LGBTQ+ History in Children's Lit Webinar ft. Lee Wind, Rob Sanders, Melanie Gillman | A Webinar Rebroadcast

Lerner Publishing Group presents children’s & YA book creators to talk about their books in honor of LGBT+ History Month in October. We’ll cover the importance of queer history in literature for today’s young readers, how readers can find role models in both fiction and nonfiction, and the difference and importance of recognizing queer history in addition to LGBTQ+ Pride in June. Participants will leave this powerful webinar with inspiration as well as a wonderful, crowd-sourced list of resources for teachers, librarians, educators, and parents looking to share LGBTQ+ history with young readers. 

Transcript

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all right as people keep coming in i'll go ahead and jump in thank you all for coming i'm rachel edward vp of marketing at learner publishing group and uh very excited to have you join us today to talk about uh history in children's literature um our webinar is being recorded today and we will send out the link to the recording along with um the book list in the follow-up email so we're going to be compiling the book list don't worry about taking notes uh for all of the hopefully great books that will be dropped into the chat um as we're talking we do have auto-generated closed captioning enabled um if you would prefer not to see the closed captioning you can click the button called live transcript at the bottom of your screen to turn that off if you have any questions for our panelists please use the q a button below we have a staff member keeping an eye on that and we'll try to get to questions at the end of the presentation if we don't get to your particular question we'll try to answer it by email afterwards you can also use the chat feature uh for questions or just general thoughts as well as those book recommendations but we'll start by looking in the q a box when it's time for our q a session please note that abuse of any kind will not be tolerated and anyone violating this policy will be similar summarily banned from the webinar um but i'm sure we won't have to worry about that today if you are live tweeting along we'll be using the hashtag hashtag queerhistory is everywhere so please feel free to join the conversation online and with that said we'll jump into our discussion first i will introduce our panelists melanie gilman is a cartoonist and colored pencil artist who draws positive queer and trans comics for young readers they are the creator of the webcomic and graphic novel as the crow flies published in 2017 by iron circus comics and stage dreams published in 2019 by graphic universe an imprint of learner publishing group stage dreams was named a children's book committee at bank street college best children's book of the year a finalist for excellence in graphic literature awards a yalsa great graphic novels for teens and a prism award nominee in addition to their comics work they are also an adjective professor in the comics mfa program at the california college of the arts where they teach classes about making comics and professional practices rob sanders is a teacher who writes and a writer who teaches he is known for his funny and fierce fiction and non-fiction picture books and is recognized as one of the pioneers in the arena of lgbtqia plus literary non-fiction picture books rob's non-fiction books continue to break new ground including the first picture books about the pride flag the stonewall uprising a transgender civil war soldier a gay presidential candidate and the first gay marriage in america his work also continues to introduce readers to heroes of the lgbtqia plus community from harvey milk to gilbert baker from cleve jones to buyer wreston and more it's fiction explores friendship relationships standing up for others and being allies blood brothers his first middle grade novel written in powerful raw verse releases in spring 2022 and rob pays it forward he serves as co-regional advisor for scbwi florida and is a frequent speaker teacher mentor coach and critiquer lee wind is the founding blogger and publisher of i'm here i'm queer what the hell do i read an award-winning website about books culture and empowerment for lesbian gay bi trans questioning and queer youth and their allies he is the author of the crowd-funded young adult novel queer is a five dollar bill celebrated by publishers weekly as an indie success story and the junior literary guild gold standard selection no way they were gay hidden lives and secret loves published earlier this year by zest books an imprint of learner publishing group lee also works for the independent book publishers association and the society of children's book writers and illustrators now i'm going to hand it off to our panelists to talk a little bit about their work generally any specific books that they want to highlight uh you know uh in particular and then we'll jump into some questions so first i'll stop sharing my screen so you can see our panel is all right so melanie i'll toss it over to you first all right well hi everyone uh so melanie gilman here uh that was a great introduction that rachel gave and that gave covered most of the bases uh but probably the book that we'll end up talking the most about for me today is uh stage dreams here which is a lesbian western romance set in 1861 new mexico so right at the start of the civil war uh and dives into not just you know queer romance and fun uh western hijinks but also the history of women's spies in the civil war which is a really fascinating topic so it was a lot of fun getting to marry those two uh elements of the narrative together and find ways that they could interact in this story thanks and then rob anything you'd like to say about your body of work well i'll just throw some books up on the screen so and as i'm showing them to you pride the story of harvey milk and the rainbow flag my first non-fiction and that kind of got me started writing non-fiction i also had a history of already doing some fiction peaceful fights for equal rights stonewall a building uprising a revolution the fighting infantry man which isn't about albert dj cashier trans civil war soldier mayor pete this year two grooms on a cake came out which is the story of the first legal gay marriage in america in 1971 between michael mcconnell and jack baker and today is the book birthday of stitch by stitch cleve jones and the aids memorial quilt which has garnered two starred reviews which i'm really proud of from one from kirkus which like did god ever think that would happen in my writing career i don't know uh and about my since we're talking about queer history today my novel in verse that comes out in the spring is a historical fiction book that explores hiv and aids as it was prevalent in kids especially those with hemophilia in the in the 80s so kind of like the ryan white kind of kids you know that some of us remember reading about so that's a bit about my writing thanks and