Recently, my five-year-old son brought home a picture book from our local library called “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” and, when he asked me to read it at bedtime that evening, I felt a profound resignation. The book’s cover features two smiling grooms in skinny-fit suits standing beneath an arbor, and a tiny flower girl, about my son’s age, wearing a bright yellow dress. The girl is Chloe, and one of the men, Bobby, is her favorite uncle: “He took her rowing on the river. He taught her the names of the stars.” Just a few pages in, Bobby brings his boyfriend to a family picnic, and there, to Chloe’s consternation, the couple announce their engagement. The book that I assumed this one to be unfurled in my head: Chloe would haltingly accept the notion that a wedding isn’t just for a man and a woman; she would learn that it’s O.K. to be gay.
But “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” happily, is not that book at all. The story’s central conflict, the crucial set of assumptions that Chloe must shake off, is rooted not in any child-sized homophobia but in her worries that her uncle, once he’s married and perhaps starting a family of his own, will no longer fly kites with her or take her to the ballet. “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” offers no hint that Bobby’s marriage itself is a departure from any norm. Instead, it’s a book where queer families just are, in a world where no one must be persuaded of it. My kids live in a version of that world—hardly a post-gender utopia, but many of their peers have two moms or two dads, and it’s not unusual for boys to wear nail polish or tutus to preschool. Not long after my son brought “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” home, his public elementary school picked it as the Book of the Month for June, to coincide with Pride.
In an increasing number of states, that choice could contravene the law. In March, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, signed the Parental Rights in Education bill, popularly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which declares that “classroom instruction . . . on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate”; it also prohibits “classroom discussion” of such topics. In April, Governor Kay Ivey, of Alabama, signed a bill with similar language, and multiple states have comparable legislation pending. In Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott has attempted to criminalize gender-affirming pediatric care and asked the state’s education agency to investigate “the availability of pornography” in public schools, the state representative Matt Krause has compiled a widely circulated master list of some eight hundred and fifty books that potentially violate HB 3979, which bars the teaching of material that could cause a student to feel “psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” Other groups, such as the right-wing Moms for Liberty, have disseminated hit lists of their own.
Krause’s list names books that have been frequently targeted for bans owing to drummed-up panics over critical race theory (such as Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist”) and queer-centered books for older readers, including two memoirs that Abbott has condemned as “clearly pornographic” (Carmen Maria Machado’s “In the Dream House” and Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer”). But it also includes a number of superb picture books with L.G.B.T. themes, such as “And Tango Makes Three,” about two male penguins who have a baby, and “Julián at the Wedding,” about a boy who loves to dress up. These books, like “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” are striking for their pointed lack of “psychological distress.” They are part of a genre that barely existed a generation ago, and they present a surprising vision of what a children’s book should be—one that many lawmakers are trying to legislate out of existence.
In the nineteen-seventies, a tiny imprint called Lollipop Power launched in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, describing itself as “a feminist collective that writes, illustrates, and publishes books to counteract sex-stereotyped behavior and role models presented by society to young children.” Its inexpensive books, which were stapled like zines, included “Jesse’s Dream Skirt,” a pioneering portrayal of a gender-nonconforming preschooler; “When Megan Went Away,” which scholars believe to be the first American children’s book to portray lesbian parents (albeit ones who have just split up); and “Lots of Mommies,” in which a little girl is raised by her mother and three other women. But Lollipop Power’s output never crossed into the mainstream.
Gay-themed picture books did not receive widespread attention until the turn of the nineties, when the L.G.B.T.-focussed Alyson Publications published “Heather Has Two Mommies” and “Daddy’s Roommate.” The Alyson books received enormous, often hysterical media attention—on a “Larry King Live” segment, in 1992, a concerned guest denounced “Daddy’s Roommate” for its “explicit pictures of two men hugging each other.” Both books made repeat appearances on the American Library Association’s annual Top 10 Most Challenged Books list, which tallies demands to remove books from public- and school-library shelves nationwide. These were stiff, earnest books, lacking for drama or wit; “Heather” was improbably dense with text for a book intended for very young readers, and included a detailed explainer of artificial insemination. Still, “it was a book that was always stocked in gay bookstores and women’s bookstores,” K. T. Horning, who recently retired as the director of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me. “A lot of lesbians bought it as gifts for friends who were having children, or even just bought for themselves, because it was the only time they had ever seen themselves reflected in a children’s book.”
