by Betsy Bird
Interestingly, if at any point Lyle the crocodile were to, say, find an interest in another male crocodile, that book would be challenged in conservative districts faster than you can say “gay gator.” But if the character in the book is nebulous, or a child, then it slips right on in. Subversion on a picture-book level.
There is a flip side to all of this. It doesn’t happen very often, but once in a while you’ll find a picture book that acts as a kind of antithesis to books that seek to break down gender expectations. Don Freeman’s Dandelion is a perfect example of this. In this story, a little lion is invited to a party. To prepare, he decides to get himself cleaned up and proceeds to wash and comb himself and put on nice clothes. The problem is that, when he attempts to get into the party, no one recognizes him and he’s denied access. Dejected, he dirties his nice clothes once more, and suddenly everyone returns to being his friend. Aside from the fact that lions are not typically considered to be messy creatures (was Freeman reluctant to put pig to paper?), there is the fact that the book is reinforcing the problems inherent in boy characters becoming dandified (hence the title). It’s not an offensive book, but one wonders if it could be written today.
As for those contemporary picture books, with every passing year the market sees more and more books with healthy, happy gay individuals in them. On the picture-book side of things, you can find books from the innocuous King & King to the delightful And Tango Makes Three. There’s Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, the beautiful Pija Lindenbaum book Mini Mia and Her Darling Uncle, and even board books with titles like Mommy, Mama, and Me or Daddy, Papa, and Me. Chapter books have been a little slower to follow and at first only contained characters that could be vaguely considered gay-ish — books like Stitches by Glen Huser. Fortunately, the tide is changing, and you have books like Keeper by Kathi Appelt with its gay mermaid and The Popularity Papers by Amy Ignatow, sporting two gay dads as naturally as you please. Literature, it seems, has come a long way.
Ms. Wittlinger and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad School Visit
Author Ellen Wittlinger was once invited to present at a day-long book festival at a large library. The newly hired, fresh-faced librarian for young adults had invited the author after the library director had approved the author lineup without actually having looked at any of Wittlinger’s books. The librarian used her portion of the publicity budget to have bookmarks made listing all of Wittlinger’s books that would be distributed to the middle- and high-school students in the school district. But since all handouts had to be approved by the front office, someone in the administration noted at that point that some of the books contained gay and lesbian characters. All publicity was scrapped. When the author arrived in town, people acted embarrassed and awkward around her. The librarian apologized, and the library director approached her to let her know that he had tried his best to convince the administration to publicize the event, saying, “I told them you were married and had two children.”
“I couldn’t believe someone was saying this,” she told us. “I was straight, so that somehow validated the books?” Wittlinger noted more than one thousand attendees at the festival — but only ten people showed up for her program. “It was a completely humiliating experience, but the worst part of it was that I knew there were gay teens living in that town who were being kept even more hidden than I was, kids who would have loved to read about GLBT characters like themselves. But they weren’t even allowed to know those books existed.”
TOTALLY JAMES HOWE
Not every author or illustrator of children’s books comes out from day one. At times, it takes years. Like many authors, including Arnold Lobel, James Howe came out late in life. In the early days of his career, he was best known as the Bunnicula series author. He married, had a family, was widowed, and remarried. Then, age fifty-one, Howe came out to the world. “One of the first emotions I experienced was anger. I was angry that I had wasted so much of my life being fearful and ashamed over something that was just one part of who I am and should never have been a big deal in the first place.”
The result was Totally Joe. Joe, a minor character in Howe’s previous book The Misfits, is gay, out, and proud at school. Though he has to deal with the usual bullies, he’s surrounded by a loving and supportive atmosphere. As Howe put it, “After I came out at the age of fifty-one, I was determined to write a character — a rewritten version of myself, if you will — who was growing up gay and feeling good about it.”
“IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO HATE ANYONE WHOSE STORY YOU KNOW”
Putting the T in GLBT
Historically, gender-role stereotyping has been beautifully solidified in the minds of children everywhere by a whole host of children’s books. Books like 1946’s Daddies, What They Do All Day by Helen Walker Puner offer the best examples, but most older children’s books are subject to the same problems.
As we’ve seen, a fair number of books have sought to break through these stereotypes. But what of books in which the child in question doesn’t just seek to do the activities of the opposite gender, but also wants to be the other gender? Such books are few and far between. You will find the occasional exception, however. A case could perhaps be made for L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904). That particular book ends with the discovery that our hero Tip, who for all intents and purposes is a boy, has in fact been disguised in that body by Glinda. A wave of her wand and Tip becomes Ozma (a girl). Amusingly, apparently nobody has ever had a problem with this presto-chango moment.
Even more explicit might be the 1978 picture book by Louis Gould, X: A Fabulous Child’s Story. The tale is simple. Two parents have a kid and raise it as neither a boy nor a girl as part of a scientific experiment. It’s a uniquely amusing little tale, telling how the parents bought their “Baby X” toys for either gender: “A boy doll that made pee-pee and cried, ‘Pa-Pa.’ And a girl doll that talked in three languages and said, ‘I am the Pres-i-dent of Gen-er-al Mo-tors.’” Of course the world eventually dislikes the notion of an X, but when all is said and done, the plucky youngster is tested by experts and revealed to be a smart, balanced individual.
