47. All Your Children's Books Are Belong To Us (Gays), Part 1
History is Gay
Leigh Pfeffer
4.6 • 536 Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2024
⏱️ 100 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode marks the return of History is Gay after hiatus, and we're excited to be back in your podfeeds diving into the fascinating world of classic children's literature through the lens of queer authors. Leigh is joined by wonderful guest co-host, Aubree Calvin, to explore the lives and works of several groundbreaking authors, revealing how their sexualities and personal experiences shaped the books we cherished as children.
In this first of a multi-part episode, we're focusing on four beloved authors whose works were some of our favorites: Tomie dePaola, most notable for our favorite Italian grandma Strega Nona, Margaret Wise Brown, the bisexual poet behind beloved picture books Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, Ann M. Martin, who introduced us to our friends in The Babysitters Club, and Arnold Lobel, the man behind the cozy shared lives of Frog and Toad.
This conversation doesn't end here; stay tuned as we will continue to explore more queer authors and their impact on the world of children's literature in the next episode, coming soon!
Outline
0:00 – Introduction
4:51 – Socio-Historical Context: History of queer children's literature
10:00 – Who Were They? Bio Time for some of your queer kid lit faves
1:00:15 – Why do we think they're gay?
1:15:57 – 1:16:03 – CONTENT WARNING: Mention of suicidal ideation
1:37:01 – Closing and Where to Find us Online
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, and welcome to History is Gay, a podcast that examines the underappreciated and overlooked |
| 0:05.8 | queer ladies, gents, and gentle NBs that have always been there in the unexplored corners of history, |
| 0:11.8 | because history has never been as straight as you think. |
| 0:42.7 | Yeah. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to History is Gay. I'm Lee Fever, your host, and I am joined today by our lovely guest co-host who always comes in clutch with the best topics to talk with me about Aubrey Calvin again. |
| 0:49.4 | Hello. |
| 0:50.4 | Hello. Thanks for having me back. That is like the nicest intro that I have to disagree with. But it's so good to be back. Yeah, no, it's really lovely. I, uh, this is a topic that I've been wanting to do for a while and you were super game for it. And well, yeah, because every time I've come on, I've had to talk politics. |
| 1:12.1 | And yeah, I teach politics and I kind of wanted a break from it. So I said, let's do my favorite |
| 1:18.4 | thing, books. Heck yeah. Yeah, so we're coming back from hiatus. I'm figuring out exactly |
| 1:24.4 | what things will look like for the next phase of history is gay, |
| 1:28.6 | but in the meantime, Aubrey and I are coming back with a couple of episodes on this topic, |
| 1:34.4 | because there are just so many people that we couldn't fit them all into one. |
| 1:38.7 | We are talking about classic children's literature that, surprise, surprise, all your favorites are queer. |
| 1:49.0 | So many classic kid lit is written by a bunch of gamos. So there you have it. We're going to be covering a small smorgasbord of authors today, and then in our next episode, we'll come back with some more. |
| 2:05.7 | So this episode will be a little bit different. |
| 2:08.2 | We're going to start the conversation, and then we will pick up in our next episode. |
| 2:13.2 | And, you know, we're doing classic ones because a lot of the authors we're looking at are from a time before social media was such a big deal, before we seemed to know every detail about everyone's lives. |
| 2:24.9 | And the authors kind of separated themselves and their personal lives from the books instead of nowadays where just about every publisher expects authors to go on Twitter or Instagram |
| 2:35.6 | to promote themselves and promote their books. |
| 2:38.2 | This is more of a different kind of format for how books used to be sold. |
| 2:42.2 | Yeah, definitely. |
| 2:43.1 | So it was easier for us not to know much about the authors, and I just kind of feel a little bit |
| 2:48.1 | nostalgic for that time period. |
... |
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