to encourage viewer-identification (even shows that are set in a specific city often rely solely on interior shots), Transparent is, as Emily Nussbaum writes in the New Yorker,

“aggressively specific” (“Inside Out”). Nussbaum describes the Pfeffermans as, “Jewy, screwy, L.A., upper middle class, not so much queer-friendly as queer-saturated” (“Inside

Out”). In the thirty minute pilot episode the viewer learns that Ali is jobless and single

(she’s thinking about writing an “Urban Outfitters check-out line” type book called Are You

My Soulmate?, “a sort of cautionary tale about slutting around and just…being me”); Sarah is a discontented stay-at-home mom and wife (who by the end of the episode begins an affair with a former girlfriend); and Josh is a music producer who dates younger women

(“what do you feed these children that you have over at your house?” Ali asks him) but is sleeping with a significantly older woman named Rita. Rita is later identified as the

Pfefferman children’s former nanny with whom Josh has an extremely complicated relationship – she is presented as someone Josh relies on for emotional support, but also as the cause of his psychological turmoil and intimacy issues.

Midway through the pilot the viewer learns the pun in the title – that Maura is Ali,

Josh, and Sarah’s trans-parent. Maura at this point in the episode and in flashbacks that punctuate the first season, is Mort,62 their professor father. The pilot begins with each of the children being summoned for dinner at the family home because their father has something to tell them. The scene of the kids arriving at the home and the dinner scene exemplify the tragicomic tone of the series: serious and often tragic topics are interwoven

62 For clarity’s sake, I will refer to Tambor’s pre-transition character as “Mort” and his present day character as Maura.

95 with comedy. As the kids walk up the long pathway to their childhood home in the Pacific

Palisades (a wealthy coastal area of Los Angeles) Ali tells Sarah that Josh thinks their dad might have cancer; Sarah says she thinks he is going to tell them he is engaged to someone named Marcy. They then start joking about how “the last six have been named Marcy” and laughing as they try to remember the Marcys’ last names (“Fitzelfinerheinstein”?

“Rubishnowitzshitzlitz”). Sarah gets serious and asks them if they really think their dad has cancer and without responding Josh asks a question about the takeout: “Does Shotgun

Willy’s do the coleslaw with the peanuts, by the way” (00:07:53 – 00:08:20)? In addition to setting a tragicomic tone, this scene also shows how the children are often completely self- absorbed, a theme that is further enforced when they sit down to dinner and Maura attempts to come out as trans. While feasting on barbeque ribs (perhaps an intentionally non-Kosher choice to demonstrate a reformed approach to Judaism), Mort/Maura says: “I need to talk to you about something. There’s a big change going on, and….”. The kids immediately start talking all at once about whether or not he has cancer, if so, what kind, how he looks, and who else has cancer. Maura/Mort eventually shuts them up by saying,

“God! Stop it. God, I don’t have cancer. You kids want me to have cancer?” It quiets down.

The kids look nervous, but as the camera pans to each of them during this tense and serious moment, they all have BBQ sauce on their faces. The tension of the scene is cut by the physical comedy of a bunch of nervous-looking faces covered in barbeque sauce. Again, what could be a purely serious and potentially tragic moment is intertwined with comedy, both heightening the sadness of the moment and also dispelling it. Mort/Maura ends up not telling them she is trans, and instead informs them that she is going to sell the house.

96 Later in the episode, an exterior shot shows the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Inside,

Maura is at a trans support group meeting. She tells the group that she did not follow through on her commitment (made at the previous meeting) to come out to her kids. After promising the group she will come out soon (jokingly doing the three-finger Boy Scout Oath sign) she says, “They are so selfish. I don’t know how it is that I raised three people who cannot see beyond themselves.” Critics note the selfishness and self-absorption of the children as a theme that continues through each season, but the show manages to still compel the viewer to hope the best for them. Nussbaum notes, “The show’s miracle … is how much it forces you to empathize with [Sarah, Josh, and Ali].” She continues, “These are selfish people you can’t look away from, because they’re smart and funny, but also because the show presents their cruelest mistakes with clear eyes.” Although Maura is in disbelief that she raised three people who “cannot see beyond themselves,” the viewer sees throughout the series the ways in which she was a model of selfish behavior throughout their lives. Nussbaum rightly points out, “One of the show’s riskiest choices is its bluntness about the fact that Maura—so tentative in her flowing muumuus—retains much of the cranky, entitled privilege of Mort.” (“Inside Out”). To ensure the audience is sympathetic to

Maura it would have been easier to present her without any character flaws, but that approach would have also lessened her human complexity. Despite the flawed, often unsympathetic characters, and the specificity of the Pfeffermans’ elite social standing,

Transparent resonates with audiences. Due to the challenges of family life being universally relatable, the audience becomes more open to the trans narrative.

Although the artistic and storytelling merits of the series generally result in glowing critical reviews, Transparent initially garnered valid criticism for lacking racial diversity in

97 the cast, casting a cisgender man to play a trans woman, and representing trans men in a reductive way. In a Film Quarterly essay titled “Jewish, Queer-ish, Trans and Completely

Revolutionary: Jill Soloway’s Transparent and the New Television,” film scholar Villarejo points out a “salient detail” related to the “world of the Pfeffermans”: “almost everyone in

Transparent is white.” She compares the show to other media released in the same time period and also set in Los Angeles that more accurately reflect the diversity of the city

(including the critically acclaimed movie Tangerine63 and the TV musical-comedy Crazy Ex-

Girlfriend). Villarejo argues that setting the series in west Los Angeles, specifically the

Pacific Palisades, serves as an “alibi” for not including people of color in the show. She adds,

“When African American characters do appear, that is, they receive little of the tenderness and respect Soloway devotes to Maura’s transformation.” Villarejo notes that this issue

“hardly provoked notice,” unlike criticism of trans representation.

In a series of 2016 Tweets, trans activist and writer/actress/producer Jen Richards succinctly addressed the problem with cisgender men playing trans women. In addition to taking parts that could go to trans women, Richards explains that casting cisgender men as trans women reinforces the idea that trans women are just men dressed up as women. This

“cultural belief,” she explains, “is the root of violence against us” (Richards “You will”). In an article titled “Why Transparent Has Lost The Trust Of The Trans Community,” Marcy Cook also criticized the show for its lack of trans writers on staff. Responding to people who argue that Jill Soloway has a trans parent and is therefore qualified to write the show, Cook writes, “Sure, her experience will provide her with more understanding than most cis

63 Jay Duplass, who plays Josh Pfefferman, is an executive producer of Tangerine.

98 people, but it’s still second-hand experience. It’s just not the same as lived experience; hearing things second-hand is nothing like living through them” (Cook).64

Despite these critiques, Transparent was not met with as much criticism as the movies that cast cisgender men to play transwomen, including: Tom Wilkinson in Normal

(2007), Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club (2013), Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl (2015), and Matt Bomer in Anything (2017). In an op-ed for The Advocate, Dr. Cael Keegan, a professor of women and gender studies, explains, “Soloway appears to have headed off much of the criticism that Dallas Buyers Club received by educating herself and her cast on trans issues and offering production jobs and speaking parts to actual trans people”

(Keegan).65 Villarejo notes that “even the most vocal critics acknowledge Soloway’s efforts to incorporate trans and queer voices into the show’s DNA, in every department, from lighting to costume design.” However, Keegan went on in his op-ed to argue that Soloway’s progressive approach to representing trans women did not extend to the representation of trans men. In episodes six and seven there is a storyline that involves Ali dating a trans man named Dale, played by trans actor and comedian Ian Harvie. Keegan writes, “Seeing Harvie on screen, depicted as dateable and sexually desirable, was electrifying” (Keegan).

