by Betsy Bird
Don’t look for sad tales or dire straits in her adult personal life, either. She lived happily with her mother; her youngest brother, Lars; his daughter, Sophia; and her life partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, also known as simply “Tooti.” Tove put her family members into the books, and so her mother became Moominmamma — and Tooti was Too-Ticky.
Growing up in the family, young Sophia started to wonder about Tove and Tooti. “They were firm pillars of my existence, but why were these two ladies living together? . . . They kind of made me say it and then said, yes, that’s it. . . but the word lesbian was never ever used.” That said, Sophia considers that perhaps they weren’t strict lesbians anyway. Both women had made a decision not to marry and have children. It may well have been that they simply found it easier to live together. Whatever the case, Jansson’s lifestyle was not the standard husband-plus-wife-plus-2.3-children nuclear family. Instead it was loving and artistic and yielded some of the best children’s books to come out of the Nordic part of the world.
THE AIDS EPIDEMIC TAKES ITS TOLL
In the 1980s, the arts community of America was devastated by the AIDS epidemic. When the disease first appeared on the scene, it was unofficially labeled “gay cancer,” with very little information immediately available. In the first ten years of its appearance, thousands of gay men died, victims of the virus that causes AIDS. According to journalist and author Charles Kaiser, in Manhattan, gay men born after World War II suffered a 50 percent casualty rate, and almost every gay man in metropolitan areas knew ten friends who would die. “For some,” Kaiser writes, “the number of deceased friends and acquaintances. . . surpassed three hundred.”
The children’s literary community was similarly hit hard. Indeed, during this time, two of the brightest lights in the world of children’s books were almost simultaneously snuffed out, long before their talents or careers could even come close to waning.
Arnold Lobel
A theme that crops up again and again when interviewing GLBT children’s authors is the notion of being an “other” or outside the mainstream. Often this sense is inculcated at a very young age.
Arnold Lobel certainly felt this way more than once in his own life. As a child, Lobel was often ill and spent much of his time in the hospital. His biographer George Shannon writes that during his hospital stays, Lobel “literally existed outside his peers’ world, seeing them only through glass and at a distance.” A child of divorce, Lobel did not come out as gay until later in life — after his marriage to author-artist Anita Lobel and two children — but he existed outside the mainstream just the same.
As for his children’s books, they are sublime. Sometimes working alone and sometimes with collaborators, Arnold created a host of memorable books, including Uncle Elephant, Ming Lo Moves the Mountain, and Owl at Home. Far and away, however, the best known of all these are the Frog and Toad books.
Frog and Toad are the ultimate examples of comfort friends. Their tales consist of only four easy books, but in those limited stories they strike a chord with readers everywhere. Generations have grown up with Toad’s irascible irritability and Frog’s sheer joy in the world. As Christopher Bram put it in an article in the GLBT periodical Christopher Street in 1981, “In the movie, Toad would be played by Woody Allen, Frog by Gérard Depardieu.” They have appeared in short claymation films and even their own (highly catchy) Broadway musical, A Year with Frog and Toad, starring Lobel’s son-in-law and former Perfect Strangers star Mark Linn-Baker.
When Arnold Lobel began the Frog and Toad series, his early sketches reveal the two friends to be male and female. At some point in the proceedings, Lobel made both his heroes male. But perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into this. After all, fellow gay author James Marshall wrote the George and Martha books. Can’t get any more boy-and-girl friendshippy than George and Martha. George Shannon, author of the 1989 Twayne biography of Arnold Lobel, said, “One of my sources for the Twayne book quotes him as being very interested in famous male-male story sets, such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello. Who knows what was conscious and subconscious for Arnold in the 1970s?”