At the time, Horning was working at a public library in Madison. “We did also have lesbian moms and gay dads who were not fans of the Alyson books,” she said. “They felt that they were just too didactic. So we came up with a list of books that didn’t really have gay families, but they did have queer subtexts.” These included the “Frog and Toad” books, written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel, and “Three Days on a River in a Red Canoe,” written and illustrated by Vera B. Williams. “That was the hands-down favorite of lesbian families at our library, because they felt it reflected what their family life was actually like,” Horning said of “Red Canoe.” “They were not sitting down with their children and giving them long explanations of artificial insemination. The book had a great story, adventure, engaging illustrations, and kids being kids.” It also had a freewheeling approach to format: the colored-pencil drawings and text mingled with recipes, diagrams, and instructions for tying knots or pitching a tent.
Most of the early queer kid lit—or, rather, the queer kid lit that announced itself as such—was plainly didactic. Then again, “to a certain extent, all children’s literature is didactic,” Thomas Crisp, an associate professor of literacy and children’s literature at Georgia State University, said. But “L.G.B.T.Q. books that are overtly didactic are generally concerned with educating people about L.G.B.T.Q.-identified people rather than creating texts for those who have friends, family members, loved ones, or who themselves identify as L.G.B.T.Q.” Meanwhile, queer-coded stories such as “Frog and Toad” or “Red Canoe” were conceivably for and about most anyone.
The next major brouhaha about L.G.B.T. children’s books didn’t kick off until 2005, with the publication of “And Tango Makes Three,” a sweet tale about a pair of penguin dads that topped the Most Challenged list in 2006, 2007, and 2008, dipped to No. 2 in 2009, rebounded to No. 1 in 2010, and reached the top ten four more times in the decade to come. (It also made the “ThreatDown” segment of “The Colbert Report.”) “And Tango Makes Three” ’s authors, the husbands Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, collaborated with the illustrator Henry Cole, and got the idea for the book when they read a story in the Times about Roy and Silo, an inseparable pair of male chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo. The penguins went so far as to attempt to brood a rock before a zookeeper gave them a real egg to care for, which soon hatched Tango. “Out came their very own baby!” Richardson and Parnell write. “She had fuzzy white feathers and a funny black beak.” (A few years after their book was published, Richardson and Parnell had a daughter of their own.)
Richardson, who is a psychiatrist and the co-author of “Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid They’d Ask),” told me that “Tango” was rooted partly in talks he would give to private-school parents about how to approach discussing sex and sexuality with their children. “The impetus behind the book was to put something in the hands of parents that they would feel comfortable using,” he said. “Penguins are birds who are cute and cuddly, who do not have visible genitalia, who kind of snuggle and that’s about all. You can’t tell a male penguin apart from a female penguin. If we had published a book that had two lions on the cover with big manes, in 2005, it wouldn’t have reached as broad an audience.”
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“And Tango Makes Three” is not the only picture book that uses androgyny in the animal world in service of a queer theme. The original version of “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” written and illustrated by Sarah Brannen, was populated by guinea pigs, who are also rather epicene. “I wanted the story to be universal, and I thought, If I make it with cute animals, anyone can identify or not,” Brannen told me. The newer edition, published in 2020—the version my son brought home—is recast with human beings, thanks to festive illustrations by Lucia Soto. “Nowadays, I hear from people sometimes who feel that illustrating the book with animals made it somehow safer—that it backed away a bit from the reality of gay human beings,” Brannen said. “That wasn’t my intention, but things change.”
For a progressive-minded reader, an intentionally demure approach to a queer children’s story may scan as squeamishness; a conservative parent, meanwhile, may see it as a trick. “There were requests that a sticker should be put on the cover of ‘Tango,’ to announce that it was a gay book,” Richardson said. Coincidentally, “Tango” appeared the same year as the blockbuster documentary “March of the Penguins,” which many conservatives embraced as an anthropomorphized showcase of traditional family values. Amid right-wing penguin mania, Roy and Silo looked like interlopers, disguised as themselves.
