Response: "Epistemology of the Closet"

I wanted to re-read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "Epistemology of the Closet" before delving into more queer kids books because I think one thing that characterizes kids books in general - and ones on queer topics in particular - is the omission of content. This is partly out of pedagogical necessity, one assumes: a calculus textbook will be no use to someone who hasn't yet learnt arithmetic. But this is also done as a way to maintain (perhaps I should instead say "to produce") a childhood innocence.

Representations of queer folks in books for young children are caught somewhere between explanatory revelation and tactful withholding: sexuality is the topic, even though discussions of sex and sexuality are somewhat taboo in works for children. For all the tales that end with happy weddings of princes and princesses, none of them take the time to address what heterosexuality is. But now we have a set of books for kids that do address what homosexuality is, and I'm interested in investigating how that's been done.

Thus: Sedgwick. In her analysis of the biblical story of Esther, she proposes seven ways in which Esther's coming out as a Jew differs from a gay or lesbian coming out. By way of a quick summary, these are:

1. "...there is no suggestion that [her Jewish] identity might be a debatable, a porous, a mutable fact about her." That is, no one asks if her Jewishness is "just a phase."
2. "Esther expects Assuérus to be altogether surprised by her self-disclosure; and he is." She has control over others' knowledge of her identity.
3. "Esther worries that her revelation might destroy her or fail to help her people, but it does not seem to her likely to damage Assuérus, and it does not indeed damage him." The gay closet, however, is transmissible in that by outing oneself one puts others in a position of managing this nebulous knowledge.
4. "...Assuérus seems to have no definitional involvement with the religious/ethnic identity of Esther." A gay coming-out, though, has implications for the "erotic identity" of the person who receives the disclosure, because erotic identity is never not relational.
5. "There is no suggestion that Assuérus might himself be a Jew in disguise." This seems quite tied to #4 above: the receivers of such disclosures could themselves be in closets!
6. "Esther knows who her people are and has an immediate answerability to them." Gay people have no "intact" "identity and history" from which they emerge, to which they are responsible, by which they are legitimated.
7. "Esther's avowal occurs within and perpetuates a coherent system of gender subordination." Queer identities have a (necessarily?) unstable relation to "minority" and "gender." Esther's coming out provides an opportunity for a patriarchal continuity, which queer comings-out would likely rupture.                                                                             

Sedgwick articulates an economy of knowledge in which all people participate, projecting ideas about sexuality on those with whom we interact. And she goes on to show how the dynamic, reciprocally definitional closet is bound up with our several overlapping and contradictory categories of sexuality. What you know and how you know it are intertwined with ideas not only of queer "identity" but also of queer "acts."

Can we read picture books with overtly gay and/or lesbian characters as acts of coming out? What about picture books with implicitly queer characters: are these books in a kind of closet, or do they rely on a kind of open secret shared between the author and illustrator and the (child) reader? How do these books fit into Sedgwick's coming-out schema? Can we discern whether these titles propose "minoritizing" or "universalizing" categories of gay and lesbian sexuality? These are the kinds of questions I'm hoping to dig into as I continue my reading this term.

Article: Joey Comeau and The Bravest Warriors

Toronto writer creates space teen comic series with a twist

Follow the link to read my Xtra! article about Joey Comeau's The Bravest Warriors comics!

Response: The Nightingale and the Rose

'She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses,' cried the young student, 'but in all my garden there is no red rose.'

Thus begins Oscar Wilde's fairy tale The Nightingale and the Rose, the ridiculous yet sad story of an oblivious lover and the too-earnest bird who helps him. As I mentioned in my response to The Happy Prince, despite Wilde's gay iconicity, it's not necessarily clear at first pass the ways in which his fairy tales might be read as queer. But in this one, there's an interesting tension between what seems to be a satire - or at least a pointed critique - of romantic love, and a valorization of the same, and I think this tension is a good thing to look at in order to see a how The Nightingale and the Rose might be read queerly.

In The Happy Prince, Wilde shows pairs of characters in a variety of relationships: familial, romantic, friendly. And the ones that are the most successful and laudable in that story are the male-male relationships (or the relationship between a man and his Art). One of the negatively portrayed hetero relationships in that story is that of the girl at the palace and her lover. The beloved in The Nightingale and the Rose seems to be almost a reprise of this palace girl (though this girl doesn't actually live in the palace, it's at a ball given by a prince that they might woo, and both girls are terribly oblivious, insensitive people). But unlike in The Happy Prince, in The Nightingale and the Rose Wilde has not created a city of twosomes so that we can see a broad schema of the value he ascribes to various relationships. Instead, we have a chain of relationships all differently problematized: girl/young student - young student/nightingale - nightingale/rose. And all of these are opposite-sex.

