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 before bed that night, I felt a deep sense of resignation. The book’s cover features two smiling groomsmen in tight suits standing under a gazebo 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 later, Bobby brings his boyfriend to a family picnic and there, to Chloe’s astonishment, the couple announce their engagement. The book I assumed this one developed in my head: Chloe would be reluctant to accept the idea that a wedding isn’t just for a man and a woman; she would learn that it’s okay. to be gay.
But “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” thankfully, isn’t that book at all. The story’s central conflict, a key set of assumptions that Chloe must shake off, is rooted not in child-sized homophobia, but in her concern that when she marries and perhaps starts a family of his own, her uncle 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 about queer families, in a world where no one needs to be convinced. My kids live in a version of that world—it’s hardly a post-natal 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 in preschool. Not long after my son brought home “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” his public elementary school chose it as Book of the Month for June, to coincide with Pride.
In an increasing number of countries, that choice could be in conflict with the law. In March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law the Parental Rights in Education Act, popularly known as the Don’t Say Gay Act, which declares that “classroom teaching . . . about sexual orientation or gender identity must not appear in kindergarten until the 3rd grade or in a way that is not appropriate for the age”; it also prohibits “classroom discussion” of such topics. In April, Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama signed similar language into law, and several states have similar legislation pending. In Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott has sought to criminalize gender-affirming pediatric care and asked the state education agency to investigate the “availability of pornography” in public schools, state representative Matt Krause has compiled a widely circulated master list of some eight hundred and fifty books that potentially violate HB 3979, which prohibits the teaching of material that could cause a student to feel “psychological distress because of an individual’s race or sex.” Other groups, such as the right-wing Moms for Liberty, circulated their own hit lists.
Krause’s list lists books that have often been banned because of the mounting panic over critical race theory (such as Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be Anti-Racist”) and queer-focused books for older readers, including two memoirs that Abbott denounced as “obviously pornographic” (“In the Dream House” by Carmen Maria Machado and “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobaba). But it also includes a number of superb picture books with L.G.B.T. themes, such as “A Tango Makes Three,” about two male penguins who have a baby, and “Julián at the Wedding,” about a boy who likes to dress up. These books, like Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, are remarkable for their marked lack of “psychological distress.” They’re part of a genre that barely existed a generation ago, and they represent a surprising vision of what a children’s book should be—one that many lawmakers are trying to abolish.
In the 1970s, a small imprint called Lollipop Power launched in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, describing itself as “a feminist collective that writes, illustrates, and publishes books to counter the sexually stereotypical behaviors and role models that society presents to young children.” His inexpensive books, which were bound as zines, included “Jesse’s Dream Skirt,” a pioneering account of gender-nonconforming preschool; “When Megan Gone,” which scholars believe is the first American children’s book to feature lesbian parents (albeit ones who have just split up); and “Puno Mama”, in which a girl is raised by her mother and three other women. But production of Lollipop Power never went mainstream.
Gay-themed picture books did not gain widespread attention until the turn of the 1990s, when Alyson Publications focused on L.G.B.T. published “Heather Has Two Moms” and “Daddy’s Roommate”. The Alyson books have attracted enormous, often hysterical media attention — on a segment of “Larry King Live” in 1992, a concerned guest slammed “Daddy’s Roommate” for its “explicit images of two men hugging.” Both books have repeatedly appeared on the American Library Association’s annual list of 10 most requested books, which aggregates requests to remove books from the shelves of public and school libraries across the country. They were stiff, serious books, without drama or wit; “Heather” was incredibly dense for a book aimed at very young readers, and included a detailed explanation of artificial insemination. Still, “it was a book that was always available in gay bookstores and women’s bookstores,” K. T. Horning, who recently retired as director of the School of Education’s Children’s Book Cooperative Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told me. “Many lesbians bought it as a gift for friends who had children, or even just for themselves, because it was the only time they saw themselves in a children’s book.”