then lee over to you sure um and rob congratulations on the book birthday that's exciting um what a nice what a nice way to celebrate today uh so i'm gay and i didn't come out until i was in my 20s and i spent a really long time from age 11 to age 25 actively hiding who i was every day and then once i came out and got honest with myself and and everybody else um i i had this moment where i was uh told that there were these letters that abraham lincoln had written to joshua fry speed um that convinced the person that was telling me that that abraham was in love with joshua and i was like that can't be true that just seems crazy but i went and got the letters from the library and and when i was reading it i had this goosebump moment that it was like oh my gosh um there was one moment when abraham writes joshua they'd lived together for four years and then joshua moves back to kentucky and marries this woman named fanny and and abraham writes him and says are you now in feeling as well as judgment glad that you're married as you are and back when i dated girls when i was closeted that's exactly how i felt i just kept wondering would the feeling come but i judged that it was the right thing to do it was what everyone told me i was supposed to do so i just was like oh my gosh this is incredible so i i started doing all this research and i yeah i became convinced too that abraham was in love with this other guy and i decided that that would be a cool book to write about a kid that discovers this real stuff about abraham lincoln so that became queer as a five dollar bill but when i was doing it there was just so much re so much evidence that kept coming up and i was just like there was more and more and more at one point i just was like look i can't shove this all into a novel that's supposed to be a page turner what if i did a non-fiction book but i had hated non-fiction i when i was a kid i thought well history was really boring i felt really left out of it so um anyway i decided what if i did a nonfiction book that was more about like rethinking history all together and taking oh this is my version with all my my notes but like taking taking the idea of the false facade of history that we're all taught and crashing it down so with uh lincoln and speeders one chapter and then there are other chapters about abraham lincoln sorry about mamma gandhi and eleanor roosevelt and waywa um really talking about like men are loved men and women who loved women and people lived outside gender boundaries in history and that is what i am obsessed about right now trying to get the primary source materials directly to kids and sort of bypassing the hundreds of years of historians that have denied it super cool thanks to all of you that that is a much uh more interesting summary of your work than i could have provided so i'd like to talk about why it is important for you as a creator to share stories of lgbtq history whether it's fiction or non-fiction why is it important to focus on history as opposed to or in addition to modern day fiction or non-fiction um we'll start with rob well i come at my writing from the perspective of a teacher because i taught in elementary school public school for many years took early retirement last december but one of the questions i'm asked most frequently by adults is why do you write such controversial books my answer is always the same i don't write controversial books i write books about history to me what would be controversial is to not teach history to kids so i write books so my nonfiction books in particular so kids know the history of the lgbtq plus community so they can see themselves and their families represented in books so they can grow an empathy and understanding of others and so that if or when the day comes that they might realize they're part of the lgbtq community they'll be better prepared to step into who they are so in other words it's rudine sims bishops mirrors windows and doors that i'm hoping that my books will do that by giving kids a historical perspective of the community that i'm a part of thank you melanie you can go next so there's lots of reasons for doing queer historical fiction uh one of them is because it kind of flies in the face of one of the most popular uh ways that especially uh conservative and homophobic people are gonna try to dismiss uh modern-day lgbtq people which is by saying that this is some like new thing or it's a fad or it's you know just you know these crazy kids who are coming up with some wild stuff here um and diving into queer and trans history is a way to look backwards and say no this is a like normal historical part of you know human existence for as long back as we have records uh it's also a matter of preserving what archives and records we do have because not enough work is being done in my opinion at least in order to preserve a lot of those archives and preserve a lot of those records which makes that historical research a little bit more difficult to do than if you're researching you know uh you know your straight and cis historical figures generally uh so there's also something to be said for going through the act of doing that research and finding a way to uh input that research into even a fictional work as a way to help better preserve what records we do have out there and keep them more fresh and more alive in modern day readers minds uh and even with historical fiction too like one of the things that i found while writing stage dreams was that you know if i had tried to sit down and write a straightforward uh non-fiction account of one specific queer or trans person's life in the american west in like the 1800s it would have been a very difficult task because it's not that there weren't queer and trans people at the time it's that their lives were not documented very well and a lot of those documents that did exist have been lost over time or deliberately destroyed uh but one strength of historical fiction is that it allows you to take a number of fractional stories and fractional accounts and find a way to weave them all together into a solid narrative whole which is imagining what life would have been like in general for someone who would have been alive back then even if we can't always very easily point to you know rich and uh you know very well documented sources about one single individual person's life uh so historical fiction is a fun way to uh take what records we do have and find a way to lend a sense of narrative completeness to them that draws from a number of different sources while still accounting for the fact that it is difficult oftentimes to do this research and you know there are periods of american history where a lot of records that uh we wish existed are are not there uh in the way that we wish that they were uh but this is something we could hear about more from the folks who are writing more non-fiction in this room too uh because definitely the the research aspect is going to be an interesting task whenever you're dealing with queer history