Bram similarly finds much to love in the duo but eschews the interpretation that Frog and Toad have to be gay: “I do not really need that possibility. The scope of the stories seems so much broader. Although Frog and Toad are more consistently loyal and kind than the children I remember or know, the fervor of their relationship rings true for all childhood friendships. Such friendships are our first opportunity to connect with someone to whom we are not bound by authority or physical need. They don’t always make up in intensity for what they lack in duration, but perhaps they serve as half-forgotten models for our relationships with people when we grow older, whether as friends, spouses, or lovers.”
Original sketches of Frog and Toad in varying guises and genders
Image Credit 4
Similarly, the two indulge in baking cookies, sewing buttons, gardening, and telling each other that they care about their friendship. They present a model relationship, no matter what the stripe.
In the spring of 1986, Lobel was diagnosed with AIDS. He died the following year. In giving his eulogy, James Marshall said of his friend, “When he learned he had a fatal illness, he tried to convince himself and his friends that perhaps it was, after all, an appropriate time to die. But he soon gave up that notion. He realized that there was nothing at all appropriate about a man dying at the height of his creative powers.” Lobel left behind a legacy of great works. Perhaps the saddest part of Marshall’s speech is the moment when he says, “Now that he is gone, there will be books written about him — books that will cover various aspects of his work in greater depth.” To date, there has been only one.
James Marshall, “Wicked Angel”
There’s a story of James Marshall that serves as one of the more peculiar and delightful tributes out there. Editor Regina Hayes spoke of him in The Horn Book in 2007, and her memories of the man are anything but fluffy bunny–ish:
At lunch with Toby Sherry, his editor at Dial, Jim noticed a woman at the table directly next to his who looked familiar. He realized she was the very same evil witch who had stolen a cab from him and his ailing father a few nights before. He also realized she had kicked off her shoes — very expensive alligator pumps. When the check came, Jim signaled to Toby that they needed to make a speedy exit. He rummaged under the table for his portfolio, and off they went. Once in the cab, Jim opened his portfolio to reveal one alligator pump! What delicious revenge.
When it comes to Marshall stories, this is pretty much par for the course. Everyone adored him. He could draw with such perfect seeming simplicity yet never won a Caldecott Medal in his lifetime, though he did win a 1989 Honor. He was also undeniably gay.
As George Shannon once put it, “James, Arnold, and Maurice were sort of the unofficial gay trio of picture books in the seventies and eighties.” Indeed, it was Sendak who was left in the end to pay tribute to Marshall, not so long after Marshall had in turn paid tribute to Lobel. In George and Martha: The Complete Stories of Two Best Friends, Sendak extolled Marshall’s talents. Bemoaning the fact that Marshall was never properly appreciated in his time, Sendak places Marshall at the end of “a long line of masters that began in the nineteenth century with the preeminent English illustrator, Randolph Caldecott; then continued in our century with Jean de Brunhoff in France and Edward Ardizzone in England; and then via Tomi Ungerer arrived full blast in America, where the laurel wreath settled finally, splendidly, on the judicious, humane, witty, and astonishingly clever head of James Marshall.”
Of the three great gay icons of the ’70s and ’80s, the least has been written about Marshall. He was warm and witty, often rendering Sendak speechless with laughter. Indeed, that humor penetrated his work. His most memorable creations, the hippos George and Martha, were named for the lead characters in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In a 1986 interview, Marshall explaine
d their origins:
I was sitting in a hammock at my mama’s house in Hilotus, a little town outside of San Antonio, and I was doodling on a page. Actually, it was just a blank page, and there were two little dots already in the paper and I recognized them as eyes, and I started developing around the character that has become Martha, my hippo. And inside at that time — inside the house — my mother was watching a televised version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And the characters are George and Martha. And I thought to myself, “Well, those are two pretty good names,” so I borrowed from Edward Albee, who I’m told is not amused by this.
The hippos fly readily in the face of any assumptions people may make about queer subtext in children’s literature. Frog and Toad may have gone from boy/girl to boy/boy, but George and Martha are most certainly a boy/girl pairing.