It's unconvincing, then, to suggest that the presentation of the relationship between the young student and his beloved is a critique of hetero love in this story. If it's a critique of love, it seems to be a critique of all loves.

I've been reading this book How to Be Gay by David Halperin. I'm only half-way through so far, and I'm not sure how convincing his arguments will turn out for me. That said, he has a lot of interesting and really smart things to say. His book is about gayness as a cultural practice: he is interrogating the stuff of (white, anglophone) gay culture, and asking why, even post-Stonewall, (white, anglophone) gay male culture continues to include divas and interior design. Of course Wilde's oeuvre is canonical - foundational, even - for the culture Halperin is investigating. How to Be Gay will likely merit its own post on this blog at some point, but in the meanwhile I think some of his ideas about melodrama and camp might be useful in reading The Nightingale and the Rose. I'm not sure that Wilde's story would exactly fit into Halperin's definition of melodrama or camp. But The Nightingale and the Rose does share a major similarity to these two modes in its "simultaneous coincidence of passionate investment and alienated bemusement, so typical of gay male culture."

There's nothing good to say about the relationship of the girl and the young student: both are contemptible people, and though we don't exactly wish for his rejection at the end of the story, we certainly aren't surprised that the lover has mis-estimated the situation. There's a mis-estimation on the part of the nightingale as well, of course: she thinks that the young student's love is worth the sacrifice of her life. But she acts out of generosity, and we are on her side.

We relate, and we do not relate. We are better than, we are not as good as, we are just the same. If we asked Halperin, I think he'd say that the gayness of this story inheres in the tension between the involvement and the detachment that the story demands of its readers.

Though there's clearly much more to say on these matters, and though I've left the titular relationship of the nightingale to the rose almost completely out of the discussion, I'm going to wrap up this post and move on to The Selfish Giant, but I suspect some of these ideas will bear coming back to. In the meanwhile, I'm going to offer two passages from How to Be Gay that I will be keeping in mind as I continue to read Wilde.

It is camp's alienated queer perspective on socially authorized values that reveals Being to be a performance of being ("Being-as-Playing-a-Role") and that enables us to see identities as compelling acts of social theatre, instead of as essences. [...] By refusing to accept social identities as natural kinds of being, as objective descriptions of who you are, and by exposing them, instead, as performative roles, and thus as inauthentic, stigmatized groups achieve some leverage against the disqualifications attached to those identities. By putting everything in quotation marks, especially anything "serious" - and thereby opening a crucial gap between actor and role, between identity and essence - camp irony makes it possible to get some distance on "your" self, on the "self" that society has affixed to you as your authentic nature, as your very being. [...] Converting serious social meanings into trivial ones is not only an anti-social aesthetic practice, then. It is also the foundation of a political strategy of social contestation and defiance.

...and...

But to derealize dominant heterosexual or heteronormative social roles and meanings, to disrupt their unquestioning claims to seriousness and authenticity, is not to do away with them or to make their power disappear. It is to achieve a certain degree of leverage in relation to them, while also acknowledging their continuing ability to dictate the terms of our social existence. That explains why gay male culture has evolved an elusive cultural practice and mode of perception, known as camp, which involves not taking seriously, literally, or unironically the very things that matter most and cause the most pain. It also explains why gay male culture encourages us to laugh at situations...that are horrifying or tragic. Just as camp works to puncture the unironic worship of beauty whose power it cannot rival or displace, so gay male culture struggles to suspend the pain of losses that it does not cease to grieve. 

Queer Books for Kids: Book List

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this blog has come about in part because of a project I'm doing at school. I thought I'd post the project description and book list for your perusal, and I'd love any suggestions people have for other titles to include! Here it is:

Project description: 

For this project, I will read picture-books and novels written for children which offer representations of homosexuality and queerness, both overt and coded. In order to provide myself a theoretical framework, I will also read a small selection of relevant queer theory and critical works.

I will consider the ways in which these texts engage not only gender and sexuality, but also identity politics, intersectionality, normativity, and the closet. I will explore the ways in which these representations vary not only from work to work and medium to medium (picture-book, novel, graphic novel) but also when representing child or adult characters, and when intended for very young or for middle-grade readerships.  