in general and i'd love to hear from other folks about that process for them yeah i'll just jump in if i can and just say that um you know melanie that it's it's so true um you know things do get changed by by historians by its family members by people themselves um in an effort to sort of sanitize the the their queer lives and it's usually not to benefit the people who are queer it's usually to benefit the sort of structures of power that have been set up which is why there's this false facade of history in the first place that we are still teaching kids today um that are still being taught to kids today the the history textbook my my kid in 10th grade had could have been my history textbook from 10th grade like it was just the stories of like rich white straight cisgendered able-bodied white men from europe that were wealthy um and you know i think that when i actually asked the teacher about it um in a way that i was hoping not to be too confrontational i said well what about all the other stories and they were like well we have lots of good supplemental material for that and i was like okay um so like eventually we'll have to get to the textbooks too but yeah at least there are some some some other things and i'm excited that we're crowdsourcing this list but one thing to keep in mind is that it every little story is is a crack in that facade and what i was trying to do rather than just focus on like a whole book about like lincoln and and speed was that if we show lots of cracks in the facade where there's stories of mendel of men and women who loved women and people who lived outside gender boundaries maybe we can take the whole facade down and then it's not just our queer stories but it's the stories of women and people of color and disabled people it's all these other stories that don't get told from history as well and i think that that's really exciting because once you actually recognize that this is this huge like thing that's being pulled on all of us right that we're all being denied the real stories from history and that's really exciting and if you can get kids to to sort of recognize you know show them some of the ways that history has been sort of like you know sanitized um and let them go back to the primary source materials i'm obsessed with prime resource materials because i think that like when we can get them clean they can hear these voices they can they can read the love contract between mahatma gandhi and the guy he loved herman kollenbach i mean they wrote a love contract together like it's incredible and i think it changes how you see history and how you see yourself and what going to what rob said with you know it is the windows and the mirrors and the sliding glass doors and it is also the knowledge that like if someone like me existed in the past then i think that i have a better right to a place at the table today and if i think i have a right to a place at the table today the future that i can imagine is without limits right and we want that like i don't have a time machine i can't go back and give my book to myself but it would be it's amazing to think that we can pay it forward and we can let kids know this now and you can help great are you able to hear me yes okay no we lost you again is that working ah very good all right so all of my uh zoom controls have disappeared again so uh we'll see how the rest of this goes i've got my colleague who may end up feeding questions into the chat if uh if i disappear for some reason at any rate we'll jump into our second question how did you find or develop the specific historical topic that you shared in your book um and then one thing that just jumped out at me as you all three were talking about your books um there is a civil war theme running through here is that a bit of a coincidence or or um i'm thinking it may also have something to do with records that are available from the 1800s compared to things that are available you know further uh beyond maybe there's nothing there but i think it's interesting that we've got a little bit of a theme so uh lee we'll we'll jump back to you how you know how and i know for your book in particular there were a bunch of things that you had additional um materials where they didn't end up making it into the book and how did you narrow it down to what you did cover uh and then how did you do the research for it oh it was so hard to narrow it down um in fact at one point the book had 15 chapters and i was basically given a choice because of the page count because there's a lot of like endnotes and stuff um the page account was getting bigger and bigger and and and we needed to like kind of cut and so i had a choice i could either cut the chapters more so there would be less primary source materials that we would be discussing about each person like the chapter about shakespeare writing all these love sonnets to another guy instead of there being you know six examples of the sonnets we'd have to go down to three or i could just take out three of the chapters and so i chose to take out three of the chapters because i really thought that like there are a lot of overview survey books that are like a little bit here a little bit there here's one quote and that i didn't want to do that i really wanted to put the materials in front of young readers and be like hey this is how i read it hundreds of years of historians disagree with me but look at it let's talk about it i'll tell you the tricky tricks that people use to try to change pronouns and other ways of hiding this but read it read it with me and then you make your own call do you think that abraham do you think that william shakespeare was in love with this other guy um mysterious mr wh and i love that and then you know i it was very important for me to show that like i didn't make any of it up so like i said there's a lot of footnotes but also um learner was where they were the team at learner were great sports and um they agreed with me that we could um put in bold all the primary source materials because i thought that that was really important like when you just glanced at the book which by the way is so beautifully designed um it's so easy to see like oh that's a quote that's a direct quote from a primary source and i love that because i think that that's one of the things we want to you know encourage kids to have some some literacy about how to read and how to absorb information and how to know is this real or is this not um so yeah and then i just went to town on endnotes and just kind of like you know that was my uh that was my adventure it was like reading something in adult book this this uh this row behind me uh that's all my queer nonfiction mostly for adults and um i would you know find something and i'd be like okay what was the source for that and then i'd go and i'd get that source um and i'd go back and back and back until i could actually like find the original source and um it was a bit of an adventure and i like it because it's uh you know it's an adventure everybody