The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books

Jennifer Miller

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781496839992
• eBook ISBN: 9781496840011
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

2023 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title In The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books, Jennifer Miller identifies an archive of over 150 English-language children's picture books that explicitly represent LGBTQ+ identities, expressions, and issues. This archive is then analyzed to explore the evolution of LGBTQ+ characters and content from the 1970s to the present. Miller describes dominant tropes that emerge in the field to analyze historical shifts in representational practices, which she suggests parallel larger sociocultural shifts in the visibility of LGBTQ+ identities. Additionally, Miller considers material constraints and possibilities affecting the production, distribution, and consumption of LGBTQ+ children's picture books from the 1970s to the present. This foundational work defines the field of LGBTQ+ children's picture books thoroughly, yet accessibly.In addition to laying the groundwork for further research, The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books presents a reading lens, critical optimism, used to analyze the transformative potential of LGBTQ+ children's picture books. Many texts remain attached to heteronormative family forms and raced and classed models of success. However, by considering what these books put into the world, as well as problematic aspects of the world reproduced within them, Miller argues that LGBTQ+ children's picture books are an essential world-making project and seek to usher in a transformed world as well as a significant historical archive that reflects material and representational shifts in dominant and subcultural understandings of gender and sexuality.

Chapter One

What Can Picture Books Do?

The Politics of LGBTQ+ Children’s Literature

In November 2019, I attended the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) annual conference in San Francisco. Coincidentally, while waiting for a panel about children’s picture books to begin, I opened Makeda Zook and Sadie Epstein-Fine’s Spawning Generations: Rants and Reflections on Growing Up with LGBTQ+ Parents (2018), a book I had picked up earlier that day in the conference exhibit hall. I wasn’t expecting the collection of essays by children of LGBTQ+¹ parents to begin with a reflection on cultural representations, particularly children’s books, but to my surprise it did. In the book’s introduction, the editors lament the absence of families like theirs in children’s picture books while they were growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. They propose that the recent expansion of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books makes the “queerspawn” of LGBTQ+ parents feel “incrementally less scattered” (1). This indicates that children’s picture books can foster a sense of collective identity and help develop an imagined community by encouraging readers to understand their experiences as part of a larger story. Readers of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books, whether they are queer identifying themselves or are the cisgender, heterosexual children of queer parents, find their experiences affirmed in children’s culture that accounts for queer identities and experiences.

Having one’s queer experiences acknowledged and affirmed in the relentlessly and deliberately cisgender, straight world of children’s culture is politically significant, and it is an example of the transformative potential of LGBTQ+ literature. In other words, stories, like those found in LGBTQ+ children’s books, undertake essential sociocultural work. They make legible, and by extension knowable, what would otherwise hover below the surface of our collective consciousness. For instance, Stefan Lynch, the first director of Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere (COLAGE), a networking and support organization for children with LGBTQ+ parents that was founded in 1990, coined the term queerspawn (Epstein-Fine and Zook 5–6). For Epstein-Fine and Zook, the word serves as an anchor. They write that it “situates [queerspawn] within a political and personal landscape of community belonging” that can be important because of similar experiences of homophobia and transphobia as a result of the proximity to queerness the children of LGBTQ+ parents experience (5–6). In other words, although queerspawn may identify as cisgender and heterosexual, they are “queered” because of their love for gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender parents. Additionally, queerspawn may share affinity with queer cultures and communities because of growing up queerly. The importance of collective queer language and culture in encouraging modes of queer relationality and modeling queer possibilities is discussed throughout this book, which explores representations of living, learning, and loving queerly in LGBTQ+ children’s picture books.

This study introduces and builds the argument that LGBTQ+ children’s picture books have the potential to create imagined queer collectives that can have real consequences on experiences of community belonging and building as well as social and psychic transformation. Benedict Anderson introduced the term imagined community in his 1983 study of European nation-states and nation building, in which he conceives of the nation as an imagined community. According to Anderson, individuals identify with images depicted in cultural texts and imagine themselves as similar to others as a result of the shared culture and experience. This encourages identification and fellowship with a network of strangers (Anderson 6). I find this description of the imaginative work required to make and sustain a nation and identification with a nation quite compelling and think LGBTQ+ cultural texts can accomplish similar identification with an imagined collective. Even more, this initial imaginative work can have real effects on material worldmaking and community building. LGBTQ+ children’s picture books write the lives of LGBTQ+ persons so often omitted from cultural representation into the field of social and cultural visibility, enabling both collective identification and identity affirmation among those who may be quite isolated from others with similar experiences of gender and sexual identity. As a result, studying the types of representations written into intelligibility and types of collectives imagined is essential to understanding the transformative potential of LGBTQ+ children’s literature. What is imagined affects what is possible.