This is not to say that Marshall didn’t create children’s books that spoke to queer families, of course. In his delightful 1991 article, “Positive Images and the Stupid Family: Queer Books for Kids?” Michael Bronski lambastes the picture books created up until that point that meant to present gay and lesbian parents and relatives in a positive light. Tearing into such books as Michael Willhoite’s Uncle What-Is-It Is Coming to Visit!! for doing more harm than good (the scary leather man is a problem right there), Bronski makes the argument that a great deal more good can be gained from books like Harry Allard and James Marshall’s Stupids series. “Child readers understand that their own lives and experiences are ‘normal’ and that profoundly centering idea is reinforced by the foolish activity of made-up characters — a much better strategy than the Dick and Jane tone of these gay books.” That said, there is at least one James Marshall book that seemingly appears to be about a gay child. Bonzini! The Tattooed Man by Jeffrey Allen features a little boy who becomes enamored of a bald, muscled, tattooed circus performer with a handlebar mustache. Amusingly, Bronski appears to have been unaware that Marshall himself was gay, remarking with astonishment that Bonzini “looks amazingly like a gym-queen/clone.”
In time, Marshall, too, tested positive for HIV, and we lost another of our great author-illustrators. In Maurice Sendak’s picture book We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, one of the four angels in the spread at the beginning of section 2, “Jack and Guy,” is reading one of Marshall’s George and Martha tales, and two spreads before that you can spot a newspaper headline from October 1992 that reads, “Jim Goes Home.” That was the month and year of Marshall’s death.
The recipient of the 2007 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for lifetime achievement, Marshall received the honor after his death that he could never gain during his life. As Sendak put it so eloquently, “James the perfect friend was indistinguishable from James the perfect artist.”
THE BOOKS THEMSELVES
Look at the history of American cinema and you will note that while gay characters have rarely been positively portrayed on the silver screen, they’ve at least been present. Whether as the swishy hairdresser or the fey costumer, they are there. In contrast, children’s literature is a veritable desert. Gay characters portrayed in a positive or even a negative light are, until the late twentieth century, virtually absent. When Philip Nel wrote the history of American radical children’s literature, Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature, with fellow University of Texas professor Julia Mickenberg, there was little gay content to include. This was in part because their book meant to reprint out-of-print items, and for the most part, children’s books that deal with homosexual characters tend to be contemporary. For example, Nel says, “I’d wanted to use Johnny Valentine’s One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads (1994), but the publisher brought it back into print when we were assembling our volume.” In the end, Nel and Mickenberg’s book includes a history of radical children’s literature, including picture books on socialism, feminism, labor unions, peace, and multiculturalism, but the most radical notion of all, the equality of homosexuals, makes no appearance.
When pressed to name the first children’s book that could be called explicitly gay-friendly, Nel named Susanne Bösche’s Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, published in Danish in 1981 and in English in 1983. The book recounts a weekend Jenny, her father, and her father’s partner spend together.
Just as Michael Bronski considered books with a queer subtext better than preachy didactic texts, there is a kind of subgenre of children’s books in which the kids eschew rote gender stereotypes. For a great deal of time, boys did boy things in books and girls did girl things. These were so ubiquitous in the culture that no one thought twice about it. Babar marries Celeste, and not a word is said on her part. Lucy and Susan are told in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe that the idea of girls fighting is a distasteful notion. Even Dr. Seuss got in on the act. Can you name a single positive female character from any of his books published during his lifetime? As Philip Nel points out, Sally doesn’t speak in The Cat in the Hat, and Mayzie is a neglectful mother in Horton Hatches the Egg.
In the 1960s and ’70s, progressives started challenging this rigidly held system. Titles of the era that challenge gender stereotypes include Eve Merriam’s Mommies at Work (1961) and Girls Can Be Anything by Norma Klein (1973). And princesses were no longer obliged to go marrying the first prince who came to their door, thanks to 1969’s The Practical Princess by Jay Williams and Robert Munsch’s The Paper Bag Princess (1980).