However, Keegan’s initial response quickly changed when “Harvie's entire storyline devolves into a series of jokes about his lack of a proper, cisgender penis.” In fact, as Keegan

64 Cook also brings up an incident for which Soloway received a considerable amount of backlash: Soloway posted a meme on Facebook of “the Transparent poster with the faces of Bruce Jenner and family photoshopped in to replace the Pfeffermans” (Lowder). Although Soloway removed the post and issued an apology, some trans activists saw her decision to post the meme as illustrative of Soloway’s lack of awareness of trans issues (Lowder). 65 Tambor also expressed recognition of the criticism in his 2016 acceptance speech for the Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series Emmy. He said, “To you people out there, you producers and you network owners and you agents and you creative sparks: please give transgender talent a chance. … And also one more thing: I would not be unhappy were I the last cisgender male to play a female transgender on television" (Begley).

99 points out, one of Dale’s early lines is “I’m a man with a vag.” The reduction of Dale’s character leads to, Keegan writes, “Objectification, fetishization, and obsession with genitals that all feed transphobia.”

Responding to the criticism surrounding the first season of Transparent, Soloway decided to institute a “trans-affirmative action” program. In a panel with Jenji Kohan

(creator of Orange is the New Black) at the New Yorker Festival Soloway explained that they66 were unable to find a trans screenwriter, and so they decided to teach a group of trans writers how to write for television. Kohan was resistant to Soloway’s approach to hiring writers, claiming, “what you are in life shouldn’t automatically make you what you do in your art” (Gan). Soloway responded by arguing:

No matter what we did, we were always going to be otherizing Maura in some way.

And in the same way where I wouldn’t want a man to say, ‘I can have a writers’ room

full of men and we can write women just fine.’ I can’t say that I can create a show

about a trans woman and not have a trans woman writing for me. It’s absolutely

necessary, and it’s gonna change the show. (Gan)

The “trans-affirmative action” initiative resulted in the hiring of Our Lady J, a trans singer- songwriter and classical pianist, who had only written as an amateur before being hired for

Transparent (Villarreal). In addition to hiring Our Lady J, Soloway has hired trans people to fill positions in the various production roles, and since season one, Transparent has increased its focus on characters played by trans women (primarily Maura’s friends Davina and Shay, played by Alexandra Billings and Trace Lysette, respectively). With these changes, subsequent seasons of Transparent received less criticism on the basis of trans

66 Soloway identifies as gender non-conforming and prefers they/them/their pronouns (Gross, “‘Transparent’ Creator”).

100 representation (although the show is still limited to the trans women’s experiences as it has not featured another trans man character).

Section Two: Transparent as Tragicomedy – Comic Relief and Narrative Arc

As with Fun Home, the humor in Transparent is often subtle and very dark, but the wry laughter the humor produces consistently engages the viewer and draws them into the sadness of certain scenes. As with the aforementioned scene showing Maura attempting to come out to her children while they are all covered in barbeque sauce, Transparent’s humor is quintessentially tragicomic in that in the genre comedy is often deployed to heighten the sadness or poignancy of scenes. One of the most affecting scenes in the first season happens in episode two, titled “The Letting Go,” when Maura goes to her new friend

Davina’s apartment. Maura is casually looking around Davina’s place and telling her about her children. As Maura takes a seat at Davina’s vanity table, the shot moves to Davina as she says, “You know, sweetie, this is a really big journey that we’re on, and you’ve just started on it, so you’ve got to learn to let go of everything anybody thinks of you. A really, really good friend of mine said this to me when I first transitioned. ‘You know, in five years, you’re going to look up and not one of your family members is still going to be there. Not one.’” Maura then asks: “Was your friend right?” Davina responds: “Yep” with a small smile.

This bleak message from Davina is delivered as the viewer watches Maura sitting at the vanity trying on a pair of rhinestone-lined sunglasses. The image of Maura trying on the glittering, showy glasses is not funny, per se, but it is a moment of levity, a strong contrast to Davina’s statement. The moment is at once joyous because it shows Maura beginning to find friends that she can connect with as a woman, but at the same time heartrending

101 because it reminds the viewer, and Maura, that trans people often face estrangement or exile from biological family.

Comic plot structure defines the queer tragicomedy, not the plot of marriage and children (a function of normative temporality), but rather that of finding queer community.

It is also defined by an ending that is unfinished but ultimately optimistic. As with Tales of the City and Fun Home, Transparent emphasizes the way the location of other queers is a pivotal moment for protagonists. In both Tales and Fun Home the reader sees how moving away from family leads to self-acceptance and a better quality of life, an alternative comic ending for protagonists. In Transparent, however, both Maura’s biological family and her logical family (to use Maupin’s word for chosen family) are essential parts of her coming out narrative; she does not need to gain distance from her biological family to accept her queer identity; on the contrary, their support is crucial to her happiness. Nevertheless, the first season emphasizes how finding a queer family is still integral to Maura’s coming out narrative because they support her when her biological family lets her down.

In season one, episode seven, there is a literal moment of Maura looking up to see her family is not there. Maura is taking part in the West Hollywood LGBT Community

Center’s “Trans Got Talent” show. She and Davina decide to perform a song and Maura expresses to each of her children how important it is to her that they are there. Although they all show up and are there for the beginning of their performance of Gotye’s song

“Somebody That I Used To Know,” one by one they leave (Ali because she cannot stop laughing, Josh because he seems to be having trouble coping with his father’s transition, and Sarah because she’s drunk and spills her drink/gets in a fight with Tammy). Maura looks up to see their empty seats as she sings the line “now you’re just somebody that I

102 used to know” (19:57-22:15, “Symbolic Exemplar”). The scene seems foreshadowing of familial disappointments to come, but in actuality, the Pfefferman family reunites a few days later at Shelly’s condo and, after a brief discussion of the incident, moves beyond the issue. The Pfeffermans go through many intense confrontations (in the season one finale,

Ali says “secrets” are the family’s religion) but always come back together. As the series progresses, Maura’s chosen family is shown as exhibiting the same familial loyalty. For instance, Maura and Davina have a very heated exchange one day, but in their next scene together the argument is not even mentioned – just as Maura’s biological family fights and moves on, so do Davina and Maura. In the second and third season Maura’s logical family,

Davina and Shay, are often included in family events (birthday parties, weddings, funerals).

Although the scene with Davina warning Maura not to rely on her biological family is not funny, it exemplifies the show mixing the tragic with a subtle, comic tone in the same moment. Subtle comedy is used throughout the series as a form of comic relief. Although comic relief has historically been used in tragicomedies, Transparent inverts the historic formula of having lower classes provide the comedy and the higher classes play the tragedy

(a division that ended in the modern era). Giambattista Guarini, whose Compendium of

Tragicomic Poetry is discussed at greater length in the introduction, writes, “I confess, and admit it is the doctrine of Aristotle, that characters of high rank are fitting to tragedy, and those of humble station are suited to comedy,” but goes on to argue that “persons great and those not great should be introduced into one plot” (508-509). When greatness is defined in terms of social, cultural, and economic capital, the Pfefferman family certainly qualifies.