In addition to a worldmaking project, LGBTQ+ children’s picture books are a historical archive that elucidates what was thinkable and possible at different historical junctures. Writing in the late 1990s, Kenneth Kidd persuasively argued that lesbian and gay young adult novels are a useful “index to changing attitudes toward homosexuality” (114). He noted that in studying young adult fiction, one could trace a shift away from representing homosexuality as a social problem and toward representing homophobia as a social problem (114). Creating an archive large enough to map content shifts in LGBTQ+ picture books similar to those described by Kidd within young adult literature was one of my central investments in researching and writing this book.

The politics of inclusive children’s picture books and the political work these texts can do have long been explored by scholars of multicultural children’s literature. For instance, Rudine Sims Bishop’s impactful 1990 essay “Windows, Mirrors, and Sliding Glass Doors” has served as a rallying cry for the multicultural literacy movement (Bishop). Bishop’s poetic opening asserts:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience.

For too long it has been difficult for queerspawn and queer children to see their “own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience” (Bishop). Instead, as Zook and Epstein-Fine assert, queerspawn and queer children have felt isolated in their experiences, unable to make connections and imagine community.

In addition to helping children see themselves as part of the human network who share experiences with other people, Bishop indicates that children’s literature can help us imagine ourselves and one another differently, because children’s books can both affirm the self and introduce us to others. This textual and aesthetic introduction to others is an essential component of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books’ transformative potential. These texts don’t only normalize lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans experiences. They also decenter the normalcy of cisgender heterosexuality. This decentering can help all readers see the straight world, often hidden by its own ubiquity, and critique its inadequacies. For instance, in many of the children’s picture books discussed here, the heterosexual family is revealed as insufficient, unable to meet the needs of the queer child. In other instances, cisgender heterosexuality is represented as drab. In these instances, queerness is envied even as its vilified, needed even as it is rejected.

Very recent LGBTQ+ children’s picture books are radically inclusive, boldly celebratory, and have no time for stigma or shame. These books show queerness taking up space in public spaces. This is particularly apparent in recently released children’s books that celebrate drag culture. For example, 2020 releases like Little Miss Hot Mess’s The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish, Ellie Royce’s Auntie-Uncle: Drag Queen Hero, Desmond Napoles’s Be Amazing: A History of Pride, Michelle Tea’s Tabitha and Magoo Dress Up Too, and RuPaul Charles, a board book biography from Little Bee Books’ People of Pride series, all introduce young readers to queer culture and gender play joyfully and unapologetically (Little Miss Hot Mess; Royce; Napoles; Tea; Little Bee Books). The partial, precarious, and still incomplete normalization of drag marks a shift in queer culture’s position in dominant culture; drag is moving toward the center of our cultural imaginary as family fun entertainment, and, I would suggest, shifts like this are transformative. It is essential to think like historians of the present in order to identify cracks in oppressive gender and sexual ideologies and make change as well as acknowledge when change is being made.

Although experts in literary studies, sociology, education, and library studies have created convincing, evidence-based scholarship about the importance of making LGBTQ+ children’s picture books accessible to young readers, recent studies demonstrate that teachers are not prepared, administrators are not willing, and community members frequently rally against attempts to include LGBTQ+ children’s literature in public school curriculums and on library bookshelves (Sears; Letts and Sears; Janmohamed; Hermann-Wilmarth and Ryan; Ryan and Hermann-Wilmarth, Reading the Rainbow; DePalma; Goodrich and Luke; Curwood et al.; Garry; Sanders and Mathis; Brand and Maasch; Dodge and Crutcher; Hyland; Swartz; K. Jiménez; Burke and Greenfield; K. Robinson). In fact, Laura B. Smolkin and Craig A. Young’s 2011 essay “Missing Mirrors, Missing Windows: Children’s Literature Textbooks and LGBT Topics,” which references Sims Bishop’s important work in its title, suggests that young readers are being “denied their rights” to LGBTQ+ children’s books by adults who see LGBTQ+ people and culture as “morally wrong and wish to obliterate high-quality books that portray the families and, therefore, the children of same-sex relationships” (217). Smolkin and Young’s study of children’s literature textbooks proves that few future teachers are introduced to LGBTQ+ content, which they attribute to “commonly held misconceptions about LGBT families and children,” including the idea that LGBTQ+ identities and experiences are not relevant, relatable, or appropriate for consumption by children (217). These “commonly held misconceptions” also include belief in the inferiority, indecency, and deviancy of homosexuality as well as the belief that children lack an understanding of gender and sexuality. The tension between the ever-growing field of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books available and the censorship controversies that often keep these texts out of the hands of children is explored throughout this book.