can do great um rob over do you have you've got you've highlighted a number of um specific um incidents or or you know specific moments in history as part of your books how do you decide what you want to focus on compared to all of what is out there yeah i am very much a person that can if i connect personally with a story if i get goosebumps or my heart palpitations that i am interested i know i'm interested in telling that story or if i think it's a story that really really has universal truths to it that a lot of readers could benefit from as well as it eliminating some of lgbtq history that it makes it a great topic when i was researched pride came about the first non-fiction book came about because of one of those emotional moments it was 2015 the scotus marriage equality decision and that night some of us will remember that the white house was illuminated in the colors of the rainbow flag something i mean i never thought that day would happen as a person of my generation let alone that occurrence that night and as i looked at the white house i knew that my students fourth graders uh would have seen a pride flag but they wouldn't have known who created it what was the inspiration for it what's its real meaning and value to the community and so i set out to write that story and that night i had written the first draft before the lights were turned off on the white house but then came what has to come with non-fiction which is research lots and lots of research and like lee was saying many secondary sources are out there television shows a movie a magazine article that will lead you to primary sources and so that's always the quest the ultimate primary resource being if you can ever come into contact with the subject themselves or someone who was at the actual event that you're writing about that that's a great vetting source for all the research that you do as well probably to me the most difficult part of any of this though is finding a way to make a story interesting and engaging to kid readers and to find an entry point to that story so that's what what i spent a lot of time doing in addition to research is trying to figure out how do you make a wedding interesting to kids especially a wedding from 1971 why would they care well i thought back to my childhood what did i care about if i went to a wedding which i seemed to have gone to a lot as a kid the cake i would care about the cake so i told parallel stories how a cake is made and how a relationship is formed in stitch by stitch a poem weaves its way through the entire book so the kids can read that poem offset in different fonts kind of like lee was saying um or they can read the story or they can re read the two as they weave together so those entry points are really important to me um so that kids really get into that topic and want to turn the page and want to read the book again and want to share it with another reader that they know great and melanie how did you choose this particular time and place for your story and then you know you mentioned some of the challenges of researching um and i love the the combination of multiple individuals experiences into a greater whole but how did you do research for it this was um you know the research process that ended up uh coming to fruition in stage dreams really started several years beforehand uh there was a while where i was doing uh annual uh historical non-fiction queer history comics for a little independent newspaper in denver called westward uh where every year i would pick a random like queer or trans historical figure from usually the 1800s in colorado history and i would uh research them and end up drawing a little comic strip about their life and have it in the newspaper uh and i ended up doing that enough that i sort of was starting to get a feel for like who are the the queer and trans historical figures that we know enough about that i could tell a like little you know half-page comic strip narrative about them uh and and a lot of those ended up kind of leading me down the rabbit hole of uh you know primary sources etc for uh historical figures in the american west uh and i was really attracted to the idea of doing a uh a historical fiction story set in the american west in the 1800s partly for genre reasons because you know when you're adding in elements of a western in there you're allowed to play around with elements of like you know adventure and escapism and romance and like you know high drama and espionage and all of these like fun uh fun enjoyable uh fictional conceits that you can kind of weave into the narrative so it ended up just being a very fun sandbox to play in as a storyteller uh and for me too you know one of the things that i want to provide to readers uh because it's a thing that i crave myself uh when i'm looking for books is just narratives that are queer and romantic and fun but also very escapist and adventurous in nature uh like you know i'm trying to move more away from uh narratives that are strictly tragic or uh gonna be about violence and discrimination and was more interested in telling stories which are just kind of like fun and goofy and adventurous uh and because of genre reasons there was a lot that i could play with in the scope of a western narrative there uh so ended up pulling in a lot of that dope down the various rabbit holes researching as far as i could in various historical figures uh and then found fun ways to kind of weave everything together yes uh centering queer joy in a narrative especially when you're writing for children i think where you know it's important to give them uh you know not saying that we should never be telling stories about like discrimination or violence or whatnot but we need to have some balance there too where we also want to be putting things out into the world which are like joyful and loving and fun at the same time too so so this was a good chance to play around with all that type of stuff in building a narrative here and that that totally came out i mean stage dreams takes all of the best of all of the tropes of a western and puts them in a graphic novel and just the whole read is super fun um and you know the the the storyline is there's romance there's drama there's adventure and uh there's no um you know there's discrimination but it's it could be for anything so it's a very uh humanizing um you know and and and fun for for any kid windows mirrors and doors again uh so you all have have talked about this a little bit um uh the importance of primary sources and and really getting that through to the reader not just using it you know for your research but sharing it back to the reader um in uh both stage streams and rob in your picture books this is done through back matter lee your whole book is effectively uh you know that kind of bad matter but what um especially when it comes to fiction and so you know lee going to your novel here um what is the what is the role of that kind of research and and sharing it i know especially in stage dreams melanie you