Their privilege and wealth is shown not only in the houses they inhabit and the cars they drive, but in Maura’s unquestioned ability to transition however she chooses. In other

103 words, Maura can afford hormone therapy and “elective” surgery, a privilege not afforded all trans people. However, the Pfeffermans contribute to both the comedy and the tragedy and their obtuseness about their privilege is used as a source of comic relief. A prime example of their comic unawareness happens in the first episode of season two. Family and friends are gathered for Sarah and Tammy’s big, and clearly expensive lesbian wedding

(although the ceremony happens, Sarah realizes during the reception that she made a mistake and tells the Rabbi not to send the paperwork to the county official). Everyone is dressed in white and milling about before the ceremony. Maura tells Davina she “misses

[her] in the Shangri La” (the apartment complex where they both lived). Davina replies,

“Well, the condos came in and moved all us queers out.” “Fucking yuppies,” Maura replies

(17:18-17:22, “Kina Hora”). Davina chuckles slightly, looks out at the swanky Palm Springs wedding, and agrees. Maura seems completely unaware that they are surrounded by

“fucking yuppies,” (many of whom are her family) and this brief exchange turns Maura’s lack of awareness into the joke.

Later in “The Letting Go” episode there occurs another example of comic relief, but in this case there is actual laugh-out-loud humor that offsets the emotional heaviness of the episode. The comic relief comes after a discussion of Tante Gittel, a Pfefferman relative who died in the holocaust. In Shelly’s condo Ali finds a ring that she vaguely remembers coming from Tante Gittel. She asks Shelly, “What’s the story with this thing again? Who is Tante

Gittel? Is that Grandma Rose’s sister who was in Treblinka?” Josh interrupts to ask, “Did we really have someone in Treblinka?” Ali says, “Wasn’t she, like, waiting in line, going to her death and handed it to somebody?” (“The Letting Go”). Shelly is distracted and does not give Ali the information she wants (she also does not know the story and only knows the

104 ring as the “fakakta thing” Mort tried to propose to her with before she made him get a different ring). This short scene introduces the viewer to Tante Gittel (who becomes significant in season two) and the knowledge that Maura’s family was in the holocaust.

“The Letting Go” is an emotionally heavy episode with an overall dark tone that is disrupted by the scene following the discussion of Tante Gittel. Ali goes outside to give bagels to Sarah and her husband Len (who are arguing by their minivan). After Sarah rejects the bagel because it has tofu-schmear on it, Ali attempts to walk back to the condo when a gaggle of geese swarm around her, flapping their wings and trying to get at the bagel. A security guard wielding a net yells, “Ma’am, what you’re looking at is a posturing goose.” Ali starts to panic about what to do next and the camera moves to the point of view of the geese looking at her as she dances around, balancing the tofu-schmear bagel, as Len and Sarah shout directions and the rest of the family look on from the safety of the condo.

The humor is physical and absurd rather than the more common intellectual, subtle humor of the series. The geese scene is dropped in between the discussion of Treblinka and followed by a scene back at Davina’s condo where a fellow resident is wheeled away in a body bag after dying in his apartment (“a sweet old queen,” according to Davina). It is an example of the way the series uses comedy as a palliative to keep the audience engaged, rather than overwhelming the audience with sadness.

Although Maura finds a supportive queer community, has the financial means to support her transition, and is not rejected from her biological family, her character is imbued with a sense of melancholy. Maura’s sadness can perhaps be explained, in part, by her experience of “melancholic universalism.” In a 2015 essay “Melancholic Universalism,”

Sara Ahmed explains why “the universal” often causes sadness for those who are seen as

105 “in relation” to the “universal” (sexism and racism are both predicated on universalism; man as universal, white as universal). She writes, “Melancholic universalism is the requirement to identify with the universal that repudiates you… Not all universalism is melancholic. That is precisely my point: that the universal is distributed. Some embody its promise; others embody the failure to live up to the promise.” After Maura comes out and presents as a woman in the public sphere, she experiences friction with the universal in ways she had never experienced prior to living openly as a trans woman – she comes up against “the wall” of universalism. The wall “comes up for those who are not accommodated … for those who are accommodated there is no wall at all,” writes Ahmed.

Although Maura was in pain before coming out, she still experienced white privilege and the privilege of someone who presents as male. In a season two episode titled “Man on the

Land” Maura tells a group of women, “I was in way too much pain to experience what you’re calling privilege,” to which someone replies, “Your pain and your privilege are separate.” In other words, she was the universal, despite being in emotional agony.

Nussbaum writes, “One of the show’s riskiest choices is its bluntness about the fact that

Maura—so tentative in her flowing muumuus—retains much of the cranky, entitled privilege of Mort” (“Inside Out”). Thus, before coming out she was unhappy because she was not able to be herself, and after coming out she experiences the melancholy that can come from being rejected from the universal. Ahmed writes, “To be rejected by the universal whose promise is not extended to you: melancholic universalism.” However,

Maura’s sadness, in all its complexity, does not preclude the series from being a tragicomedy because her narrative arc concludes optimistically at the end of each season.

106 The pain that Maura felt pre-transition was tragic not only because of her agony, but also because it radiated outward and contributed to the pain of her family. An equally significant tragedy in Transparent is how both Josh and Shelly were sexually abused as children, but because of Maura’s secrets and pain their trauma was eclipsed. Season one, episode four reveals the depth of the Pfefferman family’s secrets when Syd, Ali’s best friend, has sex with Josh and he tells her not to tell Ali. Syd assures him she will not say anything, saying, “I’m just going to sort of store it away in my cabinet of Pfefferman family secrets.” After Josh asks her what other secrets she knows, Syd responds, “And there’s the woman that babysat you, that drove you around and took advantage of your sweet little teenage bod, and it was super lecherous” (00:02:30 – 00:02:51). Josh insists that it was

“every fifteen-year-old’s wet dream,” but later in the episode he goes to Rita’s apartment where he asks her if his parents knew they were having sex when he was a minor. She replies, “Of course they knew. Everybody knew.” Josh presses her for more information about whether or not they ever confronted her to stop her, but she becomes angry at Josh and asks/tells him, “We were in love, right?” Josh placates her, but does not concede they were in love, and the next scene shows them naked in bed. Episode four is the beginning of

Josh trying to grapple with what happened to him as child, and the next season he learns that his parents not only knew about Rita sexually assaulting him, but also knew that he impregnated her. As an adult, at the end of season one, Josh learns he has a teenage son with Rita, but his parents knew long before him and paid a family in Kansas to care for the child and keep him a secret from Josh.

The season two, episode four scenes of Josh realizing he was sexually abused, and that his parents knew, are intercut with a flashback to 1994. Maura, then known as Mort

107 and presenting male, checks into a hotel under a pseudonym. It is revealed that he is meeting up with a friend, Mark/Marcy, to dress in women’s clothing for the weekend.

Where episode four only suggests that Maura’s absence contributes to her overlooking

Josh’s relationship with Rita, episode eight makes the connection more explicit. In episode eight the viewer learns that Ali, with Mort’s subtle encouragement, was allowed to cancel her own Bat Mitzvah. Mort’s ulterior motive for allowing her to cancel was so he could go to a cross-dressing retreat for the weekend with Marcy (he tells the family he is going to a conference).67 As Mort is getting in the car to leave for his “conference,” Shelly is upset because she does not know what to tell people. Mort says, “No one owes anybody any explanation, Shel. It is what it is.” Mort’s statement reflects more about his approach to keeping secrets from his family than it is helpful to a distraught Shelly. After Mort leaves

Shelly calls her sister and tells her, “He just left. Just now. And he left me to pick up the pieces. Per usual” (00:00:27 – 00:01:00, “Best New Girl”). Shelly then leaves the three kids

(Sarah is home from college) to go to her sister’s house. At her sister’s we learn that Mort often misses family events, and that Shelly assumes he is having an affair with his Teaching

Assistant. With both parents gone – Mort leading his secret life, Shelly trying to cope with his absence – the Pfefferman children are left alone.