At the time, Horning was working at the Madison Public Library. “We had lesbian moms and gay dads who weren’t fans of the Alison books,” she said. “They felt they were just too didactic. So we came up with a list of books that didn’t actually have gay families, but had queer subtext.” Among them are the books “The Frog and the Toad”, written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel, and “Three Days on the River in the Red Canoe”, written and illustrated by Vera B. Williams. “It was a favorite of the lesbian families in our library because they felt it reflected what their family life was really like,” Horning told The Red Canoe. “They didn’t sit down with their children and give them long explanations about artificial insemination. The book had a great story, adventure, interesting illustrations, and kids were kids.” He also took a free approach to formatting: colored pencil drawings and text mixed with recipes, diagrams and instructions for tying knots or pitching a tent.
Most early queer kid lit—or, rather, queer kid lit that announced itself as such—was clearly didactic. Then again, “to some extent, all children’s literature is didactic,” said Thomas Crisp, associate professor of literacy and children’s literature at Georgia State University. But “L.G.B.T.Q. books that are overtly didactic are mostly concerned with educating people about L.G.B.T.Q.-identified people, not creating texts for those who have friends, family members, loved ones, or self-identify as L.G.B.T.Q.” Meanwhile, queer-coded stories like “The Frog and the Toad” or “The Red Canoe” were possible for most anyone.
The next big fuss about L.G.B.T. children’s books didn’t take off until 2005, with the release of A Tango Makes Three, a cute story about a pair of papa penguins that topped the most challenging list in 2006, 2007 and 2008, falling to No. 2 in 2009, jumping to No. 1 in 2010 and reached the top ten four more times over the next decade. (It was also featured in the “ThreatDown” segment on “The Colbert Report.”) And Tango Makes Three authors, husband and wife Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, collaborated with illustrator Henry Cole and got the idea for the book when they read a story in Times about Roy and Silo, the inseparable pair of male bearded penguins at the Central Park Zoo. The penguins went so far as to try to invent a rock before the zookeeper gave them a real egg to care for, which soon hatched into Tango. “Out came their 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 their daughter.)
Richardson, who is a psychiatrist and co-author of “Everything You Never Wanted Your Kids to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid They’ll Ask),” told me that “Tango” was partly rooted in talks he’d give to private-school parents about how to approach talking about sex and sexuality with your children. “The impetus behind the book was to put something in parents’ hands that they would feel comfortable using,” he said. “Penguins are birds that are cute and cuddly, that don’t have visible genitalia, that kind of cuddle and that’s all. You can’t tell a male penguin from a female. If we had published a book in 2005 with two lions on the cover with big manes, it would not have reached such a wide audience.”
And Tango Makes Three is not the only picture book to use androgyny in the animal world in the service of a queer theme. The original version of “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” written and illustrated by Sarah Brannen, was populated by guinea pigs, which are also pretty epic. “I wanted the story to be universal and I thought, if I make it with cute animals, everyone can recognize it or not,” Brannen told me. The newer edition, published in 2020 – the version my son brought home – has been reworked with human beings, thanks to Lucia Soto’s festive illustrations. “Nowadays I sometimes hear from people who feel that illustrating the book with animals made it somehow safer — that it moved a little bit away from the reality of gay human beings,” Brannen said. “It wasn’t my intention, but things change.”
To the progressive-minded reader, the deliberately low-key approach to a queer children’s story may seem like snobbery; a conservative parent, meanwhile, may see it as a trick. “There were requests to put a sticker on the cover of ‘Tango’ to announce that it was a gay book,” Richardson said. Coincidentally, “Tango” came out the same year as the documentary “March of the Penguins,” which many conservatives accepted as an anthropomorphized depiction of traditional family values. Amidst the right-wing penguinmania, Roy and Silo looked like intruders, disguised as themselves.
