Wild Things!

by Betsy Bird

  Fortunately, within the community itself, folks are trying to figure out how to label books for kids and teens that are GLBT so as to make them easier, not harder, to find. It is exciting to think that there are GLBT book awards for young persons’ literature. There is the youth section of the Stonewall Book Award and even the Lambda Literary Awards (or “Lammies”). The Stonewall Awards are also generally given to books that are GLBTQ in content. Things are looking up.

  MAURICE SENDAK, ONCE AGAIN

  “I just didn’t think it was anybody’s business,” Sendak said to the New York Times in 2008 when discussing his homosexuality. He lived with Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst, for fifty years before Glynn’s death, in May 2007. He never told his parents: “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.”

  Children protect their parents, Sendak said. It was like the time he had a heart attack at thirty-nine. His mother was dying from cancer in the hospital, and he decided to keep the news to himself, something he eventually regretted.

  A gay artist in New York is not exactly uncommon, but Sendak said that the idea of a gay man writing children’s books would have hurt his career when he was in his twenties and thirties. We hear that and understand simultaneously that authors and illustrators working with children’s books today still feel the same pressure to keep their personal lives under wraps. Yet looking back over the decades, it’s clear that even then they managed to create whole swaths of the children’s classics we love and appreciate today. Their legacy lives on, and their books have helped children understand the difficulties in sometimes being the “other.”

  The term “there are no survivors” continues to appear in obituaries for gay and lesbian couples, though happily it is far less common. And while the great GLBT authors and illustrators of the past may or may not have left physical progeny, they have certainly left many survivors. Harriet the Spy, Frog and Toad, George and Martha — these are their true offspring, and they will live forever, long after their creators have gone.

  When I was growing up as a young lesbian in the ’50s, I looked in vain for books about my people. There were none for kids, and the few I knew about for adults were always out of the library, which I later realized was probably a subtle (maybe backhanded would be a better word!) form of censorship.

  I did find some paperbacks with lurid covers in the local bus station, but they ended with the gay characters committing suicide, dying in a car crash, being sent to a mental hospital, or “turning” heterosexual.

  Eventually I did find Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, written in England in the 1920s, and tried for obscenity there and in the U.S.; as a result it was banned in England for years, but not here. . . . It does end sadly, but with an impassioned cry for justice and understanding.

  I read that book many times as a teenager, and I vowed that someday I’d write a book for my people that would end happily.

  — author Nancy Garden

  Nancy Garden spent ten years producing realistic fiction, informational books, and historical novels for young people before publishing the book she’d always vowed to write: a story about a gay relationship that ends happily. Released in 1982, Annie on My Mind was not the first gay-themed novel for young readers (John Donovan, Isabelle Holland, and Sandra Scoppettone had gotten there first), nor was it even the first with a happy ending. But it was a strong, well-written novel that rightfully took its place as an important work in the field. VOYA declared, “The body of adolescent literature has waited for this book a long time,” joining a long list of journals that agreed on Annie’s literary excellence. There was remarkably little controversy about the novel’s subject matter. In fact, the most damning criticism was reserved for the book’s dust-jacket art, which, some readers felt, depicted the romantic couple Annie and Liza as unattractive and tough-looking, thereby playing up lesbian stereotypes.

  Within just a few years, however, copies of Annie on My Mind were being burned by angry protestors on the steps of the Kansas City, Missouri, Board of Education building. Ultimately, Garden’s novel would be the subject of a landmark U.S. District Court case. Even in these litigious times, it’s rare for a children’s book to end up on the court docket. Yet every day, in schools and libraries all across the country, books for young readers face censorship and banning, based on a variety of factors. These include classic works of literature, such as The Diary of Anne Frank (sometimes challenged for being “too depressing”) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There are picture books in which the protagonist doesn’t wear underpants (In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak), as well as early readers in which the protagonist does wear his tighty-whities (the Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey), yet that’s still not enough. There are Caldecott books accused of being communist, and beautifully written Newbery winners criticized for containing “bad language.” Gulliver, Alice, and Romeo and Juliet have been challenged. Harry Potter has vanished from library shelves without the aid of a magic wand.

  What’s next, a ban on books about cute, fluffy bunnies?

  Heaven help us, it almost happened!

  THEY DIDN’T LIKE THE COLOR OF HIS HARE

  Two little rabbits spend their days playing games, such as “Jump the Daisies” and “Run Through the Clover.” When they’re thirsty, they drink cool, clear water from the spring, and when they’re hungry, they graze in a patch of dandelions. But the male rabbit is pensive and finally admits to his companion, “I just wish that I could be with you forever and always.” When she agrees, the two don dandelions and clasp hands, as their friends from the forest dance in a wedding circle around the happy pair. From this brief description, it’s hard to believe that Garth Williams’s The Rabbits’ Wedding was one of the most controversial books of the 1950s. The clue to the controversy can be seen in the cover illustration.

