Battles Rage Over Children's Books With Gay Themes

This message comes from a very personal place, as Parr remembered his "personal struggles growing up in a small town and feeling like I didn't fit in. … I didn't want to wear a rock T-shirt and jeans and drive a pickup truck and work for the gas company like my Dad and everybody around me." It also didn't help to have a high-school art teacher who criticized his work and told him he'd never succeed as an artist. But as an author, Parr found that his style, with bright colors and bold lines, appealed to children's visual sensibilities.

If there's one book that encapsulates Parr's central message, it is It's Okay to be Different, which lists various types of differences ranging from silly things that get kids laughing ("It's okay to eat macaroni and cheese in the bathtub") to more serious issues ("It's okay to have wheels" and be in a wheelchair). An illustration of two women is accompanied with "It's okay to have different Moms"; an illustration of two men with "It's okay to have different Dads."

In The Family Book, Parr takes a similar approach of listing different kinds of families: some are big, some are small; some have step-parents or single parents; some are the same color, some are different colors; some are big, some are small. One page reads, "Some families have two moms or two dads."

What's significant about this approach is that the depictions of two moms and two dads — which could apply to step-parent situations as well as same-sex parents — are not the sole topic of the book. Instead, they are presented in a larger context in which differences of all kinds are highlighted and therefore normalized. Each person and each family, Parr's books demonstrate, has something unique about it. And if everyone has something unique about them, then it's not only OK to be different, it is in fact the norm.

This points to why so many gay parents feel it is important to find books like Parr's to give their children. Levine observed, "If all a child is exposed to is the most conservative idea of a norm, then they will grow up feeling that anything that is outside of that norm is somehow wrong."

And Michael Cruz, a gay father of a 14-month-old baby girl, said that while it is "a huge challenge, " he is careful to provide his daughter with books that portray a variety of family types because "we want to know that we are doing our best as parents to show our daughter the wide scope of the world, to show her that she is not alone. Hopefully, she will end up, in part due to these books, valuing her uniqueness and individuality as a positive difference in the world."

Despite the overall inclusiveness of his books, Parr has nevertheless found that "one page from one book out of 30" has brought him some controversy. Parr described giving a reading of The Family Book at a school in the San Francisco Bay area, where parents were required to sign permission slips allowing their children to hear him read the page about two moms and two dads.

When he got to that page, two children had to be escorted from the room — something that, he pointed out, ironically had the effect of drawing more attention to them and making them feel like the ones who were somehow different.

Of course, there might also have also been children at that school being raised by same-sex parents, and one can imagine how it felt to them to realize that hearing about families like theirs required special permission. But Parr said, "If hearing me read this to them in this environment and seeing that it's normal helped them, then it made a difference regardless of those other parents."

The controversy hasn't deterred Parr going forward, either. His next book, to be published this fall, is titled We Belong Together and depicts various families brought together through adoption, including some with two female and two male parents. Parr noted that the publisher made the decision to put an illustration of two male parents on the back cover, apparently unafraid that this image might somehow limit perceptions of the book's content and designate it as a special issue or alternative lifestyle book.

It's an example of the kind of publisher support that Levine described as necessary to get more books like this into bookstores. But books like this need strong consumer support or publishers will continue to shy away from them.

"I'm hyper-alert in bookstores looking for the book that might include our family," Levine said. "I'd buy anything that remotely reflected us, partly because I would want to make a vote with my pocketbook. I want to say, 'Whoever you are in that publishing house who pushed this through, I am supporting you.'"

In other words, in the publishing world, the "pocketbook vote" will always trump the "heckler's vote." Now go to a bookstore and vote.