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I went to speak at of a children's book festival and written by a bookstory called Reading Reptile, and one of the librarians came up to me and she said, you know, I lost my job because of your book. And I said, oh, I'm so sorry I didn't. I'm really sorry about that. And she said, no, no, I'm very proud of that. Well you can imagine how that made me feel. I mean I almost wept. I was just so so impressed with her stamina and her refusal to knuckle under.
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South, I thought being gay was the worst thing I could ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn that by seeking out our history, and what I've found are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love. In this episode, we'll meet Michael Wilhoyt, the author of
the second most banned book of the nineteen nineties. We'll learn why his children's book about two gay dads became the centerpiece for a culture war in America, and how, nearly twenty five years later, history seems to be repeating itself from my heart podcast. I'm Jordan and Solves, and this is what we loved growing up. I loved TV and the movies, but I wasn't so crazy about reading books. I dreaded all of my required reading in high school,
and I slogged my way through The Great Gatsby. Frankly, I just thought reading books and novels wasn't really my thing. Until I was twenty one. I came out and a friend of mine recommended that I read Call Me by Your Name, And once I started, I read the entire two hundred and fifty page book in one sitting, the soaring highs and the deep, deep lows of a gay first love. I felt like the author had almost written that book for me, and I felt inspired to start
reading more and more and realized I loved reading. I just never had a book that spoke to me as a child. My next guest, Michael Wilhoyt, actually wrote one of the books that I wish I had read as a kid. Michael is a cartoonist in his late seventies. In nineteen ninety he authored and illustrated one of the very first children's books that addressed gay life. His book was called Daddy's Roommate. It's about a little boy whose
parents get divorced because his dad is gay. The dad finds a loving partner that he moves in with and who the boy grows to love too. While the initial reception was positive, it became the center of a culture war in America about queer people in society. It would go on to become the second most banned book of the nineteen nineties. But Michael never set out to be radical when he wrote Daddy's Roommate. He just wanted to write a children's book, and in some ways I found
that to be radical. He wasn't trying to make a political statement. He was just trying to make kids happy. Michael always knew that he loved telling stories through his drawings, ever since he was a little boy in Oklahoma.
My name is Michael wilvoych w ill Hoige, and I'm an artist and writer.
So Michael, why don't we start at the beginning. Sure, you are very famous for authoring and illustrating this children's book, Daddy's Roommates, that has become quite infamous over time and one of the most banned books of the nineties, the second most banned book of the nineties. But was that what you always wanted to do even when you were a kid. Did you always want to be an illustrator or a writer?
Oh? Yes, yes, I was an artist from the very beginning. I was raised by my grandparents, and my grandfather was the president of an insurance company, and he had all these outdated forms of blank backs. So I had stacks and stacks at drawing paper, and they just gave me a few pencils and other paper and let me go. When I was a kid, I made I was drawing fish and I made one with dots all ever, and I called it a mazlefish, and everybody thought that was
so cute and the durable and everything. And I'm just really real merry and bright kid. Also a gay one, but I didn't realize that then.
Well, how and where did you grow up? You said you grew up with your grandparents, right, tell me about that.
Yes, I grew up in Hobart, Oklahoma. It was then a very attractive and a welcoming town. I was always I was a churchgoer. I'm not anymore, but I grew up thinking that people were worth a good bit more than sometimes that were given credit for. I was raised by great, great people. My parents married very very early. My mother was sixteen and my father was seventeen, and they ran off to Texas to get married and I
was already on the way. Oh wow, Yeah, apparently they loved each other very much, but they were just too young to be parents. So anyway, I don't really remember any time that I lived with my parents. Very early on, I stayed with my maternal grandparents.
What was it like, you know, growing up gay in Oklahoma in the fifties.
I didn't honestly know, because I didn't know I was gay. That came along a lot considerably later on. In fact, when I was a kid, I I was. I was bonkers over girls, I mean crazy over them from the from the very beginning. I fell in love in kindergarten with this with this one girl with whom I was still close friends at seventy eight, and I noticed boys. You know, there was a kid that moved to town in the third grade that I suddenly became just really
enraptured with. But it wasn't until until high school I really fell sort of in love with one of my classmates. He was straight and a nice guy. But and I never acted on it or anything like that. But I never thought I was gay. I didn't when I when I thought of Bill, I didn't think of of a stripping off and going to it. It was, I don't know, just sort in effecting.
And when did you end up coming out? Like what age were you when you ended up coming out?