include um information on on trans people in history but also just other facts about the time and the place so how did you decide what you wanted to have your back matter highlight we'll start with melanie and then go over to lee uh so knowing that this was gonna end up being a book which would be primarily serving like you know like uh younger readers like you know middle school high school etc one thing that i wanted to make sure was that the back matter text was both like informative and added nuance but was also fun too uh so it was a combination of you know me bringing in uh historical concepts and ideas that just provide a little bit more scope and nuance to the types of uh background that's happening in the story itself i mean one fun thing about historical fiction in general is that it's sometimes hard to get the characters to like explain things to the reader without it sounding very expository and boring uh so sometimes the back matter is me being like let me like like walk you through a little bit of like what the context is behind this you know why is uh this character who's rodging a stagecoach really disappointed to find a chest full of banknotes rather than gold like why is that uh a thing which would be really frustrating in 1861 uh so things like that and also finding ways to incorporate some stuff that was just like fun little background details uh like i did i had a scene that was set in a taylor shop in the 1860s so i got to talk a lot about like the various tools that would have been used by taylor's at the time which are very different than modern day tools a little bit about like the history of fashion and the way that it moved across the american landscape from east to west and why that was happening uh so a combination of like fun like you know fun silly facts that inform some of the background imagery that's going into the comics and also areas where i want to provide some additional nuance and additional information stuff that you know you can't really fit into the narrative itself without making the characters do like an exposition conversation with each other but it's still useful for readers to know uh so you know finding a balance between uh fun and exposition and hopefully aiming towards something which is going to be informative but also very enjoyable to read too i don't think that back matter notes should ever be a like dry read they should be they should be fun too yes i agree i agree completely with that that was so cool and it was very cool to learn about the bird that held the fabric um i think i think about it a lot in terms of layers of text like remember what rob was just saying about how he had his poem and he also had the story and and they sort of wove together throughout the book so i think of back matter as sort of like you know it's it's a layer of text that's at the end of the book but i think there's also a way that you can think of back matter as just layering layering text um so like in in my novel sure i had you know a whole endnote section that chapter by chapter explained you know what was real about the um the bold you know what was real about the primary sources what was real about the evidence that the main character was discovering about abraham lincoln being in love with another guy um in in no way they were gay i had a lot of additional layers of of text because i had like sort of my story that i wanted to tell like here's this person that this is you know giving a little background and then like here's this incredible stuff that you didn't know about the person and here's some of the primary sources that that sort of back that argument up but let's go into them and then when i was sharing primary sources i actually wanted to get into it like i wanted to be like okay well this is why i interpret this line in this way so i was like i could do footnotes but then i'm going to have footnotes and endnotes in the same book oh my gosh that sounds horrible so i thought about um uh remember vh1 had pop-up video where someone would be singing and then it would be like um you know like and that little factoid would come up next to them so so that's the idea that that we came up with and so there are all these sort of like you know pop-up notes like here there's this is a little description um uh it's actually uh a transcript uh a quote from a transcript of a a video on youtube talking about the two-spirit identity and um and the character says while this label is only being used since the 90s and then i did a little pop-up next to it that said the 1990s because kids not aren't necessarily going to know that um and so you know that enabled me to do another layer of text uh sidebars are another layer of text right like there are all these additional fun things that you can get across photos are another visual layer of text right like i mean i know it sounds weird to call them text but they are they're another way you know this is a the mask of kolomana which in zuni culture sort of was this um spiritual figure that literally the hairstyle was you know half in the female style and half in the male style so like getting to show kids that kind of stuff it just enriches the entire experience whether it's fiction or non-fiction like um and and in fact i had photos in the back of the fiction book as well so i think that for me that's the most fun way of thinking about it is that like how do you how do you give them like their own adventure in in discovering the the book because like melanie's book you could just read it straight through and not even straight through sorry you could read it directly through and um and not even you know look at the at the back better if you chose to that's one way of reading it but then you could read the back matter and then go back and read the story again and see in a whole new way because it does make more things make more sense so i love that the idea of it being layers of text that's a great way to think about it rob how about with your picture books you know getting primary sources in or back matter or layers of text well and lee what you're describing teachers and librarians would call text features and it's a whole nother level of learning to read as you as a reader that you have to not just read the text you have to read all these other things to get the full meaning of what you're reading and so it's a whole thing in elementary school that we learned to read text features i suppose you do in middle school in high school too um probably back matter serves all the purposes that melanie and leah said in picture books but may serve another purpose as well because the picture book audience is a younger audience uh often let's say maybe 6 to 10 maybe younger maybe older we know that middle school and high school teachers use picture books a lot in instruction as well but that's the primary focus so you can't put all the details in the story a it'd be overwhelming b it won't be a very engaging story so back matter often serves the purpose of telling the rest of the details