New Guide to LGBTQAI+ Kids’/YA Books Offers Lists, Advice, Discussion

A new guide to LGBTQAI+ children’s and young adult books should become a go-to resource for librarians, teachers, and parents—although it needs to clean up a few errors.

LGBTQAI+Books for Children and Teens, by Christina Dorr and Liz Deskins, published by the American Library Association (ALA), offers a lot of value in its 132 pages. Dorr, a media specialist with a Ph.D in education with a specialty in literature and literacy, and Deskins, who has been a school librarian for 30 years, have created a compact guide with suggested books for young, middle grade, and teen readers, along with descriptive blurbs and discussion questions for each book. They break down each age range further as appropriate (e.g., Realistic Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction). For each age range, they also explain why LGBTQAI+-inclusive books are necessary and what readers of that age may gain from them, along with ideas for activities and displays in libraries or classrooms.

In their introduction, they offer a clear, succinct rationale for why we should share LGBTQAI+ literature with all children. “We recognize the importance of books/literature being a window, door, or mirror for children,” they explain, noting, “It’s an issue of basic human rights.” They also give us a short history of LGBTQAI+ kids’ literature, and suggestions for dealing with objections to it.

The volume is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all such books, but as Jamie Campbell Naidoo, professor at the University of Alabama School of Library and Information Studies, explains in the Forward, “the suggestions for the highlighted books can be used to jumpstart program planning for other titles that represent LGBTQAI+ experiences. (See Naidoo’s own Rainbow Family Collections, about which more here, for a more comprehensive list of LGBTQ-inclusive books through grade five, up to his publication date of 2012. See also my own more up-to-date book lists for queer parents and our children.)

I might quibble with a few of Dorr and Deskins’ choices for books (in particular, I’d replace a few older titles for young children with some newer ones), but overall, they do a fine job of giving readers a good selection of books to get things started. I’m not going to debate particular titles here (except for one I found problematic, below). I have concerns, however, with a number of other mistakes and omissions in the book, some larger than others.

This one feels critical:

• When Dorr and Deskins describe the protagonist of 10,000 Dresses by Marcus Ewert, the first picture book to feature a transgender child, they say, “Bailey is a boy who dreams of dresses.” No. Bailey is referred to with female pronouns throughout 10,000 Dresses. She clearly says on one page, “But . . . I don’t feel like a boy.” Ewert has been clear that Bailey is a transgender girl. (And here’s my own interview with him from 2009.) A better and less offensive description would have been, “Although Bailey’s parents see her as a boy, she doesn’t feel like one and dreams of dresses.”

These mistakes just seem sloppy:

• In the Introduction, Dorr and Deskins mention The Arizona Kid, by Ron Koertge, which they say was published in 1989. It was in fact first published in 1988 by Joy Street Books—a date Dorr and Deskins note correctly in the chapter on teen books. More egregiously, they say in the introduction that this “was a critical book at the time for several reasons,” including that “It was published at the beginning of the Stonewall Rebellion.” That’s just wrong. The Stonewall Rebellion started in 1969, arguably the most well-known year in LGBTQAI+ civil rights history. The Arizona Kid was nearly two decades later.
• Jonathan Donovan’s groundbreaking YA novel, I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip, is correctly titled in one location; in another, it is called I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth It.
• This sentence incorrectly uses “intersex” as an noun, not an adjective: “Published in 2015, None of the Above by I.W. Gregorio became the first book to deal directly with the issues surrounding intersex.” Intersex what?
• In their description of Lesléa Newman’s classic Heather Has Two Mommies, they say, “Kate and Jane decide to have in vitro fertilization and Heather is born.” No. Kate and Jane use plain ol’ assisted insemination, which is different. In IVF, the egg is removed, fertilized outside the womb, and then placed into it. But the text of Heather clearly says, “The doctor put some sperm into Jane’s vagina.” A small detail? Perhaps—but in a book about families who place value on explaining their children’s origins accurately, this feels important to get right. Also, that entire description of insemination has been omitted from the second edition (2000) onward, as being too tangential to the main story, so I’m not sure that Dorr and Deskins even need to mention that part of the story at this point in time.
• Also, they incorrectly say that Heather was “First written in 1979, republished in 1989, and published again in 2015 with new illustrations.” That’s wrong. It was first published in 1989, not 1979, and was republished in 2000, 2009, and 2015. And while they are right to say Heather was “initially self-published,” they are wrong to say that publisher Alyson Wonderland purchased it “ten years later.” They did so only one year later, as Newman clearly states in her afterward to the 10th Anniversary Edition.

These last two are arguable, but I offer them for consideration:

• Their list of organizations under Additional Resources omits Family Equality Council, COLAGE, and PFLAG, the three national organizations focused solely on families with LGBTQAI+ individuals in them. Each of these organizations produces booklists and/or other materials directly relevant to children/youth, schools, and inclusion. And although Dorr and Deskins do list HRC, it might have been better to specify HRC’s Welcoming Schools project, which offers a plethora of resources for teachers and others around inclusive language in schools, dealing with objections to LGBTQAI+ representation, book lists, and much more related to topics that Dorr and Deskins raise.
• Among the additional books Dorr and Deskins suggest is Ann Bausam’s Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights, which I found problematic in its terminology around transgender people and in its omission of several key transgender activists of color. I would hope they’d reevaluate its inclusion in this light.

I’ve detailed these issues at some length because the book really does have the potential to become a vital and widely used resource. It lists a useful, annotated assortment of books, arranged in helpful ways, with great ideas and suggestions for their use in libraries, schools, and elsewhere. At $45, however, the book seems clearly aimed at libraries and schools, not individuals, for whom that is a lot to pay for a small paperback—but I can see many LGBTQAI+ parents also benefiting directly from it (or wanting to buy it as a gift for their children’s teachers). It’s a shame the cost will likely prevent many of us from getting it—as many readers here already know, finding quality, LGBTQAI+ books for our children is an ongoing concern. If the cost is prohibitive for us as individuals, though, then we should at least recommend it for our local libraries and schools. Let’s hope the ALA quickly releases a second edition, correcting the above mistakes, so that we can recommend it knowing the information it conveys is both inclusive and accurate.

I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.