WEEK 1 – kings and queens

• Oscar Wilde: Fairy Tales                                                                          
• Oscar Wilde, adapted into comics by P Craig Russell: Fairy Tales
• Brière-Haquet: La princesse qui n’aimait pas les princes                            
• Nijland: the King and King series                                                        
• Cornelia Funke: Princess Knight                                                                 

WEEK 2 – euphemisms and implications

• Eve Sedgwick: “The Epistemology of the Closet”                           
• Carson Kressley: You're Different and That's Super                           
• Ashley Spires: Small Saul                                                                          
• Rachel Vail: Piggy Bunny                                                                     
• Lesléa Newman: The Boy Who Cried Fabulous                                    
• Harvey Fierstein: The Sissy Duckling                                                           
• Tomie dePaola: Oliver Button Is a Sissy                                                  

WEEK 3 – the queerness around us

• Godon: Hello, Sailor                                                                     
• Richardson: And Tango Makes Three                                              
• Scotto: Jérôme par coeur                                                            
• Lesléa Newman: Gloria Goes to Gay Pride                                          

WEEK 4 – queer families, week 1

• Ford: “Why Lesléa Newman Makes Heather into Zoe”             
• Todd Parr: selected picture books                                                 
• Lesléa Newman: selected picture books                                                
• Combes: A B C: A Family Alphabet Book                                   

WEEK 5 – queer families, week 2

• Patricia Polacco: In Our Mothers’ House                                                
• Ken Setterington: Mom and Mum Are Getting Married!                 
• Elwin: Asha’s Mums                                                                     
• Brannen: Uncle Bobby’s Wedding                                               
• Cory Silverberg: What Makes a Baby                                                      
• Garden: Molly’s Family                                                                 
• Willhoite: Daddy’s Roommate                                                      

WEEK 6 – gender independence

• Zolotow: William’s Doll                                                                    
• Ewert: 10,000 Dresses                                                                  
• Kilodavis: My Princess Boy                                                             
• Gould: X: a fabulous child’s story                                          
• Hughes: No Girls Allowed                                                              
• David Walliams: The Boy in the Dress                                                   

WEEK 7 – Baum & Barrie

• Pugh: "There lived in the Land of Oz..."                              
• Lauren Berlant: “Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material).” 
• L Frank Baum: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
• James M Barrie: Peter Pan

WEEK 8 – Louise Fitzhugh

• Louise Fitzhugh: Harriet the Spy                                                                
• Louise Fitzhugh: Nobody’s Family is Going to Change                       
• Bernstein: “The Queerness of Harriet the Spy”                        

WEEK 9 – contemporary queer kids’ novels, week 1

• James Howe: The Misfits                                                                       
• James Howe: Totally Joe                                                                           
• Tim Federle: Better Nate Than Ever                                                 

WEEK 10 – contemporary queer kids’ novels, week 2

• Glen Huser: Stitches
• E L Konigsburg: Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World                    
• Robinson: “Lovebugs and Queer Boys in E. L. Konigsburg’s...”       

WEEK 11 – contemporary queer kids’ novels, week 3    

• McCaughrean: The Death-Defying Pepper Roux                             
• Gennari: My Mixed-up Berry-Blue Summer                           

WEEK 12 – queer comics for kids

• Raina Telgemeier: Drama
• Ryan North: Adventure Time
• Joey Comeau: Bravest Warriors                                                             

In theory, you should be able to expect a reading response-type post on each of these works from me by Christmas!               

Response: The Happy Prince

First on my list for queer kids literature to read for school are Oscar Wilde's fairy tales. I'll post my entire reading list up soon, perhaps, but suffice it to say that I wanted to start with a few works like this that were older, and then work my way to the present. And Wilde's works for adults are so clearly gay, and yet so coded, that I thought perhaps his stories for children would offer a similar experience.

I think I had read these stories as a teenager, but if that's the case, The Happy Prince is the only one that stuck with me. I read them all through once this week, and was left puzzled. They were not as fun or juicy as The Picture of Dorian Gray or The Importance of Being Earnest. They seem neither decadent nor homosexual. And there was more Christianity in them than I had expected to find. But I let them bat around in my head for a day or two, and then re-read The Happy Prince to see if anything would emerge on a second pass that had eluded me. And something did emerge.

First, some broad strokes. The Happy Prince is the story of a prince and a male swallow, who start off merely friendly, but eventually end up as a couple, acknowledged by God. The swallow seems to be attracted to the prince out of pity, in the beginning, and it is only the swallow's goodness, or duty, perhaps, that makes him stay with the prince. But by the time the prince is blind, their lives and philanthropy have intertwined so much that they are now clearly in love. The swallow is so in love with the prince that he will not save his own life by leaving for warmer climes, and so he dies, and the prince's heart breaks in two. In their last moments together, the swallow dares to ask to kiss the prince's hand, but that would be insufficient expression of their relationship: "...you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you" the prince insists.