By the 1970s, author/illustrator Richard Scarry was the object of much feminist criticism for his repeated portrayal of female characters in passive domestic roles in his many picture books showing community workers. But Scarry eventually heeded the cries of sexism aimed at him. Ms. Mouse, for instance, was a housewife, but she later became a plumber, firefighter, and mechanic, too. In her spare time, she also paints and drives a bus. Attagirl. Where once you saw a “pretty stewardess” welcoming a customer onto a plane, now you see a “flight attendant.” “Mailman” became “letter carrier,” “policeman” became “police officer,” and Dad was inserted into the kitchen in subsequent revised editions of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, originally published in 1963. Scarry also occasionally updated a character’s gender by changing his or her clothing. Author Bobbie Burch Lemontt even notes that one character, Tom the Telephone Worker, once appeared — evidently due to a mistake in the updating process — with a pink bow in his hair.
As time went on, books about girls who could be “anything” were by far more common than books in which boys had an equal chance to escape their rote roles. The person who walks into a library or bookstore looking for stories where little girls can do anything will not be wholly disappointed. There are even books like Pugdog by Andrea U’Ren in which a masculine dog turns out to be a girl, while a feminine-looking poodle is male. In spite of the poodle’s existence, however, boys who want to act in roles traditionally assigned to girls tend to find far less fare. Yet as author Marcus Ewert put it, “There have been several kids’ books, some of them absolutely fantastic, which have featured, for instance, boy-protagonists, who have acted in ways contrary to hoary old gender norms.” Citing everything from Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand to The Sissy Duckling by Harvey Fierstein to Lesléa Newman’s The Boy Who Cried Fabulous, Ewert is able to name some of the best of the best, but in terms of sheer numbers, tomboy girls have “sissy” boys beat, hands down.
Charlotte Zolotow’s William’s Doll is one of the best examples of going against the flow. In this beautifully written children’s book (sadly the illustrations by William Pene du Bois have aged far less well), a boy really wants a doll. This leads to the usual amount of teasing, bullying, and paternal displeasure. Amusingly, the happy ending comes about when the boy’s grandmother convinces the father that if the boy has a doll, he’ll learn how to be a good parent someday. This is a kind of justification the dad can grudgingly accept, though you have the distinct feeling by the end that this is not the only issue he and William will butt heads over in the future.
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sp; Certainly, few people had seen anything like Zolotow’s book. Of course, in William’s Doll, William was given an excuse (albeit from a well-intentioned grandparent) as to the reason why a boy would want anything as girly as a doll. Other books are unapologetic about the inclinations of their heroes. Tomie dePaola’s Oliver Button Is a Sissy is an excellent example of this. A semi-autobiographical tale, the story follows young Oliver, who prefers playing dress-up in the family’s attic to sports and at last enlists in a dance class. The book reflects actual incidents that happened to young dePaola, as when the bullies in Tomie’s school stole his tap shoes to play catch with or when his father and brother called him a sissy. The book in turn inspired the video Oliver Button Is a Star, where folks like Arctic explorer Ann Bancroft and Tomie dePaola himself (out and proud) talk about the bullying they endured as children. These discussions are set against a live performance of Oliver Button Is a Sissy as performed by the gay men’s choir of New York City. Along the way, we learn personal details, such as the fact that as a kid, when Tomie wanted to jump rope with the girls at recess, his mother had to send a note to school saying it was OK. Even with that, he was only allowed to turn the rope. Even more interestingly, Tomie had to continually fight to prove that his name was spelled T-O-M-I-E and not T-O-M-M-Y. Later Mr. dePaola would write the autobiographical 26 Fairmount Avenue series about his life. Though the Tomie in those books doesn’t have to face as much criticism, Tomie shares with Oliver that same love of dance and dressing up.