I was in my late twenties. It wasn't until something snapped. I would go down to Georgetown some I was living in the Washington suburbs. But there was a guy that ran a bookstore in Georgetown and he was very openly gay, very attractive in sort of a wolfish manner. And I kept going into the shop and one night I went in and he said, you know you're interested in me, aren't you? And I said, well yes, And he said, well, I would love to help you, but you see, I'm
a Buddhist and I'm trying to negate all desires. Wow. Yeah, So I thought, well the hell of that. So I thought, well, all right, game on. So I walked about three blocks down Connecticut Avenue and walked into a gay bar and met somebody and his name is Bob. He had sort of a short, dark mustache, of a bright orange of oakswagon, and he came home with me and we had a lot of fun. It was quite a surprise. And then I kept doing this, you know, going out and finding people.
And then finally I was in a play with a guy named Artie, and he was very openly gay, wore buttons of and so forth. Say don't try to change me in all this business. And he was immediately attractive, and he was very cute too, blonde with mustache. And anyway, we were in this play together, and after rehearsal, i'd sometimes ask him if he would get to like to get together for a drink. And one night, already and I went to bed together, and I thought, all right,
this is the way things are. This is not a phase I'm going through. If it is, it's one hell of a phase.
Oh you still thought up until this point, I'm just going through a phase.
Yeah. Oh yeah, Wow.
So you weren't really out yet.
I was not out yet. I was out. Two days later. I called my friends Bob and Lisa and and I was I knew I had to I had to come out to somebody, So why not my best friends? So I called up and I said, hey, can I come over and talk for a while? And Lisa said what's wrong? And I said, well, what do you mean? And I said, well, uh, I'll tell you when I get over. She said, do you have cancer? And I said no, I don't have cancer. So I said no, I I have come to the
conclusion that I am homosexual. I couldn't quite say the word, gave in for some reason, much simpler word, and she said, is that all? And so I came out to Bob and Lisa and they were so completely, so wonderfully accepting. They just just said, people are going to love you no matter what I mean. I could. I almost get teary thinking about it. This was the happiest night of my life. They also gave me some really good advice. They said, you don't have to come out to everybody,
just come out to the people who matter. So I thought, well, that's pretty good advice. So the next night I started calling everybody in my family. I called my sister, I call my aunt Judy, I called my cousins, and I did not call either of my grandmothers, both of whom were still living at that time, because I figured they were as older people. They might be upset or worry about me, but everybody was completely accepting. It was wonderful, it was it was thrilling. I thought, why didn't I
do this before? In fact, I only have two real regrets in my life that I didn't come out earlier, and then I gave up piano in the third grade.
What was the feeling that you got when Bob and Lisa had given you such warm reception.
Well, I thought that they have opened the floodgates for me. I went out and had a lot of fun. I mean, it was Washington in the seventies, and my dance card was always filled, if I may put it that way.
While living in Washington, D. C. Michael became a contractor for the US Navy, creating medical illustrations for them, posters, caricatures, and murals. He loved his job, but he had a dream from a very early age of writing children's books. What was some of the artwork you were doing for the Navy.
I did a lot of medical I did cartoons and caricatures, very good cartoonist by the way, and caricaturists, calligraphy, signs, posters, exhibits, murals. I painted murals in the Pentagon at Fort Knox. It any kind of artwork, It's wonderful. That's what I was. I was not a gay man or an American or I was an artist, and I was a working artist, and I loved it.
Well, now, where does Daddy's roommate come into this, because it sounds like you had a full time job.
While I was in the Washington area, I started doing cartoons for the Washington Blade.
What is the Washington Blade.
It's a gay newspaper. I think it's still publishing. Don Michael's, the editor, said I would you like to do a cartoon strip for us, caricatures of gay men and women and gay icons. So I did, and over the years I did about I probably did five hundred or more caricatures for The Blade. I didn enough cartoons that I thought that maybe they should be put into a collection. So Sasha Allison and Allison Publications on Plimpton Street in Boston.
I went down and I said, I'm a cartoonist and I here are some of my cartoons and would you like to publish them? He said, well, I'm not sure. We're thinking about doing another collection, but let's see how this works out. And in the meantime, could you design a cover or two for us? And later on Sasha contacted me and he said, you know, I've been thinking about doing a line of children's books with a gay theme. Wow,
I'm gonna call it Alice in Wonderland. So I said, well, all right, I think I can come up with an idea. So I went home, and I did not come up with a great idea, but I did come up with the title Daddy's Roommate. Didn't know what it was gonna do with it. It just sort of popped into my head.