After Sarah leaves to go to a “really cool protest against abusive labor practices,”

Rita arrives and leaves with Josh. Later in the episode there is a brief scene of a sun- drenched car ride where Rita and Josh hold hands; it is implied this is in the early days of

Rita abusing Josh (before they leave Ali tells Josh that seeing him with Rita is “gross”). As

67 The episode makes clear that the camp is for men who cross dress, not trans women. Men at the camp deride a former-attendee who starts to take hormones: “We’re cross- dressers, but we’re still men.”

108 for Ali, she takes a ride with a stranger (the caterer who shows up to deliver food, not realizing the Bat Mitzvah was cancelled) to the beach. Once there she meets a man, who looks to be in his late-twenties, and tells him she is seventeen. The scene then becomes surreal, with present-day Ali watching thirteen-year-old Ali horse around with the man.

Present-day Ali kisses the man, but the scene is intentionally unclear whether child Ali and the man kiss or have sex. Child Ali wakes up the next morning in the bed of the man’s truck; she asks him why he didn’t try anything with her, and he says he didn’t really believe she was seventeen. Again, what exactly happened is unclear, but it is evident that Mort and

Shelly’s absence during Josh and Ali’s childhoods contributed to them being in dangerous situations, which in turn became the root of issues they have in adulthood.68 Part of the tragedy of Maura’s story is that it was necessary for her to lead a secret life, but

Transparent also shows how secrets can ripple outward to have devastating effects.

In season three Josh’s storyline is centered on him struggling with depression and trying to disentangle himself from Rita. Rita exerts a control over him; she relies on him for money, he reluctantly relies on her for emotional support. In episode five Josh is informed that Rita died, either by accidentally or intentionally falling over the fourth story railing at a mall. As Josh struggles with his complicated grief, the season also shows how the pain and secret Maura carried was so all-encompassing that Shelly’s pain went unseen. In episode eight there is a flashback to Shelly as a preteen in 1958. Her music teacher invites her to come see him after school for some extra singing practice. Excited by the special attention,

Shelly meets with him behind closed doors. After she leaves she quits the musical and stops eating. Her parents take her to a doctor after she does not eat for two weeks, but she

68 This is not to say that Rita is innocent; she is a predator and child molester.

109 refused to talk about what happened. Present-day Shelly is shown to be extremely particular about food, and it is implied that an eating disorder persisted throughout her life after the sexual abuse by her music teacher.

The focus on the ramifications of sexual violence is a persistent theme in seasons three and four, but because Transparent is a tragicomedy both Josh and Shelly’s narrative arcs in each season end with an optimistic tone. At the end of season three the Pfefferman family goes on a cruise together; on the last night Shelly performs a one-woman show she had been working on in previous episodes. She begins the show, “To Shel And Back” (a title both funny and sad), with a monologue: “When I was a young girl, something happened to me that made me stop being who I really was. I stopped growing in every sense of the word. I have always been drawn to men who wanted to live in the darkness of a secret.

Who am I? I didn’t know. I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know. I was in a cocoon

(00:24:20 – 00:25:15 “Exciting and New”). However, “To Shel and Back” marks the beginning of Shelly trying to work through her trauma, to come out of her cocoon.

Accompanied by her room attendant, Shelly then breaks into song: Alanis Morissette’s

“Hand in Pocket”. The song is a series of juxtapositions (“I’m high but I’m grounded, I’m sane but I’m overwhelmed”) that overall reflect Shelly’s optimism: “I’m lost, but I’m hopeful, baby.” In a review of the episode Kathryn Van Arendonk describes what makes this scene so effective: “Like all Shelly speeches, this could be played for straight laughs.

Don’t get me wrong — the laughs are there… But Shelly’s wearing no makeup,69 her voice is tremulous, and her feelings are unmistakably real.” The mix of sincerity with humor (as

69 I agree with this assessment of the scene, but Shelly wears more makeup than usual for her performance. I think the author means to convey that her makeup is not excessive stage makeup; Shelly has on dark eyeliner that draws attention to the intensity in her eyes.

110 well as a bit of comic relief when Maura asks, regarding the room attendance/piano accompanist, “you get a gay with your room?”) is a hallmark of tragicomedy. The scene of

Shelly singing is intercut with a scene of Josh pouring Rita’s ashes overboard. Josh is crying, but there is also the sense that this will be the beginning of Josh moving forward. The season ends on a triumphant Shelly earning a raucous applause.

Season four continues its exploration of Shelly and Josh trying to cope with their pasts. Josh begins going to group therapy for sex addicts and begins to come to terms with the fact that he was molested (the suggestion that “maybe an erection is not consent” is a revelation for him). Despite actively working on dealing with trauma, Josh is haunted by a literal ghost of Rita who continues to disrupt his emotional state from beyond the grave.

For example, Rita appears to Josh at group therapy and taunts him by asking, “Ah, so now you’re a victim” (00:10:20 – 11:34, “Groin Anomaly”)? Ghosts, as discussed in chapter one, are characteristic of tragic narratives. Shelly continues to struggle with a family who cannot see her pain. Season four takes place primarily in Israel, where the Pfeffermans are travelling as a family. In episode eight Shelly has an emotional break down after Josh, who is being taught how to shoot, points a gun at her. Sarah, her husband Len, Josh, and Maura gather around her and she tells them, “Those two times I was in the mental hospital, it was a relief not being a mother.” Sarah, who thought she was “in Fresno” when she was actually in a mental hospital (another family secret) asks, “Do you hate us?” Shelly responds, “No, I don’t hate you, but your Moppa’s not the only one who’s suffered.” She then goes on to chastise them for never asking about the secret that she “loudly exclaimed” in her cruise ship show. Strangers asked her about her secret, but no one in her family did. To placate her, Maura says, “Yes, yes. Your secret… You were talking about me.” Maura’s assumption

111 that Shelly was talking about her is indicative of how Maura’s secret became the center of the Pfefferman family, around which everyone else orbited, despite their own traumas.

Shelly says, “No. No. I was talking about me.” She tells them about how she was ten-years- old when her music teacher molested her and she stopped eating. The episode ends with

Josh sobbing, realizing his mother was molested as a child as he was, and stumbling off into the desert (00:21:30 – 00:22:53, “Desert Eagle”).

While the end of episode eight is tragic and devastating, the next episode continues

Josh and Shelly’s parallel narrative and the tragicomic narrative arc is restored. In a scene at the Dead Sea that is both humorous and moving, Shelly, wearing a full piece wetsuit and swimming cap, is afraid to get in the water (“She’s afraid of everything,” Sarah comments).

Josh encourages Shelly to come out, insisting that he will hold on to her the whole way.

Clinging to him, Josh says, “You’ve got to relax. I’ve got you.” He then holds her as she floats on her back, the sun shining down on them. All season Shelly and Josh have been struggling with each other – Josh annoyed with Shelly’s particular ways, Shelly hurt by his inability to see her pain – but in the Dead Sea the two come back together and again there is the sense that this is another pivotal moment in their being able to heal. In the last episode of the season, Josh, taking inspiration from Shelly who banished a disgruntled AirBnB renter staying at the family home while they were in Israel, confronts the ghost of Rita. He tells her, “I was a victim. But I also loved you.” Josh’s story, for all its tragedy, ends with him recognizing the complexity of his abuse and beginning to deal with his trauma. Shelly, too, is feeling better, as the season ends with her singing, along with Maura, “Everything is

Alright” from Jesus Christ Superstar while Josh, smiling, looks up to the night sky. For the

112 first time this season it seems like everything will be alright for Josh and Shelly. They got their comic ending.