Adults fear children’s books for their ability to penetrate a developing subconscious and tell a child who she is; it follows that the same books have a knack for getting adults to tell on themselves. The assumption that “a gay book” is necessarily a sexualized book, and therefore inappropriate for children, is baked into the language of “Don’t Say Gay”: the law prohibits discussion of “sexual orientation or gender identity,” full stop, but it’s tacitly understood that only certain orientations and identities qualify for the ban. The same normative mind-set infused the attacks on “And Tango Makes Three.” “It was criticized in the conservative press as being sexually explicit,” Richardson said. “That’s when you know we’re dealing with projection—adults who are projecting their fantasies onto this book. When you get an adult of a certain generation and you say ‘homosexuality’ to them, their association is men having sex with men. That’s simply where their mind goes. What we’ve tried to explain is: your four-year-old does not have that association, and by the way, that association isn’t in the book; it’s in your imagination.”
Put another way, straight adults do not instantly think of straight sex when they see straight characters. When my kids watch “Bluey,” I don’t keep one finger on the remote just in case Mum and Dad suddenly start going at it atop their kitchen counter. Introduce a gay character into your children’s entertainment, though, and you become a “groomer”: the buzzword that’s now omnipresent in right-wing media, equating any queer-friendly curricula or event with sexual predation. When DeSantis signed Florida’s bill into law, he said that its opponents “support sexualizing kids in kindergarten.” He also held up an oversized reproduction of a page from the picture book “Call Me Max,” about a trans kid, much as a prosecutor would hold up a crime-scene photograph in a courtroom. Labelled “found in florida,” the offending page depicted little Max lounging pensively in a verdant patch of grass, a small dog by his side.
One of the strengths of “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” is in how it represents a small child’s actual assumptions, as opposed to those of Governor Ron DeSantis. In the book, which squeaked in at No. 99 on the A.L.A.’s list of the most-challenged books of the twenty-tens, there is no indication that Chloe is capable of sorting relationships as “gay” or “straight.” In fact, she frets about the wedding precisely because she assumes that Bobby’s new husband will neatly substitute for her—that their respective relationships with Bobby can be placed in the same category. That is to say, she is as clueless, solipsistic, and gloriously free of adult imprinting as any five-year-old you’ll meet at the library.
“I had to think hard about how to tell this story in the way a child would see it,” Brannen told me. “I wrote versions in which Chloe was confused because Bobby was marrying a man, and it just felt wrong. It didn’t feel true. When I’ve spoken to groups of young children—kindergarten, first grade—you can sometimes see that some of them might not have ever thought about that before, that a man can marry a man. And they go, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And then the next question is ‘How old are you?’ or ‘Have you ever been a flower girl?’ And the younger children, the preschoolers, they really take it for granted.”
Jessica Love is the writer and illustrator of “Julián at the Wedding” and its predecessor, the gorgeous and dreamlike “Julián Is a Mermaid,” in which the title character seizes his chance, when his grandmother is in the tub, to craft a costume for himself, using her curtains as a gown and her houseplant as a headdress. When Love reads the book aloud to children, she told me, she typically pauses just as Julián’s grandmother is coming out of the bathroom, her hair wrapped in a towel. “I’ll ask the kids, ‘Do you think he’s going to be in trouble?’ The really little ones will say, ‘Yeah, because he made a mess,’ or ‘Yeah, because he hurt her plant.’ ” (Spoiler: Julián’s not in trouble, and his abuela escorts him in his curtains-and-houseplant finery to the annual Mermaid Parade, in Coney Island.)
“It’s not even on the kids’ radar that the way he chose to dress up might be a problem,” Love said. “I wanted the story to function absolutely in the absence of that idea.” Love’s illustrations are vibrant and exquisitely detailed, but they also leave openings for the imaginative reader to fill, or not: whether Julián lives with his abuela or is just visiting her; whether the spectacularly costumed parade-goers whom Julián encounters on the subway are cis women, drag queens, or actual mermaids.