In 2015, Christian conservative “Jacqueline” wrote a popular tirade against LGBTQ+ children’s picture books on her blog Deep Roots at Home. Like many Christian conservatives, she is invested in reproducing hierarchal adult-child dynamics that position adults, especially parents, as protectors of children. This claim is used to make impassioned censorship arguments. Jacqueline writes: “Yep, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard about library books that promote the homosexual lifestyle for kids as young as kindergarten—but are you aware of the agenda to force in-depth sexuality and perverse lifestyles on your kids in public schools—and likely yours?” (Jacqueline). In the post, she references Lesléa Newman’s frequently contested Heather Has Two Mommies (1989) as a case in point and argues that books like this can “unlock” the minds of children. Jacqueline’s concern that children’s minds might be unlocked (a.k.a. opened) is quite revealing. She appears to recognize the pleasures of queerness and the likelihood that children will find queer content compelling. It’s not so much individual children she is concerned with, but instead children’s role in reproducing society, which she believes should replicate a narrow set of Christian ideals. In fact, she goes on to write: “A nation can be lost in one generation, and we are losing America now. The future depends upon what your kids are being taught now” (Jacqueline). Whereas Smolkin and Young suggest children’s rights are violated by excluding queer content from public school curriculum, Jacqueline’s claim hinges on parental rights, which she claims are violated if queer content is included in public school curriculum. Parents’ rights claims reify normative understandings of the adult-child relationship that demands adults protect vulnerable, malleable children. Importantly, LGBTQ+ children’s books often become legible to cisgender heterosexuals through panic narratives such as that performed by Jacqueline. This moralizing framework introduces LGBTQ+ children’s picture books as a problem to be solved through censorship, not as a possible solution to the problems of homophobia and transphobia.

In addition to rhetoric, policies, and practices driven by overt homophobia and transphobia, several scholars convincingly argue that dominant concepts of children and childhood make it difficult to build a compelling case for LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum even when explicit homophobia isn’t present. As a case in point, in “Doing Anti-Homophobia and Anti-Heterosexism in Early Childhood Education,” education scholar Kerry Robinson argues that “hegemonic discourses of childhood and sexuality … operate to render sexuality (especially non-heterosexuality) issues as ‘taboo’ and irrelevant to the lives of children.” In other words, ideologies of children and childhood warrant the cloak of silence that wraps around all things queer. Robinson explains that it is impossible to include LGBTQ+ content in curriculum without challenging these entrenched sociocultural norms about gender, sexuality, and adult-child relationships. Even more, she argues that LGBTQ+ representations “disrupt the inequitable discourses that operate to constitute sexuality as fixed within a naturalized hierarchical heterosexual/homosexual binarism, which normalizes heterosexuality and renders non-heterosexual relationships as deviant and abnormal” (K. Robinson 178). It is the disruptive potential of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books that I return to throughout this book, even when I recognize and lament attachments to white, middle-class ideals, even when I identify and critique hetero- and homonormativity. To paint a full picture of the cultural work LGBTQ+ children’s picture books do, it is essential to articulate the disruptive work their very existence accomplishes. Because of the stigmatization of queer gender and sexuality in children’s culture, a stigma currently being contested, I suggest that whatever else LGBTQ+ children’s books do, they also denaturalize the still present dominant notion that nonheterosexual relationships are deviant, abnormal, and unfit for children.

