Apparently my favorite picture books as a child were written by queer authors. This brings me joy.
Look, most of the queer people I know, myself included, had pretty rough childhoods (for a variety of reasons, but being recognizably queer was part of it) and as a result, we are fiercely protective of kids. Not protecting kids in a walled-garden sense the way conservatives want, but celebrating the wonder and whimsy and weirdness of being a child, and treating children as people - people who might need more supervision and care, but people with opinions and thoughts that really do matter. So of course the most beloved children's books of the last 40 years are written by queer folx. It makes perfect sense.
There are far more besides!
Hans Christian Andersen was gay, and in between writing such heartrending masterpieces as The Happy Prince and The Little Mermaid, along with some beautiful works of satire, had a fairytale romance with a German nobleman, and successfully annoyed the fuck out of Charles Dickens.
The Ugly Duckling is a fable about his acceptance of himself as a gay man, after a struggle to see his own value as a person who didn't fit expectations.
Then there's Tove Jansson, who wrote the Moomins, internationally popular for over 80 years. She and her partner of 45 years at one point lived down the street from one another and built a secret passageway through the attics of houses so they could visit one another in secret. The stories are rich with the accepting and loving compassion of the Moomin family, in spite of their own flaws and those of the people they meet.
And how about a modern one? Julian Clary, groundbreaking gay comedian and presenter, created a series of children's novels called The Bolds, about a family of hyenas who have taken on the identity of a couple of human tourists who died while on safari, and live in a house in an English suburb, raising their twin children and working in a factory that makes jokes for Christmas crackers, keeping the fact that they are hyenas secret from the humans around them through cunning disguise. They become aware that others around them are also animals disguised as humans, and gradually form a supportive and caring, secret community. At a glance it's a sweet and funny tale of a ridiculous situation, but to an adult, it's a clear parallel of queer subcultures, written by a man who lived through the aids crisis as a figurehead of his community.
I'd like to give a shout-out here to one of the staples of my childhood, Jan Pieńkowski! He was a writer and illustrator, most famously known for illustrating the Meg and Mog books.
Jan was a Polish writer and artist. He survived and escaped the Nazi invasion of Poland as a young boy, and said that his interest in the paper cut-out style came from an experience hiding in an air raid shelter when a soldier kept him entertained by making paper cut-outs.
He and his partner, David, were together for 40 years before getting a civil partnership in 2005 (on the day the civil partnership legislation came in). He died in 2022.