Section Three: Transparent as Queer Tragicomedy

While comic relief and Josh and Shelly’s storylines relate to the tragicomedy genre in general, Transparent is also quintessentially a queer tragicomedy because of how the

“comic” aspect is rooted in queer temporality and a sense of futurity. As discussed in the introduction, J. Jack Halberstam explains the concept of queer temporality in his70 2005 book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subculture Lives. He argues that queer time is contrasted with conventional time which is marked by events common in heterosexual lives, such as “growing up,” getting married, and having children. Although not all queer individuals choose to live lives differently than their heterosexual counterparts, Halberstam argues that queerness is “compelling” in that “it has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space” (2). He writes,

“Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely, birth, death, marriage, reproduction, and death” (Queer 2). This is similar to Elizabeth’s Freeman’s argument in Time Binds: Queer

Temporalities, Queer Histories. Queer temporalities, she argues, work in opposition to

“chrononormativity” which “is a mode of implantation, a technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts.” These “somatic facts,” like marriage or reproduction, are critical aspects of traditional tragicomedies. In the tragicomedies of the

70 In a 2012 blog post on his website, Halberstam states, “When it comes to names and pronouns, I am a bit of a free floater.” Masculine pronouns will be used in this dissertation.

113 past a comic ending meant following through with life-changing episodes of heteronormative existence, for example, marriage or childbirth. Take, for example,

Shakespeare’s tragicomedy The Winter’s Tale. The first three acts include tragic themes of suspected betrayal, exile, emotional torment, and death, but the last two acts are closer to a pastoral romance, more like A Midsummer Night’s Dream than King Lear. The play ends with King Leontes and Queen Hermione reuniting, Princess Perdita marrying Prince

Florizel, and the engagement of Lord Camillo and Hermione’s friend Paulina. In other words, all the main characters are happily paired off in heterosexual bliss (that is or to be sanctioned by marriage).71 The queer tragicomedy, on the contrary, ends with characters realizing they can exist outside of heteronormative time, or the characters’ stories do not end in any definitive way, and instead the audience can imagine how their lives continue with all their complexities. The queer tragicomedy’s ending leaves the reader/viewer with the sense that there is a better future; a future with a more evolved and culturally accepted sense of queerness.

In season two Transparent returns to the story of Tante Gittle and her ring to explore the link between queer family and biological family. Through a series of flashbacks to Berlin in 1933 the viewer learns that Gittel was the sibling of Maura’s mother Rose. In an extended flashback in episode four the viewer follows a teenage Rose, played by the actress who plays Ali in flashbacks of her as a teenager, as she visits the Institute for Sexual

Research, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld in 1919 (a placard informs the viewer of this information). Once inside, Rose is among a tour group who is told that the institute is a

71 However, what makes The Winter’s Tale one of Shakespeare’s “problem play” and a tragicomedy is that despite the comic ending the fact remains two main characters died because of King Leontes’ stubbornness (Antigonus famously exited the stage pursued by a bear).

114 place “where we believe that a wide range of sexualities, including homosexuality, are normal.” The tour guide continues, “Cross-dressers, transvestites, hermaphrodites, everyone is welcome here. Open-minded folks such as yourselves can understand the need for a safe haven for those of us who are neither male nor female” (19:02 – 19:32, “Cherry

Blossoms”).

This “safe haven” was a real place in the Weimar Republic, and Hirschfeld and his

Institute “represented the first attempt to establish ‘sexology’ … as a topic of legitimate academic study and research” (Beachy 160). Soloway cited Robert Beachy’s 2014 book Gay

Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity for information about this period, and it is evident

Beachy’s descriptions of the Institute were used in designing the set. Beachy describes the

Institut für Sexualwissenschaft as “an opulent villa at the northern edge of Berlin’s

Tiergarten Park” with two properties that housed clinical spaces, a counseling center, library, lecture hall, museum, and living quarters for staff, patients, and Hirschfeld. One goal of the Institute was to educate the public about variations on normative sexuality and gender representation, and toward this end the museum served to attract people from all over the world.72

In Transparent Rose is shown purchasing a ticket and going into the museum, but she soon leaves the tour to find Gittel who is living, in apparent luxury, at the Institute (we find out later she works there, too). Rose tells Gittel that the family needs money to procure visas and boat tickets to get to “American states” to meet up with Rose and Gittel’s father

(who the viewer later learns was never going to send for them, and instead started a new

72 One of these visitors was Margaret Sanger who wrote: “‘this most extraordinary mansion … was furnished sumptuously. On the walls of the stairway were pictures of homosexuals – men decked out as women in huge hats, earrings, and feminine make-up; also women in men’s clothing and toppers’” (162).

115 family in Los Angeles). The scene ends with this information and the viewer does not return to the storyline until the opening of episode eight with Gittel visiting her mother.

Her mother asks her, “You walk over here like this [in a dress and make up] and no one beat the fuck out of you?” Gittel tells her that she has a “transvestite pass” that Magnus had the city issue to “all of [them]” to state that they could not be arrested (00:00:19 –

00:00;48, “Oscillate”).73 Later in the episode Yetta goes to see Gittel and Rose at the

Institute to tell them she got the visas. Gittel opens hers to see that it is under her birth name, Gershon, and tells her mother that unless she has a visa for Gittel she will not go to

America.

Throughout the Berlin flashbacks the interconnectedness of the 1933 and 2015 narratives is emphasized through juxtaposition of scenes and the use of the same actors for different characters in different timelines.74 Season two reaches the height of its emphasis on the interconnectedness of the two generations in the tragic conclusion of Gittel’s narrative arc. In the penultimate episode of season two, Nazis and Hitler Youth members raid Hirschfeld’s Institute and make a bonfire out of books from the library and drag away

Gittel and other people who resided there.75 The scenes of the raid are intercut with scenes of Maura, Ali, and Sarah at the Idylwild Music Festival (a fictional version of the Michigan

73 Lisa Liebman writes, “In 1910, Hirschfeld published Die Transvestitenin (The Transvestites), coining the term ‘transvestite,’ and the concept of cross-dressing, which he determined was distinct from gender identity and sexual orientation. The first to ‘diagnose’ the desire to dress like the opposite sex, in 1909 he convinced police to issue permits to Berliners so they wouldn’t be arrested or hassled in public.” 74 In addition to Emily Robinson, who plays Rose and young Ali, three other actors who appear in flashbacks from the Pfefferman’s lives in the 1990s, also appear in the 1933 timeline (Bradley Whitford as Marcy/Magnus Hirschfeld, Michaela Watkins as Connie/Yetta, and Mel Shimkovitz as Jude/Jules). 75 In actuality Hirschfeld left Germany in 1930, but the Nazis did destroy the Institute before his death in 1935 (Liebman).

116 Womyn’s Music Festival). The characters had recently discovered that some women at the festival felt the space should be restricted to “women-born-women.” After Maura leaves a campfire discussion of what constitutes womanhood (an expository scene that seems like the show taking an opportunity educate the viewer on terms of the sex/gender debate in trans-exclusionary radical feminism), Ali goes to find her. As Ali wanders through the wilderness she passes Yetta and comes upon the 1933 scene of burning books. Ali looks across the fire and sees Rose; Rose sees her. They look into each other’s eyes: the past looking at the future; the present looking at the past. Together, they look on as Gittel is taken away into the darkness of the wilderness. I argue that is a climactic moment of queer temporality in the show because of how time is collapsed in a single pivotal scene.

