Battles Rage Over Children's Books With Gay Themes

One of the fiercest battles over gay visibility today is unfolding in the seemingly innocent arena of children's picture books:

• An illustrated children's book called And Tango Makes Three — based on actual events about a couple of male penguins in the Central Park Zoo raising a hatchling — topped the American Library Association's list of the Most Challenged Books of 2006. Organized campaigns against the book included efforts to have it restricted to the "mature" section of the library, labeled with a warning about its content, and removed from school libraries altogether.

• Two families filed a federal lawsuit alleging their civil rights were infringed when a teacher read their children King & King, a fairy tale about a prince who refuses to follow his mother's insistence he marry a princess and instead falls for a handsome prince. The book was included as part of a unit on marriage in a school in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is currently legal.

• According to a Los Angeles Time's article titled "Gay References Touchy in Children's Literature," the mere mention of two gay fathers in The Trouble With Babies, a book that celebrates the diversity of an entire San Francisco neighborhood, was enough to discourage many librarians from ordering the book, fearing protests like that of a Pittsburgh-area mother who demanded it be removed from library shelves for its "homosexual agenda."

While it's sadly not that surprising that children's books with gay themes stir this kind of controversy, what is particularly troubling about these incidents is the widespread effect they appear to have, curtailing the availability and publication of more of these kinds of books.

In a recent Guardian article about the U.K. publication of And Tango Makes Three, Judith Krieg, director of the American Library Association's office of intellectual freedom, referred to this as the "heckler's vote," where one very loud complaint can make a book unavailable for thousands. In what might be thought of as something of an understatement, she said that when it comes to homosexuality, "people go a little crazy."

There is ample evidence that these hecklers aren't just making noise but having a negative influence on publishers and librarians. The Pittsburgh-area librarian who agreed to remove The Trouble With Babies is quoted in the L.A. Times piece as saying: "The reality is, the parents who objected to this book would have taken this to our school board, and I would have been overridden. I only have so much energy for these fights."

According to the article, the book's publication was affected as well; despite positive reviews and strong sales for the author's first book, it failed to secure paperback rights that would have brought it to a wider audience.

One has to wonder if these controversies relate to the relatively stagnant number of children's books with gay themes that are currently being published. Roger Sutton, publisher of the Horn Book Magazine, a monthly that covers children's literature, told the L.A. Times that while there has been a dramatic increase in the number of GLBT-themed young adult books, sales of similar titles for young children remain "very dicey and very different." This is particularly surprising given the clear demand for these kinds of books stemming from increasing numbers of gay parents raising children

Arthur Levine, the editorial director of his own imprint for Scholastic Press, one of the world's largest children's book publishers, is, as a gay parent himself, concerned with this issue. But he emphasized that the need for these books goes well beyond children being raised by gay parents.

"Ten percent of the children's book readership, at least, will grow up to be gay or lesbian," he said to AfterElton.com. "Wouldn't it be nice if their first exposure to the idea that there are gay people in the world isn't when they're teenagers — so when little Johnny falls in love with that really cute, brainy boy in his computer class, he's grown up with the idea that it's not unusual and there's nothing wrong with that.

"And an even higher percentage of picture book readership will grow up to know and love somebody who's gay or lesbian. So when you think about it that way, a large percentage of your picture book audience can really benefit from naturalizing the idea that there are gay and lesbian people in the world. When you think about it that way, it's even more of a mystery why there aren't more of these books."