telling the rest of the story and it also serves the per purpose of telling why i write wrote that story that author's note is really important um to give a human connection because that helps readers to know oh well that's yeah that's the reason i might read that story too so all the wonderful things that are possibilities in back matter you know from timelines to um mini bios to glossaries and all those things just add a wealth and i think that there are readers i know there are readers teachers librarians and students who read back matter first because they're that kind of reader they're interested in that kind of thing just as i was as a kid i was the kid who read encyclopedias we had encyclopedias at our house i know that's online now people don't even look at those like we did but they were books and collier's encyclopedia put out a yearbook every year and so i would read about everything that had happened in the world that year you know just article after article and you could flip wherever you wanted and read whatever you want that's what back matter addicts are like too they like those facts and then they'll read the story you know so it serves a lot of purposes and allows us to do a lot of creative things um as well as as the writer that uh leads me really nicely into the next question you know having the author's note is that making the connection of the book to your personal approach to it so i'd like to ask each of you what do you hope that readers will take away from your work and i'm using an expansive um definition of readers here because in many cases the decider for the purchase of these books may not be the end user uh you know the child who's reading it so i i would encourage you to think both about the child who may be reading or having the book read to them as well as the teacher or librarian or parent who is maybe the gatekeeper to getting there um so rob will start with you what do you hope readers take away from your work well and do you know that many of my books are bought for adults they're gifted to adults uh two grooms in a cakes given to lots of uh people on their wedding days now you know and uh other books when uh someone comes out or my gay son is graduating from college and i want to give him a book and they'll choose a picture book it it's just very interesting and often history is as new to people in the community adults in the community as it is to children we didn't grow up i didn't hear walter cronkite talking about the stonewall uprising you know i had to learn i learned about that as an adult it happened when i was 10 years old so uh our books serve those purposes to helping adults but i start everything from the kid perspective i've already said that and i know that kid readers i know that kids in general are incensed by injustice you can't be on the playground with kids without hearing somebody say a hundred times that's not fair or if you're in a classroom if you do anything that at all is not equal among your students another student will point that out to you and this sense of fairness means that when kid readers are confronted with what seems unfair if it's discrimination or lack of understanding or unfair laws they get riled up and they begin to root for the underdog the oppressed the underrepresented and they have began to appreciate when fairness and justice are finally realized in that story so i want my books to rile kids up i want them to see that injustice and realize that wasn't fair and be able to recognize how injustice was corrected or corrected to some point so that they when they see injustice will know that they can do something about it too but i guess i write books so kids will get riled up mostly that's great that's wonderful melanie what do you hope readers will take away from your work so one of the things that ended up being really interesting for me when i was doing the research for stage dreams and diving into you know whatever historical documentation i could come up with for queer and trans folks who were living in this this particular area in this particular time in american history is that i found more accounts than i would have thought coming into this where you had queer and trans people who lived lives that while not being completely free of like you know discrimination violence etc were were much like happier and more loving than i would have expected for the 1800s these are people who had who had jobs who had husbands and wives who had families who had supportive communities surrounding them and that was something that i really wanted to honor in this book because it feels like a counterpoint to what we would normally i think intuitively expect about the lives of historical queer and trans people in you know hundreds of years ago uh where not saying their lives were perfect and not saying that there was not uh discrimination and strife and struggle uh but these are people who had loving and supportive communities around them very often and who were living uh authentic and uh you know loving and rich lives in many cases uh so that's kind of the thing that i hope that readers take away from this the ability to imagine a past for our own queer and trans ancestors even within our own country even in periods of time where uh discrimination would have been a major factor where uh you know you could not live uh you know out life in the same way that you could today uh but still finding ways to imagine the lives of our ancestors in ways which were had like richness and nuance and loving and community to them uh in ways that i think you know a lot of mainstream depictions of historical figures who are queer and trans oftentimes kind of fail to grapple with uh so i hope that's the thing that people take away that you know the the history of our ancestors is a little bit more complicated than a lot of uh mainstream media representations are doing justice to uh and you know it was there are a lot of stories even in the far distant past of people with uh communities with families with uh loving and rich lives and relationships surrounding them and that is a thing that uh should be a comfort to us and should be a thing that we we honor when we're talking about our own queer history that is great lee what do you hope readers will take away from your work oh my gosh i love both of those answers so much um so i i think that to begin with i want to say like i i hope that readers whatever their age understand that that history doesn't have to be like medicine that that it can be like chocolate that it can be fascinating and it can also that it can include them that they can belong and you know whether it's the queer kid that is reading it and sees a reflection of themselves whether it's a another kid that isn't queer but recognizes that that there were queer people in the past and that wow if they can maybe be a little more kind and and and be an ally to the queer kids in in the class with them um and i think like rob said there's queer adults that that it's okay to nurture your your inner