It is significant, of course, that the light coming from a tower of Hirschfeld’s burning books illuminates the scene of Gittel, and other queer Berliners, being dragged away by

Nazi officers. The Nazis are attempting to eradicate not only the queer people, but also the books that contribute to a queer archive. The attempt to eradicate queer existence from history inspires contemporary efforts to build a queer archive. In Ann Cvetkovich writes,

“The ‘archive fever’ catalyzed by the silencing, neglect, and stigmatization of queer histories is a particularly powerful force, echoing the ferocity and perversity of queer sexual desire.”

And while the Nazis may have destroyed the lives of the queer Berliners at Hirschfeld’s

Institute, the show illustrates how queer people are still able to look to the past as a guide for how to think about the future. Sara Ahmed articulates how the past is important to queer temporality in her 2006 book Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others.

She writes, “We have hope because what is behind us is also what allows other ways of gathering in time and space, of making lines that do not reproduce what we follow but

117 instead create wrinkles in the earth” (179). Ali is the character who takes the most interest in Gittel’s story, and from her story Ali develops an interest in examining the queer archive.

In season three Ali begins a Women’s Studies program at University of California

Los Angeles, where she starts to explore the 1933 Berlin that was shown in season two. In season three, episode two, Ali is shown teaching a Women’s Studies class about “asocial” people in interwar Berlin. By doing so, she is contributing to the queer archive because, as

Halbestam explains, “The archive is not simply a repository; it is also a theory of cultural relevance, a construction of collective memory, and a complex record of queer history” (In a Queer Time 169 – 170). Standing in front of a screen projecting photographs of 1930s queer Berliners, Ali says, “Berlin between the two World Wars was a much freer place than

America is today. They call these free people ‘asocials.’’ She then asks, “How many of you have had the ominous feeling that your very essence is taboo to those around you?”

(00:11:14 – 00:11:28, “When The Battle Is Over”). By teaching this history to her students, and asking them to connect it to their own lives, Ali asks her students to consider what can be learned from the past.

While Ali’s present-day storyline shows how queer people can find a usable past,

Gittel’s 1933 storyline demonstrates queer people looking toward the future. The lives of those at the Institute, both real and on Transparent, end in tragedy, but their vision for a future queer utopia lives and is shown in the lives of the Pfeffermans. Villarejo refers to season two’s inclusion of the Berlin storyline as a “stew of Jewish/trans/queer history” through which “Soloway locates the visual and familial roots of the Pfeffermans, vaguely implying that Gittel’s trans blood seeps down to Maura, vaguely suggesting that these

Berlin Jews supply some religious and cultural foundations for their twenty-first-century

118 ancestors.” Transparent’s exploration of lineage could be interpreted as an attempt to essentialize gender identity by trying to locate a genetic root for Maura’s transgenderism, however, this is not the effect the show produces in season two; instead it asks the audience to expand their idea of lineage as only biological and to consider how lineage and kinship can exist beyond biological relationships. Gittel and the other queers who were eradicated by Nazi forces are the ancestors for queers today; they envisioned a better future for their queer descendants, not just the Pfeffermans who happen to be biological descendants.

Villarejo accurately describes the early Berlin scenes as “less solid narrative than impressionist bacchanalia.” Scenes of bacchanalia may lead the viewer to think that those in the Institute lived solely for pleasure, but in later scenes it becomes evident that they were dedicated to creating a better future for queer people, a vision articulated by José

Esteban Muñoz in his 2009 book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. As described in the introduction, Muñoz’s text is a response to the antirelational trend in queer theory, defined by Leo Bersani in Homos and expanded on in Lee Edelman’s No

Future. Muñoz writes, “I respond to Edelman’s assertion that the future is the province of the child and therefore not for the queers by arguing that queerness is primarily about futurity and hope” (11). Drawing Ernst Bloch’s76 theorizing of utopia, Muñoz distinguishes between “abstract” and “concrete” utopias. “Abstract utopias are akin to banal optimism,”

Muñoz writes. Conversely, “Concrete utopias are relational to historically situated struggles, a collectivity that is actualized or potential. … [T]hey are the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is the one who dreams for many” (3).

76 Bloch, like Hirschfeld, also fled Nazi Germany.

119 Near the end of the flashback sequence, Yetta demands to speak with Hirshfeld. They are in his library (with Gittel and Rose peering in through a window in the door) when she asks him, “So what is this, a circus? A sex circus? A zoo for fucking? Are you starting a religious… a sex religion?” (06:22-06:31, “Oscillate”). An angered Hirschfeld tells her he does not believe in religion, he believes in “science,” “reason,” and “truth.” He tells her, “Look around.

You know, y--, you’re in my library. You’re next to my museum. You-- you’re underneath my medical ward. You make fun. This is the future!”(06:33—6:52, “Oscillate”). Hirschfeld’s proclamation of the Institute and the archive, as “the future” is an expression of utopian thinking, one that is collectively shared with others at the Institute. Muñoz writes, “Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” (1). The “new world,” Transparent implies, is the one inhabited by the twenty-first-century Pfeffermans; a world where a woman can decide to transition at the age of sixty-eight and find love and support in her family and community.

While season two emphasizes non-biological queer lineage (as Villarejo says, the idea that Gittel’s “trans blood seeps down to Maura” is only “vaguely implicated”), the series undermines this theme in season four by implying that Maura is trans and that Ali is questioning her gender identity because they are the biological descendants of a trans woman. While in Israel Maura discovers that her father, whom she was told is dead, is a successful businessman who started anew after leaving Maura’s mother, Rose. In episode four, Maura and Ali make a surprise visit to her father, Moshe Pfefferman. Defending his decision to leave their family, Moshe states, “Rose never loved me. She was like a depressed

120 person.” Ali asks, “Why? Why was she so depressed?” to which Moshe response, “Why?

’Cause of the fucking Holocaust. You ever heard of it?” He goes on to explain, “You can’t blame her because of the death of her brother – uh, uh… or sister…” After Ali and Maura ask for clarification, Moshe bumbles saying, “Gershon, Gittel, Gittel, Gershon…” and Maura interjects to tell Ali that Gershon was Gittel’s husband, to which Moshe says, “Gershon and

Gittel were the same person.” After Ali and Maura tell him “that’s impossible,” he says, “I’m telling you, it’s like you are, Gittel was; the same thing.” Moshe is surprised that no one ever told Maura that Gittel was transgender, and Maura, overwhelmed with emotion, abruptly leaves with Ali. The next scene shows them sitting on the beach, reflecting on what Moshe said. Maura says, “My whole life, I thought I was alone in this. Imagine if I’d known”

(00:20:20 – 00:24:50, “Cool Guy”).

In season four, episode nine the family, minus Ali, are shown having a conversation while bobbing in the Dead Sea. Maura tells everyone that Gittel was trans; surprised, Shelly asks, “What are the chances of this?” to which Maura responds, “Maybe it runs in the family.” Bryna, Maura’s sister, declares, “It’s like dyslexia. You’re born with it; you can’t help it.” The family laughs at Bryna’s unintentionally offensive remark, but her response illustrates a problematic aspect of tying queerness to genetics: queer identity becomes a genetic abnormality. Queerness, once again, is defined as “in relation” to the universal.