Of course, many older children have already grasped that, in much of the country, queer people and queer families are seen as a problem. They may know, for example, that, in Idaho, where the state representative Heather Scott told an audience that the L.G.B.T. community and its supporters are waging a “war of perversion against our children,” thirty-one alleged members of the white-supremacist group Patriot Front were arrested near a Pride event, on June 11th, and charged with conspiracy to riot. (They were released on bond and are slated for future court appearances.) Older kids may know that, on the same day, members of the right-wing hate group the Proud Boys stormed a Drag Queen Story Hour event at a library outside San Francisco, flashing white-power signs; one wore a T-shirt that read “Kill Your Local Pedophile.” They may know that school-based threats and acts of violence against queer people appear to be on the rise.
For those kids, a book like “Julián Is a Mermaid” can shape-shift into a different kind of tool. Erika Long, a school librarian in Tennessee, told me about how she used picture books such as “Julián” and the Pride primer “This Day in June” to launch middle-school units on social justice. “These were sixth graders literally sitting on the floor crisscross applesauce, reading to each other,” Long recalled, with great delight. The kids were encouraged to use Julián’s style of self-expression and his grandmother’s support of him as prompts to discuss different modes of activism. “The middle-school years are when kids are becoming really knowledgeable about who they are,” Long said. “The library is a place where they feel comfortable sharing about things that are related to identity or sexuality.”
That sense of comfort is what Moms for Liberty and others are out to disturb. During the pandemic, school closures put conservative parents in closer proximity to books and curricula that they might find offensive; meanwhile, many districts poured resources into their e-book catalogues, making it easier to take screenshots of objectionable material and share them online. “Prior to this past school year, it was not unusual for a parent to reach out to us to discuss a book,” Audrey Wilson-Youngblood, a school librarian in Texas, told me. “It was normal and healthy. But then we saw a sudden spike in people bypassing the library and going straight to social media or straight to the school board and superintendent, because they saw a book on a list. These were organized, national groups that would hunt for specific books until they found them.”
The canon of queer-themed stories for young readers is still relatively small. That means the stakes are higher for any given book in terms of who and what it chooses to represent, and how those choices are interpreted by different audiences. While I was researching this piece, I brought home many picture books written by authors on Representative Krause’s list, and my kids were confused by the handful that portrayed the bullying of gender-nonconforming boys. My daughter, who is seven, was especially baffled by Daniel Haack and Stevie Lewis’s “Prince & Knight: Tale of the Shadow King,” in which the villain’s emotional dysregulation is traced back to his feelings of shame about his long hair and feminine clothes. As soon as he’s offered some sympathy, his taste for havoc disappears. “He thinks people don’t like him because of his hair?” my daughter asked disdainfully. I felt queasy: with the aid of some well-reviewed children’s books, I had seeded in her brain that queer kids are marked for stigma before the likes of Matt Krause could do it for me.
Kyle Lukoff is the author, with the illustrator Luciano Lozano, of “Call Me Max,” the picture book held up by DeSantis as symbolic of a grooming crisis, as well as “When Aidan Became a Brother,” illustrated by Kaylani Juanita, about a young trans boy anxiously awaiting the birth of his new sibling. Before he began writing full time, in 2020, Lukoff worked as an elementary-school librarian and bookseller. He recalled an encounter with a customer at the Barnes & Noble in deep-blue Park Slope, Brooklyn. “A mom came in looking for a book about a boy who wore dresses and wearing dresses wasn’t a problem,” Lukoff said. “Her son didn’t know yet that people were going to be mean to him, and his mom didn’t want him to find out until he had to. I was, like, ‘Ooh, I don’t know—in the stories where this exists, it’s always a problem to be solved.’ ” Lukoff went on, “It almost seems as if books, in trying to do the right thing, can reify these ideas.”
In part, this is because authors themselves are performing their own kinds of projection. “Something I have noticed about a lot of picture books with L.G.B.T.Q. themes for children,” Horning said, “is that oftentimes it’s another child who brings up gender or sexuality as something odd. In my work with children, that has not been my experience—it is usually an adult who brings it up as a potential problem. Yet authors put that on a child, and then, of course, it’s the role of the wise adults to come in to explain to the kids, ‘No, there are different kinds of families.’ ”
This is the dominant dynamic of books about gender-nonconforming children, all the way back to “Jesse’s Dream Skirt”: other kids are the threat and the adults are the refuge. But there is no bullying peer in a book like “Julián Is a Mermaid,” by conscious design. “I remember having a very clear sense as a child about whether a book was being given to me to teach me a lesson and when a book was just for pleasure,” Love said. “I wanted this story to lead with pleasure. I wanted the first principle to be beauty and delight. It’s important to have stories that are a portal into the world as we wish it to be. The counter-argument is: don’t we owe it to people who have been traumatized by bullying, or by the crueller shape of the world, to reflect that? But I tend to think that that’s in the world plenty already.”
