I’d like to speak about some things going on in the final chapter. At this point in the story, she speculates by beginning: “maybe I’m trying to render my senseless personal loss meaningful by linking it, however posthumously, to a more coherent narrative.” Here she suggests and tries to open the reader up to the possibility that her father was actually “a tragic victim of homophobia.” In fact, his life was actually a “narrative of injustice”, of repressed “sexual shame and fear.” She suggests that perhaps things would have been different if the times had permitted her father’s homosexuality; instead of condemning it. Maybe if her father had came out in his youth, and hadn’t kept everything bottled up inside, living two completely different lifestyles (externally/internally), than he’d have been spared and would have never had to result to pedophilia. This is really the first time I have seen Bechdel attempt to defend her father’s actions. She then sort of juxtaposes to different pictures of scenes in the 80s (freely hanging up gay-pride posters in NYC and a gay-pride parade revealing slogans like 'baster baby'/chelsea gym/GMHC) where homosexuality has become more of a social/cultural norm; these represent the time period in which she first comes out of the closet, a time where LOTS of people had come out, flaunting their gayness without shame or fear, for the first time in history, really. So, in fact, it was much easier for someone like her. Since her father wasn’t allowed this same luxury, he never came out, he dealt with it his own way, and the rest is history. Maybe here Bechdel is trying to emphasize with her father’s situation and ask “What If?” What if he felt it acceptable to be ‘true to his nature?’

Bravo Bechdel, Bravo. I must say. It’s an admirable attempt toward a defense of your father. Personally, I feel it’s unacceptable to excuse/exempt her father from personal responsibility like she may be suggesting. It’s her father, I understand, and for me to ‘emphasize’ I would need to imagine having to defend my own father under similar circumstances…perhaps I too would look in all conceivable directions and/or build up some kind of crafty rhetoric in defense of something so heinous.

          After this modest attempt, is really when the two begin to connect in some meaningful way, and it happens through ‘their currency’: literature. She writes: “Dad didn’t have much use for children, but as I got older, he began to sense my potential as an intellectual companion.” They use this ‘medium’ to fuel a relationship and here is when it reaches its most normal point between father-daughter. In the end, she takes what little she can out of the meager relationship, by comparing its consistency to the theme of Ulysses; that spiritual paternity can carry its own importance, and that particular importance is just barely enough to show some appreciation and gratification to her father the pedophile; because after all, “he was there to catch me when I leapt.”