  In 1958, when Harper published this oversize picture book, a firestorm of controversy erupted because the female rabbit on the cover was white and the male rabbit was black.

  A columnist from Florida’s Orlando Sentinel wrote that the rabbits’ integration is evident as soon as one sees the cover, implying that the book’s creators were readying minds for brainwashing. The Montgomery Home News referred to the book as no less than propaganda for those in support of desegregation, prompting Alabama State Senator E. O. Eddins to state that the book should be burned. It wasn’t burned, but the Alabama Public Library did remove the book from circulation and place it on special closed shelves.

  Though this rabbity ruckus would be debated in the pages of Time, Newsweek, Life, and more than seven thousand newspapers, the author-illustrator remained calm, explaining that he simply felt a white creature next to a black creature looked appealing and that the rabbits themselves were inspired by early Chinese paintings featuring black and white horses. In 1959, Time magazine quoted him as saying that the book had absolutely no political import. “I was completely unaware that animals with white fur were considered blood relations of white human beings,” he said, adding he wrote the book for very young children “who will understand it perfectly.”

  And he was right. Children did understand this gentle romance. . . and have kept the book in print for fifty years.

  CHILDREN AND ADULTS: TWO WAYS OF READING

  Yes, children understood The Rabbits’ Wedding, but their adult counterparts read much more into the book than was intended.

  Why is it that adults and kids read books in such different ways? Is it because, as more sophisticated readers, adults have a better sense of subtext than children? Or is it rather that grown-ups — already nervous about how these books can subvert their upper hand by empowering children to question the status quo — approach each book with an already entrenched set of beliefs and prejudices?

  Maybe it’s just because grown-ups have dirty minds. How else to explain the banning of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan books by the Los Angeles Public Library in the late 1920s, on the grounds that Tarzan and
Jane were enjoying hot jungle love. . . without benefit of marriage? Hey, at least those interracial rabbits tied the knot.

  Whatever the case, books seem to draw out adults’ protective instincts in a way that other forms of media do not. There are an untold number of movies filled with cursing, nudity, violence, and explicit sex. Many television shows also contain these elements. But when was the last time you saw a group of “concerned citizens” publicly burning DVDs or throwing their TV sets from rooftops? Yet let a children’s book contain a few scattered swear words. . . a bare behind. . . a gay penguin. . . and all he — er, H-E-double hockey sticks — breaks out, resulting in book challenges at public and school libraries, as well as calls for censorship and banning. It’s clear that, for many, books are dangerous things.

  Why books? What gives them such power over other media? In his 2010 Printz Honor speech, author Adam Rapp recalled a meeting with Kurt Vonnegut, who talked to Adam about the power of books: “He said that the reason books will always be more dangerous than films or television and, yes, even theater is because the reader constructs the world of the book with the author; that in essence as a reader you are a performer, and because of this collaborative act, the words get to your thoughts more powerfully than anything else.” Indeed, with reader identification, the reader becomes the very character in the book. The reader and the text are joined in a conversation, and each reader brings unique experiences and beliefs to the table. It is the meaning that the reader takes from the text, based on those life experiences, that gives books such power.

  But we also can’t disregard the power of ratings boards and libraries. Movies, for instance, self-censor. The Motion Picture Association of America determines whether or not a young person is to be allowed entry into a movie theater, given their “R” ratings. Books don’t submit to rating agencies, and libraries — beautiful, blessed libraries — make books available to all who want to read them, as opposed to, say, a young person having to prove he or she is old enough, as well as fork out the cash, to get in to see the movie du jour.

  Most librarians, teachers, and child-reading advocates may agree in principle with these words from the Intellectual Freedom Manual:

  Intellectual freedom can exist only where two essential conditions are met: first, that all individuals have the right to hold any belief on any subject and to convey their ideas in any form they deem appropriate, and second, that society makes an equal commitment to the right of unrestricted access to information and ideas regardless of the communication medium used, the content of work, and the viewpoints of both the author and the receiver of information.

  . . . as well as the official stance of the American Library Association:

  ALA actively advocates in defense of the rights of library users to read, seek information, and speak freely as guaranteed by the First Amendment. A publicly supported library provides free and equal access to information for all people of that community. We enjoy this basic right in our democratic society. It is a core value of the library profession.

  Yet, in reality, censorship remains one of the most difficult issues in children’s books, encompassing a wide range of thorny questions. Nearly everyone agrees that they don’t want their neighbors to set standards for the entire community, but what about parental rights? Shouldn’t a mother or father have the right to limit her or his own child’s reading? Or do young people’s needs trump their parents’ desires? Is book selection — deciding whether or not a book belongs in a library because of its literary quality or prospective popularity — simply another form of censorship? Are some types of censorship “positive” (such as of older books that stereotype minorities, limit girls’ career options, or use racial epithets), while others are wrong (such as of books that include gay characters or explore teenage sexuality?) There are no easy answers.

