From the May/June 2005 issue of The Horn Book Magazine

Letters to the Editor

January/February 2005 Horn Book

I fail to see why K. T. Horning (“On Spies and Purple Socks and Such”) saw the need to tie Harriet the Spy and the other titles she discusses to “gay themes.” What purpose does this serve except to provide fodder for the p.c. police and book banners? Does this mean that Tacky the Penguin and Elmer the multicolored elephant are showing homosexual tendencies, too? And let’s not forget that the Brothers Grimm, Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis also had some “different” characters that just didn’t fit in with mainstream society . . . oh my gosh, there must be gay themes in these books! Children still have the need to know that it’s okay to be different, and that it’s more than okay to think for themselves. Children’s literature can help them do this. Neither of these qualities should lead to the conclusion that they are gay.

Christine Brojek
Sebring, Florida

I think K. T. Horning is doing some heavy projecting. For example, “cross-dressing”? I am not sure where Ms. Horning grew up, but in my hometown a lot of us girls often wore corduroy slacks or flannel-lined jeans, flannel shirts, moccasins, loafers, or even high tops, probably hooded sweatshirts; snapped rabbits’ feet onto our belts, rode our bikes like wild women, climbed around construction sites, caught salamanders — shall I go on? And this was more than ten years earlier than 1965. My grandmother wore slacks, like Katharine Hepburn. My grandmother’s sister, Janet, was gay and lived all of her adult life with Aunt Louise. Aunt Janet was a little bird of a woman and the most feminine person you would ever have seen in your life. Ms. Horning is using stereotypes.

So Louise Fitzhugh was gay. Like most writers, she was telling a story from her own point of view. It seems bizarre to compare the revelation of Harriet’s spy notebook to her friends to “coming out.” Likewise, when Ms. Horning’s article spills over into other literature, like Harry Potter, our mouths hang open in surprise.

It is a very simple truth that at one point or another in his or her life, each and every child will feel different. I felt different when my class was split in second grade and I was in the half without most of my friends. I felt different when I noticed my nose was not rounded anymore but had a bump on the bridge of it, like most of the people on my dad’s side of the family. The reason children feel intensely different can be for very silly reasons — particularly as they approach adolescence, when everything is magnified for them.

Marion C. Mahoney
Kettering, Ohio

K. T. Horning responds:

I’m afraid you both read more into my essay than was actually there. I wasn’t attempting to speak for all children who have ever felt different, but only for myself as a child and, by extension, for other children on the brink of adolescence who are just beginning to understand that they may be gay or lesbian. That’s a very particular and profound kind of difference that should not be trivialized by equating it with multicolored elephants or having a bump on the bridge of one’s nose.

Of course I was doing “some heavy projecting”! That was the entire point of my essay. As readers, we project our own realities onto the stories we read. Like it or not, gay and lesbian readers are likely to have quite a different reality from you, one that allows them to read a queer subtext into books such as Harriet the Spy and Harry Potter, just as gay men have done most famously over the years with The Wizard of Oz. That doesn’t mean I am proposing the books be labeled as “gay literature.” It simply means that these books may speak to gay and lesbian readers in a different way — not better or worse than the way in which they speak to you, just different. Perhaps Harriet herself said it best: “SOME PEOPLE ARE ONE WAY AND SOME PEOPLE ARE ANOTHER AND THAT’S THAT.”

Letters to the Editor | Send a Letter to the Editor