‘Advocating and Celebrating the Abomination of Sodomy’: The Cultural Reception of Lesbian and Gay Picturebooks

Abstract

Reactions to lesbian and gay picture books range from fatuous public statements made by Australian politicians about school readers featuring a girl with two mums, through to current court cases over the use of the picture book 'King and King' (de Haan & Nijland 2000) in Boston classrooms (Barrett 2006). In the case of Susanne Bosche's 'Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin' (1983), the book was used in government debate in London to justify the introduction of Section 28, a controversial piece of legislation which forbade the promotion of 'homosexuality as a pretended family relationship' (Local Government Act 1988). On the whole, these reactions have little to do with picture books. Controversies about these texts are really about much bigger social questions, such as childhood 'innocence', constructions of sexuality, paedophilia, conversion and the dissolution of the family. These simmering anxieties erupt into moral panics when the culturally sacred and/or unspeakable categories of childhood and non-normative sexualities come into contact. In this paper I will examine reactions to a range of texts, and track the similarities between the media reaction and the contents of the picture books themselves, and the ways that these react to and feed off each other. I will discuss some of the recurring topics of this circular relationship and consider some of the problems caused by circling these topics. For this paper I will define lesbian and gay picture books as fiction for children which addresses sexualities other than heterosexuality, primarily picture books about children with same sex parents, such as 'Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin' (Bosche 1983). Although 'cultural reception' can be expanded to include a wide range of phenomena, for the purposes of this paper I will be relying mainly on newspaper articles addressing panics over these texts, with some forays into cyberspace and archives of parliamentary debate.