That’s probably the closest you’re going to come to finding cross-dressing picture books for kids prior to 2008. And as author Marcus Ewert points out, X is not without its problems:
The book X: A Fabulous Children’s Story to me is fairly problematic. The main character’s affirmed gender of “X” becomes, IMHO, a lot less liberatory when you consider that that gender was the precisely desired end result of a lengthy and highly expensive “Secret Scientific Xperiment” (“a cost of Xactly 23 billion dollars and 72 cents”), with a board of scientists screening “thousands” of parental candidates before the right couple was found, and last but not least, the issuing of an over-2,326-page “Official Instruction Manual” whose level of minute prescriptions rivals anything in, say, medieval monastic rules. Even though according to the text X the character turns out happy and well adjusted, nevertheless, when I was a kid, I was always faintly nauseated and disturbed by the complete abolition of this child’s privacy by a whole host of adults-in-charge!
It’s one thing to have a book in which a character identifies as neither male nor female. It’s another thing entirely to have a book in which a character is male and identifies as female, or vice versa. Ewert wasn’t afraid to tackle that issue himself, though. His picture book 10,000 Dresses was published in 2008. In it, an openly transgender child dreams of wearing gorgeous dresses. The book is notable for a number of reasons, but particularly because it continually refers to Bailey throughout the text as “she.” Yet Bailey’s brothers and parents keep insisting that Bailey is a boy.
Says Ewert himself, “I wanted to write a book that as far as I know hadn’t been written.” Working hard to avoid making this a single-issue book (Bailey is also an artist who wishes to create beautiful dresses but needs some help from a neighbor girl to make that dream a reality), Ewert concedes that this is probably the first time, hist
orically, that such a book could be published. “We’ve needed the twenty or so years of Heather Has Two Mommies being out, and weathering ridiculous amounts of flak, and the subsequent queer-themed picture books (still just a handful, alas!) that have been published in Heather’s groundbreaking wake.” In that time period, TV hosts like Oprah or Barbara Walters or even Tyra Banks have featured gender-variant children, and transgender studies books published after the 1990s all helped Ewert write his book in the first place.
It’s understandable that a picture book about gender variance might still be rare, even in the twenty-first century. It is surprising, then, to consider how few young adult novels discuss the same topic. We’re all familiar with the hundreds of books in which girls dress like boys to have adventures or enlist in the military. Similarly the novel Boy2Girl by Terence Blacker prefers to consider boys cross-dressing as girls as just a fun plot point and not a serious consideration of changing your gender. Debbie Harry Sings in French by Meagan Brothers takes it one step further. An original take on sexual identity experimentation in teens, it’s the story of a heterosexual teen boy, who falls hard for Blondie’s music. He has a girlfriend and doesn’t suspect he’s gay but finds himself wanting to try on the little white dress he sees in a thrift store, just like the one Debbie Harry wears on the cover of Parallel Lines. Eventually, he starts dressing like her and even enters a drag show.
When it comes to changing your gender for good, the subject is harder to find in YA novels. I Am J by Cris Beam studies the complex process of a girl convinced that she should have been born a boy. On the male side of the equation is Julie Anne Peters and her novel Luna. Peters is, in many ways, the best-known lesbian YA writer working today. Not that she meant to be so well known. As she puts it, “It was never my intent to become the poster girl for lesbian literature. In fact, it was my editor at Little, Brown, Megan Tingley, who pushed me in that direction.” Peters had concerns, but after a year of working through her fears, she produced Keeping You a Secret. The following year saw the publication of Luna, a National Book Award Finalist about a boy (Liam) who wishes to permanently transition into her true self. As Booklist reviewer Cindy Welch put it, “Peters isn’t putting forward a political agenda here. Rather, she’s bringing the circumstances surrounding a difficult situation to light, and her sensitively drawn characters realistically encompass a wide range of reactions.” In 2012, Tanita S. Davis brought readers the YA novel Happy Families, all about twin teens dealing with the discovery that their father has been cross-dressing as a female for years. The VOYA review noted the compassion and tact with which Davis infused the novel, calling it “incredibly insightful.” Indeed, it’s an honest, realistic story that avoids diminishing the complexity of the impact of transgender issues on a family by refusing to provide pat, easy answers.
All well and good, but where are the transgender authors themselves? It’s one thing to write about someone identifying with another gender, and another thing entirely to live that life yourself. Historically speaking, there has never been a successful transsexual children’s author — until now. Professor Jenny Boylan has appeared on Oprah, Larry King, The Today Show, and a Barbara Walters Special (just to name a few places). She has been portrayed on Saturday Night Live by Will Forte, participated on the judging committee of the Fulbright Scholar Program, and is a professor of creative writing and American literature at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine.