When I spoke with Richardson, he cited two books of his youth that exemplified the dichotomy between pure pleasure and a more didactic approach: “The Story of Ferdinand,” written by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson, and “Oliver Button Is a Sissy,” written and illustrated by Tomie dePaola. Ferdinand is a bull who famously refuses to participate in the bullfights, preferring “to sit just quietly and smell the flowers”; Oliver is a boy who’s averse to sports and partial to tap dancing and dressing up. Other boys tease him, but Oliver rather miraculously silences them with a strong showing at the school talent show. The process by which he earns respect feels contingent upon his gifts.
“I was so uncomfortable as a kid about ‘Oliver Button Is a Sissy,’ ” Richardson said. “I didn’t want a book where kids were teasing another child. It made me feel bad. I was embarrassed that it had happened to me.” What’s more, he said, there was nothing reassuring about the book’s happy ending. “I remember thinking, Well, but I can’t tap dance. How does this help me?”
A book whose themes are more malleable and impressionistic, Richardson suggests, may at times provide better representation than literal representation does. “ ‘The Story of Ferdinand’ was the single most important piece of literature of my whole childhood. I never read ‘Ferdinand’ and thought, ‘Well, but I don’t have horns,’ or ‘I wouldn’t sit on a bee,’ or ‘My mom isn’t a cow.’ ” The world of animals and metaphor, he said, “gives kids more imaginative space.”
If overtly L.G.B.T. books continue to be banished from library shelves, then it may be left to older works like “Ferdinand” and “Frog and Toad” to smuggle in queer-friendly themes. And, since book-banning enthusiasts tend not to read the books they ban very closely, the “just-are” brand of queer children’s story may still have a chance to slip past the censors as well. A recent entry in this category is Emma Hunsinger and Tillie Walden’s “My Parents Won’t Stop Talking!”, in which wide-eyed Molly is excited to be going to the park, but her moms just keep yammering to their across-the-street hippie neighbors, the dreaded Credenzas. The book draws on Molly’s mounting indignation with an exclamatory energy that evokes Jules Feiffer’s classic “I Lost My Bear.”
Like most binaries, though, the lines between didactic stories and just-are stories—and between Oliver Button stories and Ferdinand stories—can blur and break down. “There are books that are ‘Once upon a time there was a character who was different, and everyone was mean to them,’ and then at the end of the story you learned why you should be nice to people,” Lukoff said. “I hate those books, for a lot of reasons. There’s another category where characters quote-unquote ‘just happen to be’ an identity—there are two dads, but it’s not about that. I would posit that there’s a third type of book, one that’s wholly about a character’s identity, but without that identity being a source of conflict.”
“When Aidan Became a Brother” centers Aidan’s transness and the pain he experienced during his early childhood, when his parents gave him clothes and a bedroom suitable for the girl he was not. But the book’s precise tension derives from Aidan’s anxiety that the family won’t provide a welcoming home for the new baby. He’s worried, simply put, about being a good big brother. When Lukoff got the idea for “Aidan,” he said, “It was this flash of a kid saying, ‘This is what my room looked like when I was born—and this is what my room looks like now!’ It’s a kid telling you how he changed the world around him instead of merely forcing people to accept him into their preëxisting world view.” Aidan, like Julián the mermaid, exerts creative power and agency, building his own portal into the world as he wishes it to be.
My daughter read “When Aidan Became a Brother” to me the other night. It wasn’t new to her—she’d read it at school. When I asked her what she thought of the book, her response had everything and nothing to do with Aidan’s identity: she focussed entirely, and a bit enviously, on how he had revamped that gigantic, extremely un-Brooklyn-apartment room. A picnic table, a tent over his bed, lots of plants. “He decorated his room like it’s outside,” she said. “He feels better that way.” ♦
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