Two members of the family may happen to share homosexual tendencies. But it seems that for Alison, homosexuality was one of very few means of Alison identifying with the father. When explaining the father’s death, Alison allocates a Webster’s dictionary page of the word “queer.” Alison makes it very clear that although many definitions of the word may explain the father’s death, homosexuality was the one concept that most well-defined the existence of the father and his demise: “most compellingly at the time, his death was bound up for me with the one definition conspicuously missing from our mammoth Webster’s” (57). In the cuts in the same page, Alison holds up her sherry glass in a peculiar perpendicular way as if she were giving a toast, and then follows to drink it. The father in the later scenes draw a reminding parallel with Alison (of course in reality it would have been Alison replicating the father) as he also raises his glass in the same way (65). What is more implicit is that Alison drinks her sherry glass as if she were to enjoy her drink while a page of the word “queer” is forward-deployed towards the readers, while the father only raises the glass but not drinks it.

On the other hand, Roy, the father’s (supposed) sexual partner drinks it, as a possible counterpart for Alison’s Webster’s page of the word “queer.” The interpretation of the scene is that the two characters are both shown to be homosexuals, but while Alison openly admits her homosexuality and enjoys her pleasure, the father is portrayed and implied to have fragmented himself between his homosexuality identified by Roy in the cut and a father that not-so-successfully takes care of his family. This schizophrenic division of self is expressed when Roy goes onto drink and enjoy the sherry while the father does not, at least in front of others such as the mother. Considering that the father’s trial happened due to alcohol and the fact that he offered it to other teenage boys, the sherry scene is fairly foreshadowing. The father’s drinking and pleasure habits are deliberately concealed and kept in secret, unlike Alison; as those habits are exposed, the father is put in legal peril. Alison, as she comes out of the closet, does not meet a similar fate, at least not in the book.