Furthermore, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick articulates in the introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, a problem with searching for a genetic root to the “homosexual body” (and can be extended, I believe, to the trans body) is that it “seems to trigger an estrus of manipulative fantasy in the technological institutions of the culture.” She continues,

121 What whets these fantasies more dangerously, because more blandly, is the

presentation, often in ostensibly or authentically gay-affirmative contexts, of

biologically based ‘explanations’ for deviant behavior that are absolutely invariably

couched in terms of ‘excess,’ ‘deficiency,’ or ‘imbalance’ – whether in the hormones,

in the genetic material, or, as is currently fashionable in the fetal endocrine

environment. (43)

Transparent’s exploration of a queer gene continues in the Dead Sea when Maura tells the family to “give Ali some space [because] she’s kind of going through it, you know? You know…like I was when I was her age, you know?” Sarah laughingly responds, “Well, if anyone got the trans gene, it’s Ali” Maura clarifies that Ali is not trans, but rather she is a

“they” or, as Sarah says, “gender non-conforming… like non-binary, androgynous”

(00:17:50 – 00:19:45). The link between queerness and genetics is thus further emphasized by implying that Ali has received the queer gene from Maura, who received it from Gittel. Certainly it is understandable that a queer person might be excited to learn that they had a queer ancestor; often being queer alienates people from their biological families, and a queer ancestor could make someone feel more connected to their lineage. However, I believe Transparent’s move in the fourth season toward emphasizing this biological connection ultimately undermines the more revolutionary idea that queer people can look outside the family for lineage, as is done in season two.

Despite the fourth season’s reduction of the Gittel storyline into a normative understanding of heredity, the season is effective at disrupting traditional conceptions of time. Time is commonly understood relative to certain “logics” that are considered natural,

122 but are actually socially constructed.77 The cultural emphasis on linear progression perhaps contributes to the cultural misunderstanding that trans people all transition from one side of the gender binary to the other; that there is a clear beginning point and a clear end point. In fact, trans experience is much more multifaceted than linear temporality allows.78 Transparent disrupts this false notion of a singular trans experience by featuring trans characters in different stages of transition, and beyond that, emphasizing how there is not one stage that is more valid than another.

One striking example of this disruption of the idea that trans identity is a linear experience with a definitive end comes at the end of season three. Throughout the third season Maura explores her plastic surgery and vaginoplasty options and is enthusiastic about the prospect of both. Television critic Willa Paskin explains, “Maura is entranced by the idea of transitioning as progress” but the season “explores all the ways that progress doesn’t necessarily mean moving forward but sometimes looking back, bottoming out, staying in the same place” (“Transcendence”). The season ends with the Pfefferman family, including Shelly, on a cruise ship (which Paskin writes “must be a wink at both sitcom vacation episodes and David Foster Wallace”). Overlooking the sea, Maura tells Ali she will not be able to have any surgeries because, “Apparently, if you’re my age and there’s a little

77 Of course, birth and death are not social constructions, but marriage, reproduction, and work have been socially constructed to seem like the only “natural” way to structure life. Halberstam refers to David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity for his explanation of how “our conceptions of space and time are social constructions forged out of vibrant and volatile social relations” (Queer 6). Halberstam cites the famous tragicomedy Waiting for Godot as one example of a disruption of normative time structures, writing that the play can be read “as a defamiliarization of time spent: a treatise on the feeling of time wasted, of inertia or time outside of capitalist production” (7). 78 A 2015 study in Ontario of “dimensions of sex and gender in trans populations” found: “A minority of trans Ontarians reported a linear transition from one sex to another, yet such a trajectory is often assumed to be the norm” (Scheim, Bauer).

123 whoop-dee-doo on your heart machine record, they will not let you go under” (12:19-

12:24, “Exciting and New”). To Maura’s great dismay, this “little whoop-dee-doo” makes it so, in addition to no having surgery, she also has to stop taking hormones. Ali asks, “Wait, so you’re not transitioning?”. Maura replies, “I’ve already transitioned. I’m trans. I’m just— this is me” (13:07-13:13). Although Maura wants surgery and hormones as part of her transitioning process, her response that she has “already transitioned” and that she “is trans” articulates an “alternative temporality” to the linear transition narrative that dominates cultural understanding of trans identity. Queer temporality as comic plot structure is a tenet of the queer tragicomedy, and this scene’s entanglement of Maura’s deep sadness with queer temporality serves as a defining moment of the show’s place within the tragicomedy genre.

Transparent shows the differences between the traditional tragicomedy and the queer tragicomedy by exploring how the heteronormative comic ending (stable employment, marriage, reproduction) does not always result in life-long domestic bliss. In season one, episode two Maura tells Davina about her life before transitioning. She says, “I did … the whole Jewish thing. It’s like musical chairs. You hit twenty-five, and you just choose the -- the one who’s standing closest to you,79 and so we had three kids, and we lived in two houses, we had so many pets and then, finita la commedia” (17:52 – 18:09,

“The Letting Go”). The Italian phrase translates to “end of the show” but it is interesting to note the literal translation of “commedia” is “comedy.” In this sense, Maura directly refers

79 Although dismissive of her relationship with Shelly, the viewer sees how deeply entwined and emotionally invested they are in one another’s lives. They maintain a friendship and support one another (especially when their kids are being dismissive). There is also a flashback sequence that shows Mort and Shelly as young adults carrying on a passionate affair (Shelly was with someone else); the version the series shows is much different than merely picking the person closest to you.

124 to the heteronormative chronology of her life as a comedy, much as the way comedy meant marriage and children in traditional examples of the tragicomedy. Although Maura attributes this chronormativity to being a “Jewish thing,” Halberstam states that this timeline – getting married, having children, making enough money to be able to afford two houses – is a product of the “middle-class logic of reproductive temporality” in Western cultures. Transparent begins with Maura starting the process of trying to live life outside of

“bourgeois” (in Halberstam’s terms) temporality: at sixty-eight she has decided to transition.

The Pfeffermans attach a symbolic weight to their family home because it is representative of their time together before the parents got divorced and the children grew up and moved out. It is significant that when Maura tries to come out to her children as trans, she ends up telling them that she is going to sell the family home. It is almost as if that is a small step in being able to come out to them; not only is she building up to a larger revelation, but one that also disturbs the children’s sense of chrononormativity. The home becomes the place where the child with the life most resembling heteronomative structures lives with their family. Maura offers the house to Sarah and Len, who have two children, but they split up before they can move in. Sarah ends up living there with her post-Len girlfriend, Tammy, and their children (Tammy also has multiple kids). Once they split up, Josh and his girlfriend live there as they try to start a family, but that, too, dissolves. In Transparent, queer temporality is not limited to Maura, but rather the entire

Pfefferman family is shown navigating lives that diverge from chrononormativity.

In the first season of Transparent, Ali is portrayed as sexually adventurous (her best friend Syd tells her she’s a “vaginal learner” who has to “stick stuff in there in order to

125 understand it”) and aimless (17:40-17:44, “Looking Up”). Maura describes her to Davina as someone who “does not seem to learn, very smart.” She goes on: “99th percentile on her

S.A.T.S. Out-of-the-box smart. She just doesn’t seem to be able to… to land” (18:54-19:10,

“The Letting Go”). In the second season Ali seems to get some stability when she starts dating Syd (played by Carrie Brownstein). However, the show highlights how a stable, monogamous relationship (a core tenant of heteronormativity) is not necessary for Ali to

“land.” By episode seven (seasons are ten episodes long) Ali and Syd start to fight because

Ali spent the night at the home of a gender studies professor and poet named Leslie (based on lesbian poet Eileen Myles). Ali suggests to Syd that maybe it does not have to be bad that she is “vaguely” attracted to Leslie. When Syd responds, “So what? You’re into polyamory now?”, Ali replies, “No, I’m just saying, what if we didn’t have this, sort of, knee-jerk, hetero- normative…” but before she can finish her sentence Syd interrupts to say, “Listen to yourself. Listen to yourself. You’ve been queer for like, 30 seconds.” Ali’s tension with Syd is interesting because in the past a same-sex relationship would have been seen as queer

(both in the way the term is used in LGBTQ discourse, but also in the “unusual” sense), but in Transparent Ali’s relationship with Syd is too normative for her.

