H/Z: Why Lesléa Newman Makes Heather into Zoe

Abstract

H/Z:Why Lesléa Newman Makes Heather into Zoe Elizabeth A. Ford (bio) "Few changes in American mores over the past 50 years have been as dramatic or as salutary as the nation's increased acceptance of homosexuals." —Phillip Lopate, 1997. Consider Lopate's assertion as you read these three fragments trapped in the time capsule of a hot month in a recent summer: 20 August 1995: Denis Donoghue concludes his review of Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality with a personal comment. He says that his interest in Andrew Sullivan's work, which assesses the current politics of homosexuality, is catalyzed by his affection for his lesbian daughter, "the writer Emma Donoghue," whose homosexuality "does not darken [his] love for her, or qualify the joy [he] takes in her personality, her immense gifts" (26).1 The opening sentence of that paragraph slightly diminishes the power of his declaration: "I am not, in my own person," Donoghue makes clear, "directly caught in this dispute" (26). 25 August 1995: A shopping trip to a split-down-the-middle Carter's outlet leaves me bemused. Although department stores have always separated boys' apparel from girls', surely baby clothing has never been so irrevocably divided, so aggressively gendered. Marooned between two poles of certainty, the layette counter offers the only gender-neutral option, bland infant garments sporting amorphous patterns (not flower shapes, but not airplanes either).2 I imagine the Carter's design team heaving sighs of relief and trashing these insincere either/or ensembles, now that almost all prospective parents choose to know their babies' gender. The word layette (way too feminine) will vanish. 27 August 1995: A pretty little girl grins fetchingly from the Children's Books page of the New York Times Book Review. Catherine Stock's frontispiece accompanies Roger Sutton's review of Too Far Away to Touch, by Lesléa Newman.3 Stock's watercolor still-life shows a gold-framed photo of two faces: a smiling blonde child, eyes closed, being hugged by a tousle-haired young man whose own closed eyes are slightly shadowed. Dark background tones in this illustration foreshadow the content of Newman's text, in which the child tells about her visits with a favorite uncle, who, Sutton explains, is dying of AIDS. The descriptive phrase that Sutton applies to Newman's text could also refer to the watercolor—"poignant, but not sticky." His generally positive review of Newman's book and a similar picture book by Judith Vigna concludes with a contemplative paragraph about purpose: "What are these books for?" he asks. "Will children want to read them or hear them again?" (27). These salvaged fragments may sound like gleanings from an Internet search generated by the terms gay/lesbian, children, literature, and clothing. But I hope to reveal the codes—Barthian and other—that connect these fragments and to use them to explore a central, unspoken anxiety that haunts the conjunction of gay/lesbian issues and children's literature. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls "the experience and identity of gay or proto-gay children" a "fraught space of life-or-death struggle that has been more or less abandoned by constructivist gay theory" (42). Books that present gay or lesbian themes to children may be seen as opening up that "fraught space" to their readers. Ultimately, it is the fear of what children might learn about their own sexual identities, not about the sexuality of adults around them, that makes these books controversial. "Unsubtle, overly didactic" Authors who chose gay themes and who write for children must also choose whether or not to be commercially viable. Those who want to sell books must learn, as Newman seems to have learned, to maintain a "safe" distance between child and gay adult characters. More like a wall than a comfort zone, distance problematizes the treatment of gay themes in children's literature and may keep the genre from reflecting the growing cultural acceptance that Lopate identifies as a contemporary reality. Writers who hope to promote cultural acceptance would be unusual if they did not hope for readers and sales as well. The New York Times Book Review, itself a commodity, affects the transaction...