It’s just going to be a week of LGBTQ kids’entertainment news, and I’m okay with that. Streaming service Hulu has announced the premiere of The Bravest Knight, the first mainstream children’s television series that centers a family with same-sex parents. Watch a trailer here!
Even as mainstream children’s shows like PBS Kids’ Arthur are starting to show LGBTQ characters, independent efforts are still striving to provide quality LGBTQ-inclusive content for kids. One new effort is All Together Now!, a queer animated kid’s show about “a community of people with different gender identities, body types, abilities, family structures, and cultural backgrounds.”
Alabama Public Television is refusing to show an episode of the beloved show Arthur on PBS Kids because it depicts two male characters getting married. Contact them to let them know how you feel!
A picture book about LGBTQ-rights hero Harvey Milk is gaining support among parents and others after some parents in Hanover County, Virginia, objected to it being read in a second-grade classroom. The teacher had read the book after one child in the class was called “gay” in a negative way.
Arthur, the beloved 22-year-old series on PBS Kids, has just introduced its first queer character, Arthur’s teacher Mr. Ratburn, who got married on yesterday’s season premiere. Watch it in full online—and learn why, even though he’s not the first queer character on children’s television, he still breaks new ground.
We’re just a few weeks away from the Pride Month that marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, and children’s book authors are stepping up to offer age-appropriate histories of this pivotal event and its impact.
Sometimes a picture book knocks everything out of the park. Evocative prose, whimsical illustrations, a sweet storyline that deals with sensitive topics by applying a big dose of family love—plus a gender ambiguous protagonist with two grandfathers who are a couple. I almost missed this book because the grandfathers’ relationship is so seamlessly woven into the story that the cataloging information has no indication there are LGBTQ characters. This is one picture book that shouldn’t be skipped, however.
When my spouse and I first tried to start our family 17 years ago, we searched vainly for a book on assisted reproduction that was both authoritative and inclusive. There were queer parenting books, to be sure, but they covered such a range of topics that details of the actual babymaking processes and procedures were somewhat scanty. There were more detailed guides, but they omitted families like ours. A new book by a fertility expert—who also happens to be a lesbian mom herself—is just the book we would have hoped to have.
It’s Children’s Book Week, an annual celebration of books for children and teens that launched in 1919. Not only is 2019 a milestone anniversary for that event, however; it’s also a milestone anniversary year for queer-inclusive children’s books, too: ones for teens have been around since 1969; picture books since 1979. Let’s mark the occasion with a look at some of the LGBTQ children’s books published so far in 2019.
A trailer for the upcoming Addams Family movie starts with images of what an “average American family” can look like—including ones with two moms and two dads. “Every family is different,” the voiceover says. “But some families are more different than others,” it concludes, as the images change to show the Addams.