This is a significant point because LGBTQ+ children’s picture books have often been dismissed as homonormative, didactic, and antiqueer (Huskey; Lester; Taylor). In fact, the accusation of homonormativity has been central to scholarship production about LGBTQ+ children’s picture books, and, I suggest, it limits more productive and nuanced readings of these texts (Huskey; Taylor; Lester). Homonormativity is a term queer activists and scholars use to critique mainstream civil rights organizations’ assimilation tactics. Queer theorists who are skeptical of inclusion suggest that as privileged gays and lesbians gain increased acceptance into mainstream institutions, it is becoming possible to “forget” personal and collective histories based on shame, which hinders community building and justice-oriented activism. Privileged gays and lesbians are usually understood as white, middle class, and cisgender. Inclusion refers to access to social institutions, like marriage and the military, that have excluded LGBTQ+ individuals. Those who are skeptical of inclusion argue that the contingent acceptance and inclusion of some LGBTQ+ persons further stigmatizes others—for instance, BIPOC² and transgender individuals—who may not be able to, or may not want to, be included in social institutions that reproduce social hierarchies (Duggan, Twilight of Equality?; Duggan, “New Homonormativity”; Puar; Warner).

I agree that homonormativity stands in the way of transformative action. I also agree that most LGBTQ+ children’s picture books are homonormative. For instance, in a study of lesbian and gay children’s picture books, April M. Sanders and Janelle B. Mathis found that most of the texts analyzed construct lesbian- and gay-parented families as similar to heterosexual-parented families in all significant ways. They write: “The child in each of the books only demonstrates a happy and content disposition from having LGBT parents; the situation is presented as normal instead of an anomaly from heterosexual parenting” (Sanders and Mathis). My findings mirror those of Sanders and Mathis. I actually go further, suggesting that representations of gay and lesbian parenting in LGBTQ+ picture books often reify white, middle-class experiences and values, particularly by placing families in white suburbs and identifying gay and lesbian parents with middle-class occupations and consumption patterns. These markers are often visual—for instance represented by large homes, material possessions, and even mobility, such as the ability to go on vacations or participate in transnational adoptions. My readings of these texts link homonormativity to racialized class privilege. Additionally, my findings show that books with racially and ethnically diverse characters often take place in urban settings like apartment buildings and highlight public spaces in addition to the private space of the home. Far fewer in number, these books are also likely to thematize the normalcy of different family units, but they frequently represent difference more expansively to include single parents and extended family. At no point do I shy away from a critique of clearly present homonormativity; I just refuse to see it as the whole story, suggesting instead that even at their most homonormative, LGBTQ+ children’s picture books transform the field of cultural visibility simply by existing. Although representation is not enough, it is significant. I am equally committed to identifying and interpreting the transformative potential of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books and their collusion with hegemonic social ideologies.

It is true that almost all pre-2000 LGBTQ+ children’s picture books are about lesbian and gay adults parenting presumably cisgender, heterosexual children. It’s also true that in LGBTQ+ children’s picture books, gay- and lesbian-parented households have often been presented as a “problem” to be solved by normalizing the queer family unit, which is usually accomplished by downplaying queer difference and focusing on love as a common feature of all families. As a result, there is little internal complexity to these texts. But this is not the whole story. First, most early LGBTQ+ children’s literature was written for a small audience of LGB adults—most often parents—and their children. Additionally, most LGBTQ+ children’s picture books focused on gay and lesbian parents were written with the express purpose of providing children in lesbian- and gay-parented families representations of lives that looked, at least a little bit, like their own, in order to counter dominant cultural erasure or misrepresentation. Second, there are books that stray from the formula. Third, looking at the discourses surrounding these texts as well as the contexts that both enable and constrain them provides critical insights into the cultural work the field accomplishes as well as its transformative potential....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• (Anti-)Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: What Can Picture Books Do? The Politics of LGBTQ+ Children’s Literature
• Chapter Two: A Genealogy of LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books: The Early Years
• Chapter Three: Virtually Normal: Lesbian and Gay Grown-Ups in Children’s Picture Books
• Chapter Four: Beyond the Sissy Boy: Pink Boys and Tomboys
• Chapter Five: Queer Youth and Gender: Representing Transgender, Nonbinary, Gender-Creative, and Gender-Free Youth
• Chapter Six: Queer Youth and Sexuality: Camp Flamboyance, Queer Fabulousness, and Even a Little Same-Gender Desire
• Chapter Seven: Queer Histories: The Politics of Representing the Past
• Concluding Thoughts
• Appendix A: Jane Severance
• Appendix B: Daniel Haack
• Appendix C: Archive
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author