It's nineteen eighty nine and Michael is forty three. He had suddenly gotten the opportunity to fulfill a childhood dream of his writing a children's book, and he had just thought of the title Daddy's Roommate. Little did he know that title would cause a firestorm in American life.
So one day I was I was taking off lunch and I brew over to Wellesley and I there's a little restaurant there called Popovers, and I like to go in there and have their pop vers and coffee and then go back to the office. So I was sitting there reading a novel and eating my popover and suddenly the book flashed into my head complete like I'm Minerva out of the House of the you know, out of
the brow of Zeus. So anyway, I grabbed a couple of napkins and I wrote it out, and I met grabbed a couple more napkins and made notes for illustrations. And then that night I went went home and I collated everything, and I made some additions and changes and took it into Sasha and he said, let's go with it.
Wow, Well, what was your intention in writing Daddy's Roommate?
Simply to get a children's book published. I knew that there was an audience out there for and I thought that was great. But I did not go into it with thinking, all right, I'm going to change the world. I guess I'm not really a pioneer and I'm not a firebrand. I mean I I just wanted to write an illustrate children's book. As it turned out, it was successful, and I was benefit was finding out that these kids
benefited by these books. I thought it would be a book for a season or two and be forgotten, as most children's books are. But Newsweek did a little story on it, just a little blurb and my cousin Paula called me and said, you're a Newsweek and I said, wow. I looked at that up and sure enough, there it was. And it was a very positive old story. It didn't go into a lot of detail, but at that moment things started to pop.
In January nineteen ninety one, Newsweek published an article about Daddy's roommate titled Daddy's Out of the Closet. It reported on the some seven million American kids at the time that had gay parents and the yearning of those parents for children's stories that reflected their lives. Shortly after that article, a massive backlash ensued. According to the American Library Association, Daddy's became the second most challenged book of the nineteen nineties.
It sparked fearce school board debates about parental control across America. In Oregon and Colorado, conservative groups used the book to inspire ballot measures that would strip legal protections for gay people, and in the cases where Americans across the country tried to have the book banned from public libraries, librarians pushed
back and the ACLU defended them. The book triggered a fear that mainstream America had people didn't want their kids to be gay, and the prevailing thought at the time was that being gay was a choice, and that you could be persuaded or convinced or recruited into homosexuality. In fact, Michael's publisher wrote an opinion piece in The New York
Times defending the book. At the height of the controversy, a new culture war in America was born, and Daddy's roommate and the librarians fighting to protect it were at the very center of it all. The Newsweek article was positive. So when did the backlash begin?
Almost immediately after Alison Publications would keep me posted with what was happening, and then suddenly it was all the media. So libraries were being challenged. There was a library in Wichita Falls, Texas. There was a local minister, Reverend Robert Jeffries, who challenged the book, In fact, checked it out the
library and refused to return it. Linda Hughes, the librarian in which it all falls, challenged him and made it a cause, and suddenly people were sending in multiple copies of the book for the library.
To keep it on the shelves.
Exactly. Yeah, And they went back and forth like this for a long time, and finally it went to the Supreme Court. Now whether it's the US Supreme Court or the Texas Supreme Court, I'm not sure, but it went to the court and it was adjudicated that the book could stay in library. So I assume that this Jeffrey's character went off to Luca's wounds, But I've never heard anything more about him after that.
What was the main argument that people were making against Daddy's roommate.
Haven't you heard? We were trying to turn children gay? They were offended that it was published in the first place. They thought it was I was trying to indoctrinate children into the gay lifestyle. Oh god, I mean, you can't turn somebody gay. You know, if that were possible, you could turn people straight. And nobody has ever quite affected that as far as I'm concerned.
Well, it sounds like, you know, all these librarians were on your side.
Absolutely.
What was that like for you, like like a block?
I mean, it's just an army of librarians refused to knuckle under to the book banners. I went to speak at of a children's book festival and run by a bookstore called Reading Reptile and one of the librarians came up to me and she said, you know, I lost my job because of your book. And I said, oh, I'm so sorry I didn't I'm really sorry about that. And she said, no, no, I'm very proud of that. Well you can imagine how that made me feel. I mean, I always wept. I was just so so impressed with her,
her stamina and her refusal to knuckle under. But that's that's the way with all these libraries. I call them the foot soldiers of the First Amendment. That's it precisely what it is, freedom of speech, the most sacred thing in the Constitution.