teen that didn't get it uh your inner kid that didn't get it um and and let that be a healing for you and then for other adults to let them know that they really need to stand up and be allies for for the queer kids too um so i think all those all those quarters um i think is really important and again like this idea that you know the past knowing that you have a place in the past empowers you today and in in and that is fuel for your future um i think that that that's what i keep in mind um a lot yes that seeing yourself in the past gives you you can see yourself in the present and future i love that um i'm going to do a quick call for anyone who is watching if you have books that you think this group should know about either the panelists or the other folks who are attending please add your booklet recommendations into the chat box we'll be compiling all of those along with all the books published by all of our panelists and a bunch of other recommendations that have come in um we'll be sharing that booklet along with the recording um we'll send that message out you know tomorrow or by the end of the week certainly um once we do all the research on the books and make sure that we've got the correct links for them but please do drop your um book recommendations into the chat because the next question i have is to our panelists how do you encourage teachers librarians parents or you know for the older middle school and high school readers to find more books like yours lee will start with you okay um the ala rainbow list this is really really helpful because they've all been vetted by these librarians at the ala and it is great for a librarian to be able to point to and say well it's on the ala list that's why it's in the collection uh the stonewall book awards um these are also really really great books and also look at the nomination list not just the ones that get the award um my blog sorry not shameless plug but i have been blogging about lgbtq kid literature for uh 14 years so you can sign up for there's a weekly newsletter with new books every week um the crowdsource list we're building today and then i think this is really important it's really important to drive interest right like we wanna again back to that idea that like it's fun it's chocolate it's not medicine so um one of the things i did that is is fun that i'll toss in the in the chat too is that um i created a buzzfeed kind of quiz you know those buzzfeed quizzes like which disney princess castle would you live in um and then you take a bunch of like quick questions to answer so i did one about queer history um that's really fun and it's just like these some amazing moments i mean the book is called no way they were gay because i had all these moments researching i was like no way so um that's a really fun thing that you can do too to drive interest and then you have the books and you have interest and you have you're changing the world one reader at a time thank you and uh rob what are your recommendations to help folks find books like yours everything lee said because that's exactly what i had on my list and then i would what lee was alluding to there at the end when you find those books make other people aware of those books kid readers other influencers teachers librarians parents and become that kind of resource for other people i think the most important for some reason in my mind i think we have a lot of teachers and librarians maybe tuning in and i think the abcs of being an advocate is a to be an advocate or an ally for kids and other adults with whom you work b to be knowledgeable about books because books are a source of inspiration and sanity for many who are trying to figure out who they are and c is to c is for conversation to start conversations with others so that you become the safe welcoming person that people know is knowledgeable and wants to be a source of help and melanie what are your secret sources for finding great books so absolutely all the things that have been mentioned before um certainly one probably one of the easiest things to do is to look up uh awards and keep an eye on who you know what books are being uh both nominated and winning um in addition to the ala awards the stonewall awards etc uh things that i would also recommend would be things like the lambda literary awards which is another uh lgbtq specific uh list of uh you know awards for queer and trans books that comes out every year uh also in comics we have something called the prism awards which is a comics and graphic novel specific awards for queer and trans literature uh those are always great every year uh i also think there's a lot to be said for using social media where you know if you if you you know if you find a book that you really loved by you know by a queer or trans author maybe follow them on twitter for for a few months or so and see like whose books are they promoting who are they talking about what are they reading uh you know kind of crowdsourcing your own recommendation from the authors whose books you already know and love can be a really great way to do this and one other resource that i will shout out which is comic specific is the uh queer comics database or queer cartoonist database i forget which one it is uh it's run by marie naomi uh and this is a free online database of lgbtq cartoonists who are working today uh and that is something which is very easy to look through online and that is gonna give you a very rich resource when you're looking for uh queer and trans graphic novels that are going to be a good fit for your classroom or your library that is a fantastic list of resources i just um i'm chatting with my colleagues wow they're just writing our follow-up email for us so we will include link to all of these resources in the follow-up email um in case you've been frantically scribbling stuff down um we'll be sure to include all of that um once again for uh folks who are watching please do drop your book recommendations into the chat and then we're gonna do a quick lightning round here with our panelists what are your favorite books on lgbtq history for young readers it can be yours or they can be anybody else's anything we haven't mentioned yet here today melanie we'll start with you uh one very very well known one in the comics industry that you should absolutely like 100 read if you haven't gotten the chance to yet it's called the prince and the dressmaker it's by jen wang it's this beautiful uh like middle grade two y a graphic novel uh kind of a like fairy tale cinderella narrative uh with a uh a trans romance right at the heart of it and it's just it's beautifully drawn it's just like an absolute pleasure to read and i want to say there was some news that came out several years ago and i can't remember what's happened with this about some sort of like movie musical adaptation that's in the works for this so it's gonna be it's gonna be a big thing in probably another year or two and it's already a big thing in comics and if you haven't read it yet like really