Ali and Syd break up due to Ali’s attraction to Leslie and her proposal that they have a polyamorous relationship. Of all the characters in Transparent, Ali is the most reflective, analytical, and questioning of normative structures. When Ali and Leslie start dating the viewer sees again how queer relationships do not necessarily challenge heteronormativity or gender roles. Leslie, despite her position as a gender studies professor and feminist, is depicted as an academic who uses her position to sleep with her significantly younger female students (Leslie’s roommate explains that “Leslie harbors a little disdain for the

126 aging female body. So it seems like the age gap just keeps getting bigger”) (14:25,

“Oscillate”). Leslie also replicates gender normative power structures with Ali by insisting

Ali sacrifice her academic goals to tend to Leslie after she falls. Once Leslie tells Ali that she is in love with her, Ali starts to pull away from her, and it is evident by the end of the third season that they are not going to stay together. If Transparent were a less progressive show, it might have had Ali’s unsettledness end when she found a stable, heteronormative relationship. Instead, it shows how a traditionally “comic ending” is not a fulfilling arc for her character; her quest to discover her religious and academic interests is the more compelling narrative.

Sarah’s storyline begins with the dissolution of her marriage (as mentioned, the pilot ends with Maura catching her in bed with her ex-girlfriend Tammy). In her first scene she is shown packing lunch for her children as her husband leaves for work without saying goodbye. A dissatisfied, unhappy mother in a seemingly loveless marriage is not new territory for television, but Transparent is unique because it shows how the typical narrative arc for the archetypical dissatisfied wife and mother (to reignite the passion in her marriage or find a new mate, in other words, find a new comic ending) does not work for Sarah. Transparent takes the viewer down the route of the traditional narrative arc of chronormativity by having Sarah and Tammy become seriously involved and start combining their lives. At the end of season one, Sarah announces to her family that she is going to marry Tammy. While this announcement could signal a traditional comic end for her storyline, the viewer knows that she is only marrying her as a reaction to a fight with her husband; in other words, the viewer knows the marriage is doomed. It is surprising, then, that season two begins with Sarah and Tammy’s wedding ceremony. However, by the

127 twenty-minute mark of the episode, Sarah is hiding in the bathroom during the reception and says to Ali: “I fucking hate Tammy. I hate her and I hate her fuckin’ family. Those fucking WASPS” (20:37-20:42, “Kina Hora”). To her great relief, Rabbi Raquel (who at the time is Josh’s girlfriend) tells her she has not mailed the documents to the courthouse yet, so they are not technically married. Ali asks, “Um, okay, so what is a wedding then?”

(23:00). Raquel replies, “It’s a ritual. It’s a pageant. It’s like a very expensive play.” Ali assures Sarah, “It’s a play. And we’re just in costume” (00:23:04 -- 00:23:10). Sarah ends her relationship with Tammy that evening, and continues on her quest to find fulfillment in her life. Sarah’s narrative arc is not about making her relationship with Len work or finding a new partner, it is about the discovery of her own sexual desire outside traditional heteronormative structures. Throughout season three, she explores her submissive sexual fantasies and the viewer sees how her desire is multifaceted. A comic ending does not lead to happiness or satisfaction in all cases, but is much more complex. Both Sarah and Ali’s storylines show them struggling to live outside of heteronomative temporality, which equates success with achieving life markers like marriage and childbearing.

Section Four: Conclusion – “Queerness is always on the horizon”

As discussed, an important attribute of the queer tragicomedy is the text’s exploration of tragedy in queer lives (on both familial and systemic levels), but the text ultimately results in a comic ending. Comic, in the queer tragicomedy, means embracing queer temporality and looking toward a better future. Season two ends with Maura, Ali, and Bryna (Maura’s sister) taking Rose to the beach (she is now in a wheelchair and it is implied she has Alzheimer’s or dementia). This scene is intercut with a scene of Rose, now

128 in Los Angeles, giving birth to a baby the doctor tells her is a boy. The scenes juxtapose normative temporality (birth, immediate assignment of sex) with queer temporality

(identifying one’s own gender as an adult). Referring to the scene at the beach, Villarejo writes that Maura’s “future is as transcendent as the sea before her eyes.” In this scene

Maura represents the concrete utopian future her queer ancestors imagined and the embodiment of the present envisioning a queer future. “We may never touch queerness,”

Muñoz writes, “but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (1). As season two concludes with Maura looking out on the literal horizon, the viewer is left with the sense that the queer future Maura’s ancestors imagined is still somewhere out there.

129 Chapter Five: Conclusion

“Laugh with one side of the mouth, and cry with the other.” - Bernard Shaw

In the past two years there has been a resurgence of the term “tragicomedy” in popular culture, but it is not usually in relation to drama, literature, or television. Instead, it is used to try to make sense of Donald Trump’s presidency. After Trump won the

Republican primary articles with “Trump” and “tragicomedy” started to appear; for example, Aaron E. Sanchez’s “Trump and the Tragicomedy of American Politics” and

Alexandra Petri’s “Waiting for Pivot: A GOP Tragicomedy.” Petri’s Washington Post opinion piece is a retelling of the classic modern tragicomedy Waiting for Godot; in Waiting for Pivot

Vladimir Ryan and Estragon Priebus wait next to a “decomposing elephant carcass” waiting for Trump to “pivot” to presidential behavior. Like Godot, the pivot never comes. Around a year into Trump’s presidency Harper’s Magazine ran an article titled, “Who’s Laughing

Now? The Tragicomedy of Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live,” and Salon published a piece by Sophia A. McClennen titled, “An American Tragicomedy: The Trump Spectacle as

New Brand of Theater.” McClennen argues that the tragicomedy of this administration is it is “difficult to decide whether to laugh at the sheer stupidity of Trump and his kakistocracy or to cry in horror at their pure evil.” This quintessentially tragicomic reaction, McClennen states, is why “all of our faces hurt these days.”

Since 1978, when the first installment Tales of the City was published, the LGBTQ community has experienced both extreme tragedy and rapid social progress; I’ve argued in this dissertation that there has been a shift in the representation of LGTBQ Americans from the tragic/comic binary to the more nuanced tragicomedy which parallels the tragedy and progress of the last forty years. Essentially, writers have used the tragicomedy to show that

130 LGBTQ people cannot be reduced to either tragic or comic characters, instead, there is optimism in the face of catastrophe, laughter alongside tears, and love despite hate. The implications of a Trump administration on LGBTQ literature and television remain to be seen, and I hope further studies will be done to explore possible genre shifts. Will having a president who is both horrifyingly laughable and exceedingly dangerous result in more straightforward tragedies and comedies? Or will the tragicomedy continue to grow in popularity (albeit possibly by different names, like “sadcom” or “dramedy”)? In the words of Bernard Shaw, will we continue to “laugh with one side of the mouth, and cry with the other?”

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