Just days after we learned of yet another pair of same-sex penguin dads, comes the news that the Austin Independent School District in Texas has cancelled the performances at local elementary schools of “And Then Came Tango,” a play based on the real-life story of two male penguins who parented together.
I’m having a feeling of déjà vu. Four years ago, I was waiting to see if Barack Obama would be elected president; waiting to see the outcome of a ballot measure in California that would decide the legality of marriage equality in that state; and baffled that a patron of a Colorado library had asked for the removal or reshelving of the children’s picture book Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, claiming it was “inappropriate for children” because it showed two anthropomorphic male guinea pigs getting married.
Since we’re talking more than usual about books this week (it being Banned Books Week), I wanted to expand the conversation beyond just LGBT-inclusive children’s books, and point out some very good posts about racial and ethnic diversity in children’s books—specifically related to the covers of such books. It’s easy to quote the proverbial lesson about books and covers, but the reality is a bit more complex.
This week marks the 30th anniversary of Banned Books Week, bringing issues of LGBT content in children’s books once again to the fore.
It’s Banned Books Week, the annual celebration of the freedom to read! In honor of the event, here’s a video of gay dads Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, authors of And Tango Makes Three, reading from their book, which for several years topped the American Library Association’s list of most challenged books.
Books matter. “Children feel unimportant and invisible when they do not see representations of their lives and families in books,” asserts librarian Jamie Campbell Naidoo. He knows this firsthand. Growing up in the Bible Belt in the early 1980s, he says, there were no books that “mirrored my life and the lives of other queer children.” If there had been, he says, he “I would not have felt so alienated and ashamed of being different.” His classmates, too, might have understood his queerness was not strange. Such books, however, were not to be found.
Fast forward to today and Dr. Naidoo, now an assistant professor of library and information studies at the University of Alabama, has written a book of his own to help guide librarians, parents, teachers, and others seeking LGBT-inclusive titles.
Author Todd Parr has responded with the video below (after the jump) to the banning of his The Family Book by an Illinois school board. They banned the book after some parents complained about a page that says, “Some families have two moms or two dads.” Todd Parr is awesome.
Acclaimed children’s author Maurice Sendak died yesterday at the age of 83. I love his books, both the words and the pictures, and their exploration of “the darker side of childhood,” as NPR puts it. Darker, yes, but never bleak or hopeless.
Lesléa Newman is best known as the author of the first children’s book to feature LGBT parents, Heather Has Two Mommies, as well as other LGBT-inclusive picture books, such as Mommy, Mama, and Me; Daddy, Papa, and Me; and Donovan’s Big Day. The prolific author’s latest book, A Sweet Passover, does not feature an LGBT family, but is nonetheless a charming tale worthy of consideration by readers here.
Adrienne Rich was a mother, a lesbian, and one of our country’s foremost poets and writers. Today comes the news that she has died at the age of 82. Below is one of my favorite quotes from her works, about invisibility and diversity.