Adults fear children’s books because of their ability to tap into the developing subconscious and tell the child who he is; it follows that the same books have the ability to get adults to talk about themselves. The assumption that a “gay book” is necessarily a sexualized book, and therefore unsuitable for children, is baked into the language of “Don’t say gay”: the law prohibits discussion of “sexual orientation or gender identity”, period, but it is tacitly understood that only certain orientations and identities are eligible for banning. The same normative mindset fueled the attacks on “A Tango Makes Three”. “It’s been criticized in the conservative press as sexually explicit,” Richardson said. “That’s when you know we’re dealing with projection—adults projecting their fantasies onto this book.” When you get an adult of a certain generation and you tell them ‘homosexuality’, their association is men having sex with men. That’s just where their mind goes. What we tried to explain is: your four-year-old does not have that association, and by the way, that association is not in the book; it’s in your imagination.”
In other words, straight adults don’t immediately think of straight sex when they see straight characters. When my kids are watching “Bluey,” I don’t keep my finger on the remote in case mom and dad suddenly start following it on the kitchen counter. However, introduce a gay character into your children’s entertainment and you become a “hairdresser”: a buzzword now ubiquitous in right-wing media, equating any queer-friendly curriculum or event with sexual predation. When DeSantis signed the Florida bill into law, he said his opponents “support the sexualization of children in kindergarten.” He also held up an oversized reproduction of a page from the picture book “Call Me Max,” about a trans kid, like a prosecutor would hold up a crime scene photo in a courtroom. Labeled “FOUND IN FLORIDA”, the offending page showed little Max lounging pensively in a green patch of grass with a small dog by his side.
One of the strengths of “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” is how it presents the real assumptions of a young child, as opposed to the assumptions of Governor Ron DeSantis. In the book, which was ranked 99th on A.L.A.’s list of twenty-ten most challenging books, there is no indication that Chloe is capable of classifying relationships as “gay” or “straight.” In fact, she is worried about the wedding precisely because she assumes that Bobby’s new husband will neatly replace her – that their relationship with Bobby can be put in the same category. That is, she is as clueless, solipsistic, and gloriously free from adult imprinting as any five-year-old you’ll meet in the library.
“I had to think carefully about how to tell this story in a way that a child would see it,” Brannen told me. “I wrote versions where Chloe was confused because Bobbi married a man, and that was wrong. It wasn’t true. When I’ve talked to groups of young children—kindergarten, first grade—you can sometimes see that some of them may have never thought about it before, that a man can marry a man. And they say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And then the next question is, ‘How old are you?’ or ‘Have you ever been a flower girl?’
Jessica Love is the writer and illustrator of “Julián at the Wedding” and its predecessor, the beautiful and dreamy “Julián Is a Mermaid,” in which the title character seizes his opportunity, when his grandmother is in the bathtub, to make a costume for himself, using her curtains as a dress and her houseplant as a headdress. When Love reads a book aloud to the children, she told me, she usually stops just as Julian’s grandmother comes out of the bathroom, her hair wrapped in a towel. “I’ll ask the kids, ‘Do you think they’re going to be in trouble?’ Really little ones will say, ‘Yeah, because he made a mess,’ or ‘Yeah, because he hurt her plant.'” ( Spoiler: Julián isn’t in trouble, and his abuela follows him in his curtains and houseplants to the annual Mermaid Parade at Coney Island.)
“It’s not even on the kids’ radar that the way he chooses to dress could be a problem,” Love said. “I wanted the story to work absolutely in the absence of that idea.” The love illustrations are lively and extremely detailed, but also leave openings for the imaginative reader to fill in, or not: whether Julián lives with his abuela or is just visiting; whether the spectacularly costumed parade goers Julián meets on the subway are cis women, drag queens, or true mermaids.
Of course, many older children have already realized 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 state representative Heather Scott told an audience that L.G.B.T. community and its supporters are waging a “war of perversion against our children,” thirty-one alleged Patriot Front members were arrested near a Pride event on June 11 and charged with conspiracy to riot. (They were released on bail and scheduled for future court appearances.) Older kids may know that on the same day members of the right-wing hate group Proud Boys stormed a Drag Queen Story event at a library outside San Francisco, flashing white power signs; one wore a T-shirt that said “Kill Your Local Pedophile”. They may know that school threats and acts of violence against queer people are on the rise.
