(Tomie dePaola, at 84 the only one living, still is.) This observation comes with caveats, of course. It’s also that all of their authors were gay. Nor is it just their hushed contemplation of aloneness and connection that links them. These books are connected not merely by having found favor in our family - and probably yours in various configurations and collections, “Frog and Toad” still sells more than 500,000 copies a year. Also still extant is “ The Runaway Bunny” (1942) by Margaret Wise Brown her “ Goodnight Moon” (1947) would be there, too, if it hadn’t long since disintegrated, from overuse, into a pile of dark green dust.
Among the foxed hardbacks still standing sentry in my sons’ abandoned childhood bedroom are “ The Gashlycrumb Tinies” by Edward Gorey (1963), “ Strega Nona” by Tomie dePaola (1975), the “ George and Martha” series by James Marshall (1972 to 1988) and several by Maurice Sendak, including “ Where the Wild Things Are” (1963) and “ In the Night Kitchen” (1970). What did surprise me, as I recently began to look back at the classics I loved most as a child in the 1960s and as a father in the 1990s, is that Lobel was not an outlier. However coded the books’ gay content, it was no surprise once decoded. Nor did Lobel neglect to show how much work it takes to achieve those victories, and how tenuous they can be he died, in 1987, of complications from AIDS.
They suggested, no less to us as gay parents than to our sons with their polar personalities, how separateness could become solidarity and oddness accommodation. But in their gentleness, their sensitivity to small gestures and their haze of slowly dispersing sadness, the stories were part of the literature of otherness that had been a central theme of adult fiction forever, if only more recently of children’s. Which is not to say Frog and Toad could turn you gay. I will be lonely!” in a heartsick, croaky voice, could avoid being forced into intimate sympathy with the animal and thus the author. I don’t know how any parent, reading the stories aloud, uttering phrases like “Come back, Frog. Still, Lobel’s gayness, when I learned of it much later, seemed like something I should have known all along it lurked everywhere in his words and pictures. They get into scrapes separately but get out of them together, which is not a bad definition of marriage. Instead of innate animal passion, they model the elements of love that have to be discovered and cultivated: companionship, compromise, acceptance, good humor. They sleep apart, and Toad even dons a modest Edwardian bathing suit when he swims. They wear tight pants, collarless jackets and no shirts: outfits that would surely look great on the hunky fireman.īut Lobel is careful to make Frog and Toad entirely nonsexual. Frog, sleeker and greener, is an ameliorator. The title characters are best friends, both male, who essentially spend their lives together. Among gay-themed children’s stories, they preferred “Frog and Toad.” No, I know: “Frog and Toad” - a series of four picture books by Arnold Lobel, originally published between 19 - is not gay-themed.
(So did the name of a town en route to the country: Peckerwood.) And if you stopped to think about it, “Lucy” seemed to argue that the gay dads, however full of fun, were inadequate: When the pita chips were down, they needed rescuing, too. “The Hunky Fireman” would be a fine title for a very different kind of picture book, but his presence in this one made me wonder about the intended readership.
But the plot rang no bells for us as it built to its crisis: When the “big guys” give a party for colorful friends at their weekend house, a beehive ends up in the baba ghanouj, Lucy winds up in a tree and a hunky fireman comes to the rescue. The book, then just published, was evidently meant to help normalize already boringly normal families like ours by using the traditional substitution of animals for people in order to illustrate how much fun having gay dads can be. IN 1998, WHEN my sons were still too young to read by themselves, my partner and I gave them a picture book called “ Lucy Goes to the Country.” It’s about a cat who lives with two gay men you can tell by the tchotchkes. Updated, 4/1/20: We’re revisiting this feature, originally published last year, following the death of Tomie dePaola, the author and illustrator of “Strega Nona,” on Monday at 85.