What was it like sort of being in the midst of all of this criticism.
I was delighted and frankly a bit amused at the at all of it. I did get a death threat wow, oh yeah, yeah, yeah over the phone and for real, oh yeah yeah. And so for the first week or so I was a bit careful walking past the open windows in my in my my condo.
What did they say to you? And how did that happen?
You should be shot and we're the ones to do it. Wow? Yeah.
And you know, I guess, like you mentioned on one hand, you're getting death threats and on the other hand you're getting librarians standing.
Up for you.
Oh yes, yeah, What was that like for you to kind of be in the middle.
Of all of this. I was enjoying it. I really realized why. I was sent to New York to film a segment in New Jersey called One Broadcast Plaza, and it was right after the book to have been published. There were other people there. There were a male couple with children, and there was a single man with a daughter, and he was the one who said that his daughter kept my book under her pillow at night.
Eventually, the controversy around Daddy's roommate died down, and throughout the twenty first century, gay rights made huge strides, including the legalization of gay marriage and representation of high ranking gay people in Fortune five hundred companies, the media, and the government. But now there seems to be a new
campaign on book bands that's growing. According to pen America, an organization that tracks book bands, there were ten thousand book bands last year, a two hundred percent increase from the previous year. Overwhelmingly, according to PENN, the authors of those books are women, black people, and LGBT people. Like many of those banned books, Daddy's Roommate was seen as political when it came out, and probably still is to many people today. But again for Michael, he was never
trying to be political. He was just trying to write a children's book. There's something, you know, kind of a little radical about being an LGBT person and doing something inherently political by being LGBT. But you weren't trying to make anything political life. No, no, no, you were just living your life, living.
My life and enjoying it. Yeah, And so I was doing a little good. I was. I was pleased about that. In fact, I think I think that was something that I have not been altogether forthcoming about. I was. I was proud of having done this and having made a difference in some children's lives. And I've done other children's books since then, but that's that's the one that that
people will always remember. I mean, if I were discover a cure for cancer, my on my on the obituary would read that his roommate author dies also cured cancer.
Pen America, they're one of the organizations attracts these kinds of book bands that they just reported that there have been over ten thousand bands since twenty twenty one. You know, I'm just curious that so many of those books kind of focus on themes that your book covered. Oh yes, yeah, and you know, what do you think about that?
Well, I'm deeply offended. I hate it. I just hate it. I loathe censorship. I don't think anything should be censored.
And why not.
Because I believe in the free play of ideas. It's one of the things that I that I just took into my mother's milk. I guess, I don't know. I just feel like you everybody should have the right to read anything they want, and I don't think reading anything is going to hurt anybody.
Well, you know, young people have been at the center of protesting against these bands, and you've been through this before. What can young people learn from what you went through?
These book bands have to be fought tooth and nail. They can learn what their parents would would already tell them, to keep fighting and believe in your believe in yourself, and don't let anybody tell you that that something is wrong when you know it is not.
Well, yeah, tell me about that. I mean, what's your message to all of the young authors that may face some of these bands as they inevitably sort of embark on the exact same course you did, maybe not inherently intending to write about something political, but by writing about their life it it is political and may face bands.
Write what do you like, and don't try to edit yourself, don't try to please or displease anybody writing a self expression. But it's also communication, and if you have something to communicate, do it and let the chips fall where they may be. Bold, be brave, come out early the closet. The closet's the enemy in a way.
I kind of think, you know Daddy's reommate in some way. I know you didn't mean for it to be political, but or or even have some grand intention in shaping people's lives. But in a lot of ways, I think it indirectly does help people come out of the closet.
I hope, so, I really do.
When you wrote the book, were you sort of hoping that you, in maybe some way would give people the same feeling that Bob and Lisa gave to you?
Oh? Yes, yes, yes.
And last question, Michael, what's your favorite line in daddy'smant.
Oh gosh, I asked Mommy, what gay met and she said being gay is just one more kind of of love.
But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsal. New episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in to tell your story, email us at Buttweloved at gmail dot com, or you can send me a message on Instagram or TikTok at your underscore gooin solve this. We are a production of The Outspoken podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts. But We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers are Joey pat Emily Meronoff, and Christina Loranger. Our
executive producers are me Maya Howard and Katrina Norvil. Original music by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Bronson and Roquel Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.