In 2010, HarperCollins published Boylan’s first children’s chapter book, Falcon Quinn and the Black Mirror. The book is a rollicking romp of a fantasy concerning one Falcon Quinn. Quinn learns that, like many others, he is doomed to turn into a monster just after turning thirteen. As Boylan says about her writing, “It’s true that being trans has given me the opportunity to tell a particular kind of story that hasn’t generally been told, at least not by someone trained as a writer, and I’m grateful for that. It seems to me that we can break through to people with stories in a way that we can’t in any other way. My mother has a saying, ‘It is impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.’ And so I have tried to tell stories of people who are different in the culture — and not just trans people, I mean misfits and outcasts of every variety — and tell their tales with dignity and humor.”
The hope here is that, even if kids aren’t aware of the sexuality of the author, they’ll at least be able to take away a meaning from the book they might not have found elsewhere. One fan of Boylan’s wrote her to explain how her daughter, while reading Falcon Quinn, was learning not just how to accept difference but to speak up when necessary. Said the mother, “Recently, when a boy down the street was snorting mockingly about ‘a boy at my school who wears girl clothes,’ she turned to him with scorn and said ‘So what? They’re just clothes!’ ‘You go, girl!,’ I thought.”
Speculates Boylan, “Children — especially ones nearing adolescence — really get what I mean when I say ‘monsters.’ Figuring out how to survive in the world when you are different, struggling with identity. Well. You don’t have to be a famous transgender author to know what that’s about. It’s what we all do.”
TODAY
When Virginia L. Wolf wrote her biography of Louise Fitzhugh, published in 1991, she ran into a couple of dead ends. Getting friends and family to discuss Fitzhugh’s sexuality, even more than fifteen years after her death, was a tricky proposition. At the time, she suspected that many of the people she contacted were trying to conceal Fitzhugh’s sexual orientation. In fact, few who knew her as a child responded or even wanted to be identified. Even among those who would speak, there was a tendency to give information and then follow it up with a hasty mention that she shouldn’t put that information in her book.
Wolf’s research was done more than twenty-five years ago, and there’s little denying that strides have been made since that time. As George Shannon says, “Even at the time of my book on Arnold Lobel [1989], it was a dicey step to report he died from AIDS. These days it is so wonderful that someone like Robert Sabuda or Brent Hartinger can casually mention their partner on a book’s jacket flap.” Indeed, when author-illustrator Brian Selznick gave his Caldecott speech for the 2008 award for The Invention of Hugo Cabret, he thanked his boyfriend: “I know that I wouldn’t be here tonight without you.”
That said, it’s not as if every gay or lesbian author feels free to state his or her sexuality. For many, saying they’re gay could cut into their income. Schools and libraries in conservative districts, for example, may feel disinclined to bring an author in if they know he or she lives with a same-sex partner. Even Julie Anne Peters said that one of her initial and major concerns involved in writing a book like Keeping You a Secret was how such a book might affect her career. Ticking off her fears was “I’ll be blacklisted in every school and public library in the country. At the time, a fair amount of my income was made doing school visits, and I knew that money would dry up fast.” This was quickly followed up with the concern, “I was out to my friends and family, but there’s a big difference between being OUT (small caps) and being OUT. A global outing of this magnitude would impact my family.”
Sadly, not much has changed since these year 2000 concerns. Authors and illustrators often keep silent. When KT Horning created her GLBT children’s and YA literary blog Worth the Trip (named after the 1969 John Donovan novel), she included a sidebar of gay and lesbian authors and illustrators. Even so, Horning didn’t just slap a bunch of names up there. She asked each and every person whether or not they approved of being listed. Some said yes. Others said no.
Still, things are going better than they ever have before. In April 2010, John Green and David Levithan’s novel Will Grayson, Will Grayson debuted at number three on the New York Times bestseller list for children’s chapter books, which was the first time a book starring gay characters had appeared on that list.
On the picture-book side of things, stories that contain happy gay or lesbian households exist, though they often take a beating. It may seem s
trange that a sweet story of two penguins that raise a baby chick together would remain the most challenged book of 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 — until you realize the penguins are gay. Considering the lack of picture books featuring loving GLBT homes, authors Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson felt inclined to introduce kids to the subject in an age-appropriate way in their 2005 book And Tango Makes Three. As they put it, “We felt that there was an unmet need among the children of gay parents for stories involving families like their own. And we knew that while many parents who are not gay might wish to introduce their children to the subject of gay families, many felt unsure as to how to approach the topic, what language to use, how specific to get, and so on. This story seemed to us a perfect way for them to open up a discussion of a different sort of family with the confidence of knowing that they were doing it in an age-appropriate way.”
Certainly parents have been grateful (those who weren’t banning it left and right, of course). As blogger (I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the Hell Do I Read?) and author Lee Wind puts it, “For my daughter, child of two dads, reading Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson’s And Tango Makes Three is a remarkable normalization of a two-dad family — like ours — in the world. Sure, they’re penguins, but they’re two male penguins who. . . ended up raising a baby girl penguin.”
In 2007, an elementary-school librarian was threatened with “discipline up to and including suspension and/or termination of employment” for sharing the book with a second-grade class. Others voice concerns that such a book could lead impressionable youngsters into another lifestyle. One father reported that this was not true: “My son read And Tango Makes Three at church. It didn’t turn him into a penguin.”