COUNTY VIEW: The gay penguins that divided America

It began as what the authors claim was an innocuous children’s picture book 20 years ago. But now, two decades on, the story of the two gay penguins looks set to make its way to the highest courts of the United States.
It all started in the penguin enclosure of Central Park zoo in New York where, at mating time, the residents pair off in male-female couplings to do their business. However, Rob Gramzay, the penguin keeper, noticed that two males were spending most of their time together. So close did the relationship of Roy and Silo become that they built their own nest and proceeded to mimic their heterosexual peers by ‘hatching’ on an egg shaped rock. When Mr Gramzay gave them a real egg retrieved from another penguin couple, the two males took turns incubating the egg, which eventually hatched to produce a female chick, which the zookeeper called Tango.
So far, so fairly uneventful. But then, the story came to the attention of a writer from the New York Times, who promptly wrote an eloquent piece under the heading ‘The Love that Dare Not Squeak Its Name’. That story caught the eye of two gay men living in the city – Dr Justin Richardson, a psychiatrist with a particular interest in gay and lesbian mental health, and Peter Parnell, a scriptwriter who worked on, among other projects ‘The West Wing’.
The pair set to work and within weeks the first draft of ‘And Tango Makes Three’ – an illustrated children’s book for three to eight year olds – was ready for the publishers. Whether the authors paid heed to the first red flag of the operation, when their preferred illustrator declined on religious grounds, is debatable, but they could hardly have envisaged the extent to which the story would become a weapon of the culture wars.
The book was well received by reviewers and readers. Teachers and educationalists in general found little to criticise. A number of prestigious awards came its way. But the backlash was about to begin.
A year after its launch, two parents in Missouri complained at a public library; it was reshelved from the children’s section to adult non-fiction. Georgia followed suit, and in Florida, a number of school boards banned it completely. The social conservatives’ campaign was taken overseas; in Hong Kong, the book was banned; in Singapore, the authorities ordered all public copies to be pulped, relenting only after a public outcry.
The American Library Association tracks ‘challenges’ to books, that is, bids to have them removed or to have access to them restricted. By that measure, ‘And Tango Makes Three’ has been challenged in 32 American states, making it the most banned picture book in US culture. (While it figures highly on the list of objectionable books, compiled by parental watchdog organisations, so too does Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’). Its challengers were greatly heartened to learn that the union of Roy and Silo did not last long, the latter having found a long-term relationship with a female. The revelation that Mr Gramzay was himself in a same-sex union fuelled claims that he had been promoting the gay agenda all along.
But there is pushback as well. The book’s authors are suing two school boards in Florida and seeking a judicial ruling that the banning of the book was unconstitutional. They also challenge Florida’s stringent ‘Don’t Say Gay’ school law, which severely restricts instruction in sexual instruction or gender identity. Supporting gestures for the book include penguin figurines atop gay-wedding cakes and students attending proms in penguin costumes.
Roy and Silo, alas, have long departed for the great ice-floe in the sky, but their legacy still remains to be hammered out in the highest law courts of the United States.