do treat yourself to this book uh the prince and the dressmaker by jen wang it is a wonderful lovely book thank you i saw that one come in someone had suggested it in our forum where we're collecting these recommendations and when i was you know cleaning up the spreadsheet i ordered it from the library because it is it looks absolutely beautiful i had not heard of it before uh lee over to you favorite lgbtq history books i know one of you are already yeah yeah well actually i was gonna i i was here with props i have melanie's books i have rob's books um uh and yeah so i think uh i i wouldn't i just add melinda lowe's um last night at the telegraph club was beautiful historical fiction for older teens um uh with an incredible back matter about like san francisco lesbian lives it just oh my gosh it was so great um uh sarah praker i mentioned that this sort of survey books uh sarah has one called queer there and everywhere which is for young readers um which is like six page chapters on uh about different people and there are some cool people that i didn't i i learned about um but really i'm obsessed with primary source material so you get to see my my rainbow bookcase and um we get to go there because i think that you can share the sauna shakespeare's sonnets with kids from something maybe less a little less intimidating than the riverside shakespeare but like how cool would it be for kids to get to hear shakespeare say two loves i have of comfort and despair which like two spirits to suggest me still the better angel is a man right fair the worser spirit a woman colored ill right shakespeare's talking about the two like he loved a man and he loved a woman and how amazing would it be for them to read eleanor's roosevelt's letters to lorena hickok and they can actually hear and i'm of course i'm just reading it from my book because it's easier um where eleanor writes lorena your ring is a great comfort i look at it and think she does love me or i wouldn't be wearing it like how incredible is that and then they can read from the autobiography that christine jorgensen wrote christine's line where she writes in a letter in 1950 i think we the doctors and i are fighting this the right way make the body fit the soul rather than vice versa and then they can you know understand the context of like why christine became world famous for having gender affirming surgery like it's so exciting and i don't think that we have to think i don't think that we need to save the primary sources for when you're an adult i think kids can handle it they can have a complexity they can handle layers of text and they can handle the truth about history which is that there are queer people in history that's wonderful i love the show-and-tell rob what are your favorite uh books on lgbtq history for young readers i would encourage everyone to look for the books of gail pittman who is arguably the pioneer of nonfiction picture book uh lgbtq topic sorts of things um and i would recommend this book gay and lesbian history for kids the century-long struggle for lgbt rights by jerome poland which is written for kids has activities embedded in it and it's just a great overview of history that could spark interest and could lead kids to do additional research on topics they're interested in that's great i know that one came in several times in our recommendations so lots of votes for that um we've got a question from an attendee why isn't there more especially more non-fiction books or just more books generally with elder lgbtqia plus representation anyone want to take that one well there are a lot more than there used to be and uh when just think about pride flag and um or rainbow flag books when my pride book came out in 2018 followed two months later by one by gail pittman those were the first two non-fiction about pride flag there's probably 10 or 12 books now from board books on so it's a growing genre i think publishers are very open that's been my experience um i probably have published books with five or six major imprints so i in some not so major um but i think that they are interested in getting well-written books into the hands of readers and i would say why don't you help us write those because what we need are more own voice authors writing their story and our collective stories yes that is critical the own voices part especially um we it looks like we've got about two minutes um uh i have one last question for everyone which is what are you working on next i know some of your upcoming projects robs we've talked about a little bit but i want to give you a chance to talk about it again we will start with you sure so i'm actually working on the on the sequel to uh no way they were gay which is called gender bender and uh it's all about how the gender binary is really a social construct and that gender in itself is a social construct and it starts out by this great quote by aloc vader that says there are as many genders as there are people in the world so i'm really excited about that great and uh rob over to you blood brothers comes out in the spring that's my novel in verse next year sometime the dates are still kind of iffy there'll be a biography about gene manford co-founder pflag and another co-authored with carol boston weatherford about bayern rustin the man behind the march on washington who was gay and african-american and we're bringing our two voices together to tell that story and i've recently sold a collection of poems that are non-fiction a non-fiction poetry collection about a lot of our political pioneers in the lgbtq arena here in the states wonderful and melanie what are you working on so i'm working on a ton of stuff that has not been announced yet so i have to be a little cagey about how i describe these uh one of them is going to be a collection of original queer fairy tales which i believe should be coming out in fall of 2022 looking forward to that one uh also working on a uh children's horror graphic novel with a non-binary protagonist and i'm so excited for that one and i wish i could tell you more but uh watch the skies i guess perfect i'll also throw out a pitch we'll include this in the follow-up email you can follow all of our great panelists on twitter where i'm sure when they are able they'll be talking about all of their projects um we are right at one o'clock central time so we'll wrap it up i just want to say a special thank you to all of our panelists this was such a great discussion i'm really looking forward to seeing this book list that we put together and we are a learner we're committed to telling both modern and historical uh lgbtqia plus voices and and really want to help people find the books that are out there and then publish more of them so thank you all for attending thank you to our panelists for joining and i will like i said we'll send that follow-up email in the next couple of days uh with this book list and then we'll just go out and celebrate these books and get them in the hands of kids everywhere thank you so much everyone