Illustration by Walter Crane

There are plenty of details in the story that enrich the vague relationship of the swallow and the prince. We are given details of the swallow's romantic history that are telling: not only has he failed at heterosexual love, but his choice of opposite-sex romantic object is absurdly inappropriate. She is a reed, and her flaws include being a "coquette" and being too "domestic": qualities traditionally seen as feminine. It is after this failed relationship that the swallow encounters the prince.

The prince stands on a "tall column," "beautiful as a weathercock," the pommel of his sword tipped with a "large red ruby." If the swallow's reed was phallic (her "slender" form attracted him), despite her feminine flaws, the prince on his column is all the more so. Is it worth pointing out that swallow is also a verb...? I don't think we can get too too far on naughty puns and phallic symbols alone, but they are one level at which we can approach the text, and if that interacts with some of the other levels, how can we resist!

A quick survey of the relationships presented in the story is telling, too. These are:

• the (vaguely homosexual) love of the swallow and the prince
• the (defective, unrequited, heterosexual) love of the swallow for the reed
• the seamstress and her sick son
• the matchgirl and her mean father
• the playwright and his play
• the two poor boys, who lie "in one another's arms to try and keep themselves warm"
• the girl and her lover in the palace.

There are only two heterosexual relationships here: the swallow and the reed and the palace girl and her lover. We've already covered the problems with the first of these. In the second, the palace girl is shown to be a horrible person when she calls the poor seamstress lazy. Both of the female partners here are objects of ridicule for the reader, in their own ways. And so all of the heterosexual relationships in the world of this story are not only flawed, but flawed on account of the women in them. Meanwhile, we see a man - romantic with his "pomegranate" lips and "dreamy eyes" in his garret, living alone for his art - and the put-upon poor boys who just want to keep warm in each other's arms, like gay urchin-cherubs. And the transcendent relation between the prince and the swallow. So it seems that, at least in The Happy Prince, men do best without women. (It's interesting that we get one good and one bad opposite-sex familial relationship, too. I'm not sure exactly how to read that, except as a zero-sum.)

There are plenty of things to be said about wealth and poverty in this story, and I think these do intersect with the gender and sexuality issues Wilde presents. At the same time as his relationship with the swallow occurs, the prince also goes from happy and golden to sad and leaden (and broken). But for now I think I'll leave things here; perhaps I will be able to engage some of that aspect when I read the Russell adaptation. In the meantime I'm going to work through the rest of Wilde's fairy tales and see what else I can see!

Review: Openly Straight

Adolescent about-face

Follow the link to read my review of Bill Konigsberg's new teen novel, Openly Straight.

Starting a blog!

Hello, and welcome to the Queer Books for Kids blog!

I'm starting this blog for a couple of reasons. First, I'd like to get back in the habit of blogging. Before twitter, and perhaps even before I was really on facebook, I started the dixitque andreus blog as an online outlet for my political rants and arty musings. I didn't ever find a consistent tone, though. The fact that that blog didn't have a topic or a theme probably didn't help things, and of course eventually the various social networks took over much of the function of that blog, and I got out of the habit entirely. But I still think there's a great value to sitting down and composing a solid 300, 600, 1200 words on a topic that has caught one's attention. That's the habit I'd like to cultivate here. So that's reason number one.

Reason number two is a complicated confluence of the personal, professional and academic. Yes, as a gay man who is both a children's book-seller and a literature student, it's obvious that I would be interested in gay books for kids and books for gay kids. Lately I've been working on focusing my interest, experience and expertise by reviewing books more often (sometimes for Broken Pencil, more recently for Xtra!). And I'm just starting a project at school where I'll be reading through as many queer kids books as possible between now and December. I'm taking this as a felicitous opportunity to put some thoughts, reflections and reviews on the internet with some frequency. The idea is that my school project will help to build my blogging habit, and I'll keep writing about gender and sexuality in kids books for ever and ever! It's going to be great!

For school, I'll be looking at the ways in which queerness is represented in kids books, and reading some relevant queer theory to go along with that. I'm going to be posting up my responses to these readings, and the tone will be informal but the posts will be focused on my academic concerns. But I will also be putting up more general-interest posts, too, and I hope that the result will be engaging.

Thanks very much for reading. I hope you enjoy my new blog!