And Tango Makes Controversy

So, many years ago, I was rather proud to say that my blog was one of the leading sources for introspective posts on the subject of gay penguins. I wanted to talk about gay penguins again, because it seems to be a topic that never ceases to be a fount of subject material.

 

In particular, I wanted to talk about book banning and the children's book And Tango Makes Three. It's a delightful book based on the true story of New York Zoo penguins Roy and Silo who paired up for mating season; both were male penguins. The zookeepers, noting that obviously Roy and Silo could not produce an egg, found an egg that was not being tended to and gave it to the couple. The egg hatched into a baby girl penguin named Tango, and they were a penguin family with two dads. It's a cute true story about some penguins, who wouldn't love it?

Well, And Tango Makes Three was the #1 most challenged book for 2006 through 2010 (except for 2009, when it was merely #2), and continues to be a target for book banners in 2025, twenty years after its initial publishing. What's so offensive?

It's conservative Christians' belief that any media that touches on the subject of LGBTQIA+ individuals (even animals!) is immediately classified as pornographic. This is a very strange viewpoint which defies logic other than the logic of bigotry.

See, apparently if you talk about two men being in love with each other, it's inherently implying the existence of gay sex, and sex is porn. Never mind that the existence of heterosexual couples likewise implies the existence of sex (especially if the couple has children), but of course, straight sex is somehow less pornographic than gay sex. Oh, and transgender people are also somehow pornographic by their very existence, even though gender is separate from sex. (Imagine if Finding Nemo had given mention of the fact that clownfish are transsexual in nature; there goes your G rating, right?)

A part of this aversion to LGBTQIA+ subject material for children is this strange idea that exposing children to the idea of gay people (and penguins!) will make them turn gay, and exposure to transgender people will make them turn transgender. This is despite the fact that science continues to assert that sexual orientation and gender are determined before birth, and the fact that children who are exposed to exclusively cishet media still turn out LGBTQ. Listen people, you're not protecting children; you may in fact be hurting children who are enriched by the existence of diversity in the media they consume. And LGBTQIA+ children (who, sorry, not sorry, but they do exist) will love to have representation in the books and films they see.

Anyway, in the end, it's not really about protecting anyone from inappropriate material, unless of course you have a warped idea about what constitutes "inappropriate" based on bigoted ideas of of what's acceptable. There used to be (and still are) a lot of people who felt that media portrayal of mixed-race couples was inappropriate. We've mostly evolved as a society past that, and we need to evolve past stigmatizing LGBTQIA+ people. And penguins.