Cake Wrecks currently tops my list of humor blogs. If I am ever lacking a smile, I know I can find one over there. While six days a week the blog focuses on decorating disasters of various flavors, Sundays are reserved for truly beautiful, amazing cakes.
This Sunday, the theme is cakes inspired by children's books. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Where the Wild Things Are, Good Night, Moon... My favorite, however, is this one inspired by The Poky Little Puppy:
Yes, I'd like that sweet little puppy to go roly-poly, pell-mell, tumble-bumble into my mouth, please... when I'm finished admiring all the clever details.
My own mother was quite the cake decorator back in the day, and my first two birthday cakes were both inspired by children's books, too. I don't seem to have a photo of the Jemima Puddle-Duck cake, but here's Raggedy Ann and me on my first birthday:
Last night, the Lambda Literary Awards were announced. The winner for the children's/YA category is Out of the Pocket, by Bill Konigsberg.
Out of the Pocket is a pretty straight-ahead (so to speak) coming out story but effectively in tune with the times. At the beginning of the novel, high school football star Bobby knows he's gay but is terrified that coming out would mean the end of his sports career. (How many out American athletes—much less football players—can you name?) Bobby's tired of keeping his secret, though, and begins the process of coming out to a few confidantes. But when his trust is betrayed, Bobby is suddenly a sensation in sports media, but not for the reasons he would have hoped.
What makes Out of the Pocket a coming out story for the latter Aughts is the focus on the process of coming out to other people, as opposed to self. Moreover, while reactions to Bobby's revelation are varied, Bobby ultimately finds more acceptance (some of it realistically grudging, as from his coach) than adversity. Over all, it's an engaging and optimistic story carrying the message that yes, you can come out and not get tarred and feathered, get killed in a car crash, or commit suicide.
I haven't read all the finalists, but any of those I have would have been solid choices. So, congratulations to Bill Konigsberg and, once again, to all the other shortlisted authors!
Speaking of optimistic coming out stories, I was recently commiserating with my blogger pal Rie (Girls. Books. Food. Art. Love) about how much the climate for queer teens has changed in just the past 10 to 15 years. Rie brought up the trend in early queer teen literature for gay and lesbian characters to meet tragic ends. Meanwhile, I was having trouble remembering how many queer teen books I even had access to; I could only think of a handful. Had there really been so few?
Thank goodness I kept a book log in high school—and kept it filed away all these years. (I still have all those excruciating journals from those years, too. What of it?) When I began my coming out process in 1993, I tried to get my hand on just about every queer book I could: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays. I did subject searches in the public and high school library catalogs. I combed the shelves of my local bookstore. In other words, I was looking so hard that if I didn't find it, I'm pretty sure it didn't exist.
So, what was there? Well, aside from a bunch of adult literature (gay novels by Edmund White, Christopher Bram, and Armistead Maupin; lesbian novels by Rita Mae Brown and Jeanette Winterson—whose Art and Lies I found so incomprehensible I never recovered from it to read others; nonfiction by Randy Shilts; plays by Larry Kramer, Terrence McNally, and Tony Kushner), not much. Here's what I discovered on my book log, for queer teen books published prior to 1993:
- Sticks and Stones, by Lynn Hall (in which a gay character DIES)
- The Man Without a Face, by Isabelle Holland (in which a gay character DIES)
- Trying Hard to Hear You, by Sandra Scoppettone (in which a gay character DIES)
- Happy Endings Are All Alike, by Sandra Scoppettone (in which a gay character is RAPED)
- Annie on My MInd, by Nancy Garden (in which, unlike the above, there actually IS a happy ending, OMG.)
It's worth mentioning that I didn't encounter Annie on My Mind until late 1995, when I started going to a local queer youth group (this was pre-GSA in my hometown). They kept a Styrofoam cooler full of resources: The Rainbow Gayme, Ivan Velez's Tales of the Closet comic book series, some coming out guides, and a handful of novels with actual happy endings. (Happily, by the time I dropped in for a visit during the summer of 1997, they'd outgrown the cooler.)
In 1994 and 1995, another handful of queer teen books became available—though due to limited availability at the public library (and jack at my school library), I didn't get my hands on most of these until two years after I'd begun to question myself—two years after I needed them so badly. Here's the rest of what I got before I went to college:
- The Cat Came Back, by Hillary Mullins
- Not the Only One, edited by Tony Grima
- Dive, by Stacey Donovan
- Deliver Us from Evie, by M. E. Kerr
- Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence, edited by Marion Dane Bauer (which I read piece-meal at the book store, sneaking a few pages here and there when I thought no one was looking)
If there were others, I couldn't find them. I've looked at the Lambda Literary Foundation children's/YA award lists from those years. There were indeed queer books for kids and teens being published. But most of them I've never heard of. They came from small publishers. They may never have gotten reviewed by reputable library journals. They probably weren't making it into libraries and mainstream bookstores. And if they were, maybe the subject headings were so cruddy they were still impossible to find.
I know I had way more literature available to me than teens coming out five, ten, twenty, or more years before me. But it wasn't enough of the right stuff at the right time. I'm so very glad the teens coming out five, ten, fifteen years after me have so much more available to them, much of it available in their local and school libraries, despite ongoing censorship challenges.
And yet, I still think we need more. More books published. More variety of characters and experiences represented. More books making it onto library shelves, especially school library shelves. More and better access through cataloging and bibliographies. It's crucial to providing more information, more support, and more acceptance for queer teens today and in the future.
