48. All Your Children's Books Are Belong To Us (Gays), Part 2
History is Gay
Leigh Pfeffer
4.6 • 536 Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2025
⏱️ 78 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome back to History is Gay, with part 2 of our three-part exploration of classic queer children's literature authors, with guest host Aubree Calvin! In this second installment, we give more background on the history of queer children's literature and dive a bit deeper into our favorite Queer Kid Lit fairy grandmother Ursula Nordstrom before moving into our main coverage focusing on two additional authors, beloved James Marshall, author of George and Martha and the Miss Nelson series, as well as the iconically curmudgeonly Maurice Sendak, known best for Where the Wild Things Are.
Part three will be coming your way soon with even more queer children's authors to explore :)
Outline
0:00 – Introduction
9:35 – Socio-Historical Context: Timeline of Overt LGBTQ Rep in Children's Books
17:42 – Socio-Historical Context: Fear of the Queer Child
17:42 – 23:22 – CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of bigoted association of homosexuality with child sexual abuse
23:22 – More about Ursula Nordstorm: our queer kid lit fairy gaymother
29:27 – Who Were They? Bio Time: James Marshall
45:08 – Who Were They? Bio Time: Maurice Sendak
56:05 – Why do we think they're gay?
1:14:14 – 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 enbies that have always been there in the unexplored |
| 0:10.5 | corners of history, because history has never been as straight as you think. |
| 0:34.5 | Yeah. Hello, welcome back to history is gay. |
| 0:44.5 | I'm Lee Feffer, your host, and we are back with Aubrey, Calvin, for episode two of our three-part series on, |
| 0:48.3 | Hey, did you know that that book that you grew up with and really, really loved? |
| 0:51.0 | Did you know that the author is a big old queer mo? |
| 0:52.6 | Series. We're back. We're doing a second one. Hi, Aubrey. all queer mode series. |
| 0:55.1 | We're back. |
| 0:56.4 | We're doing a second one. |
| 0:58.2 | Hi, Aubrey. |
| 0:59.0 | Hi, Lee. |
| 1:00.4 | Thanks for having me back. |
| 1:06.2 | Thank you for coming back here and continuing to talk with me about some of our favorite classic children's literature authors who were queer and filled our early years with joy and wonder |
| 1:16.5 | and lots and lots of great things. If you haven't listened to the first episode, please go back |
| 1:23.5 | and do that. We give a little bit of context and we are going to continue that today. Last episode, |
| 1:29.5 | we talked about four different authors. Today, we are going to go into Maurice Sendak and |
| 1:35.3 | James Marshall. And then we'll come back with our final episode in this series on a couple more. |
| 1:41.5 | This has been a really fun thing to just like expand and we were like, |
| 1:47.0 | oh, we'll do like one little episode on some queer children's authors. And then we were like, |
| 1:50.8 | oh, wait, there are so many and some of them have some really extensive great biographies that |
| 1:55.7 | we want to go into. So yeah, here we are for episode two. Yeah, with the state of the world and how insanely crazy it is, it's been so much fun just to go back and read old children's books. |
... |
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