New Children’s Book Is a Bilingual Love Song from One Boy to Another

Continuing my National Coming Out Day week of new picture books, coming out today is a gorgeous new bilingual children’s book in English and Spanish that honors the Mexican serenata tradition even as reframes it to include one boy creating a love song for another, with the help of his father.

When We Love Someone We Sing to Them/Cuando Amamos Cantamos is both the title of Ernesto Javier Martí­nez’s new book (Reflection Press) and the advice given by a father to his son at the story’s beginning. “We call this a serenata,” the father explains. “It’s our way to hug with sounds.” [“A esto le llamamos una serenata, es nuestra manera de abrazar con la voz.”] He gives an example—the two of them singing to the boy’s mother last Mother’s Day—and promises the boy he will sing with him when the boy someday falls in love and wants to share what’s in his heart.

The story then shifts as the boy tells us his heart is already aflutter, and we see images of him with another boy, walking through a field and having a picnic. He asks his father to help him sing to this special boy. His father is quiet for a moment. When his son then says to him, “Teach me a song for a boy who loves boys,” the father thinks and creates a new song. The two of them sing it together to the boy’s beloved, and the book ends with the father affirming that the “garden inside” his son is sacred and deep rooted. The boy tells us, “He says that gardens like mine, even through droughts, have persisted. He says that gardens like mine have always existed.” [“Él dice que los jardines interiores como el mí­o, incluso durante las sequ­­ías, han persistido. Dice que siempre han existido jardines como el mí­o.”] That’s as beautiful a statement by a parent to an LGBTQ child as I’ve ever read.

Martí­nez, a queer Chicano/Puerto Rican literary critic, educator, and writer, won the Lambda Literary Award in 2012 for an adult anthology, but this is his first children’s book. He nails it, however, with lyrical, poetic text that celebrates both the boys’ love and the supportive relationship between the boy and his father. Pura Belpré honor award winner Maya Christina Gonzalez, a queer, femme, Chicanx activist, deserves equal credit for her stunning, vibrant illustrations that bring the story to life.

It’s also critical to note that this isn’t a book that just happens to have people of color as protagonists—it’s a full-on celebration of a Mexican cultural tradition, the serenata, with references to Xochipilli, the Mesoamerican deity of creativity, dance, and song. And the protagonist asks his father to help him sing his song “for a boy in town, for a boy bright brown [para un amigo en mi pueblo, para un niño brillante y moreno],” a clear ode to the beauty of his skin tone.

Many other picture books that have celebrated same-sex attraction have done so through tweaks on traditional European fairy-tale romances, and that is a wonderful way to update a cherished genre and make it more inclusive. But as I said in May in a longer piece on such tales, even though some of those books include people of color, we also need more queer fairy tales with roots in other lands and cultures. Martí­nez and Gonzalez’ book isn’t a fairy tale, exactly, but like them, it echoes with cultural stories and traditions, and the illustrations carry more than a touch of whimsy. It is more thoughtful than many of the fairy tale books, though, in focusing on the here and now of the boys’ relationship, rather than on the goal of marriage, which I think is not so much on the minds of picture-book age children, despite what Disney has tried to make us believe.

And unlike the parents in Thomas Scotto’s Jerome By Heart, another recent picture book that focuses on the love of one young boy for another, the father in Martínez and Gonzalez’ book is unfailingly supportive. Jerome may unfortunately be closer to the truth for many young queer people—but I also think that they and their parents and teachers need to see the kind of love and support modeled by the father in When We Love Someone.

This is a exuberant, loving, and unique book that should inspire song in many a heart.