The first thing I did at college was refuse to read a book

A panel from Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

A panel from Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

By now you have heard that several Duke University freshmen have publicly declined to read Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel about coming to terms with her sexual orientation while living with her closeted gay father. The objections began with incoming student Brian Grasso, who wrote on the Class of 2019 Facebook page that “I feel as if I would have to compromise my personal Christian moral beliefs to read it.” In an email interview with the Duke Chronicle, freshman Jeffrey Wubbenhorst objected to the comic book’s literally graphic depiction of sexual themes, saying, “The nature of ‘Fun Home’ means that content that I might have consented to read in print now violates my conscience due to its pornographic nature.” It’s his composition TA’s job to teach him how to simplify that sentence, presumably by assigning him Rudyard Kipling stories. Our job is to figure out why it’s so galling to learn the first official act of these new college students was to refuse to read a book.

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