  To fully appreciate the impact of censorship on children’s literature, it might be helpful to examine some of the reasons that books are challenged — and to note that few books are immune to the disapproving eye of the censor.

  NO IFS, ANDS, OR BUTTS: CENSORING NUDITY

  In 1862, a British minister named Charles Kingsley began publishing a serialized novel in Macmillan’s magazine concerning the adventures of a young chimney sweep who drowns in a river and becomes a “water baby.” Released in book form the following year, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby is now viewed by scholars as an allegorical indictment against England’s social system, but for many decades it was considered a cornerstone of British children’s literature. Most of the editions, including those illustrated by original artist Linley Sambourne or, later, illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith, were filled with naked Kewpie doll–like children.

  Except for that surprised-looking fish, no one during the Victorian era seemed too shocked by the blatant bearing of baby buttocks that appeared throughout the book. Thank goodness those water babies never turned around.

  An original Jessie Willcox Smith image from The Water-Babies

  Image Credit 5

  If they had, they might have found themselves in the same boat as Mickey — star of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen and children’s literature’s first full-frontal protagonist. Published in 1970, In The Night Kitchen has been one of the most challenged picture books. Shocked and horrified that Mickey is naked during most of his adventures, parents and teachers over the years have challenged this Caldecott Honor Book. One critic wrote, “The naked hero wallows in dough, swims in milk, and otherwise disports himself in a manner that some might interpret as a masturbatory fantasy.” In 1991, a Jacksonville, Florida, parent tried to get the book removed from a school library because the nudity was “disgraceful and appalling.” The following year, parents in Elk Grove, Minnesota, challenged the book because Mickey’s nudity “could lay the foundation for future use of pornography.”

  As early as 1971, librarian Betty B. Jackson of the Caldwell Parish Library in Columbia, Louisiana, proudly reported to School Library Journal that a staff member at her library had used white tempera paint to diaper the “boys” in the book, recommending that other libraries take the same course of action. (Perhaps if she’d read the book more carefully, she would have known there is only one boy in the story.) As KT Horning explained in a 2012 School Library Journal column, librarians on the whole embraced, supported, and defended the book, but it certainly has been met with its fair share of controversy from parents.

  Strangely, in the years since Mickey first showed that real boys don’t look like naked Ken dolls, censorious adults have even been bugged by bare bums, something that didn’t cause a blush or the batting of an eye when Water-Babies appeared during Lincoln’s presidency. Published in 1982, Karla Kuskin’s The Philharmonic Gets Dressed follows members of an orchestra as they get ready for a big performance. Marc Simont’s color illustrations show orchestra members in various states of undress — buried chest deep in a bubble bath, garbed in undergarments, or perhaps showing the upper curve of a bare behind. Yet the book was challenged in Texas in the early twenty-first century, as was an edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, illustrated by Michael Neugebauer, which dared to show, from a discreet distance, that the emperor had no clothes.

  Patricia Lauber had a long and distinguished career writing about science and nature, with works ranging from her 1987 Newbery Honor Volcano to a fun series called Around-the-House History, which traces the evolution of subjects such as eating and sleeping customs. Lauber had no problems with the censors until she wrote a volume on bathroom habits, What You Never Knew about Tubs, Toilets, & Showers, whose discreetly humorous illustrations by John Manders were condemned as “inappropriate.” The most frequent charge against nudity in the media is that it’s gratuitous, yet one wonders how anyone could claim a bare behind in an informational book on bathing can be gratuitous or inappropriate. Apparently those who censor would prefer that the book characters bathe in swimsuits and shower in raincoats.

  And
they would no doubt prefer that Mickey take that mixing bowl off his head and use it to cover up his genitals, instead of standing there so brazenly crowing a double entendre that none of the censors ever seem to notice, “Cock-a-Doodle Doo.”

  When it comes to nudity — or even the, er, barest suggestion of nudity — in children’s books, those who censor would strongly advise, “Cock-a-doodle don’t!”

  Scrotumgate!

  In 2007, a couple of librarians on a small librarian listserv by the name of LM_NET debated the merits of the newest Newbery Award winner, The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron. The book had many fine points to recommend it, but it also contained a certain word on the first page that raised some eyebrows. In an AA meeting, a friend of our heroine “told of the day when he had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked ’62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.” A few librarians didn’t care for the term and said as much, but on a listserv, folks feel free to say what they think.

  So it really was a shock when the New York Times proclaimed in big, shouty letters, “With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar.” Come again? Apparently Publishers Weekly had picked up on the conversation, and after that, the Times followed suit. “The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children’s books.” In fact, this was a bit of hyperbole with a national newspaper apparently eager to find any excuse to print the word scrotum in a legitimate context. Everything died down fairly quickly after that, but in some circles it can still be remembered as the great Scrotumgate of 2007.