"Where the Wild Things Are Gay"

Tomorrow is Judy Garland’s birthday. It is also Maurice Sendak’s birthday. I’m not exactly torn, but I did want to share this little piece I wrote about Where the Wild Things Are, so I’ll do it today so it doesn’t get lost. I tried very hard to get this published, because I thought it was good and completely original, but I got no bites. It did, however, get cited (as an unpublished manuscript) in a couple of scholarly books on children’s literature, which I’m proud of. I’ve entertained thoughts of rewriting it without all the footnotes, as more of a magazine-style essay. Maybe some day.

Anyway, here it is:

Where the Wild Things Are Gay

A young boy is at odds with his parents. He feels like he doesn’t belong. When he tries to express his true nature, he is punished, banished, abandoned by his family. He runs away to a place where he can be himself, a place where there are others like him. At first, the others are threatening, but they recognize that the boy is one of them. They welcome him into their lush, exotic world of all-night dancing and howling at the moon. The boy is ecstatic but eventually becomes tired and homesick. He says goodbye to his new friends, who are sad to see him go, and he returns home to make peace with his family. Most homosexual men who came out any time since the turn of the 20th century will recognize this as the “coming out story.” It is also the plot of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

The coming out story that gay men tell contains certain basic elements which changed little from the 1930s, when Sendak was growing up, to the 1960s, when Where the Wild Things Are was published. They include a) a feeling in early childhood of being “somehow different” usually accompanied by feelings of shame and fear, b) later, usually in puberty, more specific feelings of same-sex desire, c) some attempt to express these desires, which causes conflict with parents and community, d) leaving or being ejected from home, e) finding acceptance in a new “acquired family,” and f) some attempt to reconcile the new life with the old. This story, which has by its repetition through generations taken on the quality of myth, parallels the trajectory of Max’s story.

Julia Mickenberg, in “Jews in American Children’s Literature,” writes that early in his career

Sendak was told by publishers that his characters weren’t “American” enough, and he was urged to study popular children’s books: what he saw were kids who looked nothing like him, in a world far removed from his own childhood experiences: “The books were filled with blond children with little turned-up  noses, who all bounced about in poppy fields. And my drawings were of naughty, bug-eyed immigrant kids who looked like me,” he told a reporter for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles in September 2002 (Mickenberg 16).

If we can say that Sendak put his Jewishness into the character of Max, can we also speculate that his queerness is there as well? “… I am trying to draw the way children feel – or rather, the way I know I felt as a child,” says Sendak in a 1966 New Yorker profile (Hentoff 39). By this logic, I propose a reading of Where the Wild Things Are as a fairy tale for homosexual boys. 

The coming out saga starts in early childhood. Gay men who grew up in the early twentieth century often remember tentative erotic experiences as early as five or six years old. These memories are often associated with discomfort, pain, confusion, and the knowledge that these new feelings cannot be shared with parents. The similarity of these childhood memories quickly becomes obvious in compilations of oral histories such as Keith Vacha’s Quiet Fire: Memoirs of Older Gay Men and Nancy and Casey Adair’s Word is Out: “At about seven or eight years old I was very well aware of my differences; I knew I preferred male companions to female” (Vacha 121). “I remember the pain of being different” (Vacha 12). “I just knew somehow that I was terribly different, an outcast” (Adair 55). Sometimes the feelings are more explicit: “I was looking through some old pictures about a month ago and found one of me at the age of seven. I was sitting in a canoe with a banner across me like a Miss America. It’s the nelliest thing you ever saw. I thought, ‘My God, how can a kid at seven know what he’s going to be?’ But I must have. I can remember when I was about six or seven being groped by a guy who ran a construction crew. Then I remember falling madly in love with a kid in grade school. God, he hurt my feelings! I kissed him once and he started calling me a sissy” (Vacha 170). Sendak’s pictures depicting Max’s misbehavior suggest that it arises from sexual energy, as pointed out by Roderick McGillis in The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature: “Freudians might well gaze knowingly at the nail Max hammers and the crack that it penetrates in the wall. In fact, for those who look for this sort of thing, the book is replete with images of phallic aggressiveness: the strong vertical lines of erect trees, bedposts, Max’s scepter, his ship’s mast, and the horns of some of the Wild Things” (McGillis 80).

Child psychologist and fairy tale theorist Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, writes that a story for children must

give full recognition to his difficulties, while at the same time suggesting solutions to the problems which perturb him. In short, it must at one and the same time relate to all aspects of his personality—and this without ever belittling but, on the contrary, giving full credence to the seriousness of the child’s predicaments, while simultaneously promoting confidence in himself and in his future” (Bettelheim 5).

But in 1964 when Where the Wild Things Are came out, a boy’s nascent recognition that he was sexually attracted to other boys would likely have aroused revulsion in his parents rather than a desire to help the child integrate that part of his personality. Patricia Cohen, in a 2008 New York Times interview with Sendak, noted that his life has been scrutinized in hundreds of interviews in his long career and asked if there is anything he has never been asked. He answered, “Well, that I’m gay. All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never knew.” Being out to friends and colleagues but not to family was common not only among homosexuals of Sendak’s generation but until at least as recently as the generation coming out in the sixties, the time of Where the Wild Things Are (Adair 95, 107, 128, 180).

Though children are now, for better or worse, exposed to many images of homosexuals and homosexuality in the popular media, in the mid-sixties there were few, and they were negative. Homosexuality was the monster so horrible it was kept hidden from children, and even from adults except to warn or alarm them. A child who was sophisticated or curious enough to read his parents’ magazines would have come away terrified if he recognized himself as one of the freaks described in such articles as “Homosexuality: Sin or Disease?” (Christian Century 1099), “Homosexuals Need Help” (“Society should not be misled by propaganda efforts of organized homosexual groups trying to gain ‘acceptability’ for homosexuality, a psychotherapist warns”) (Science News-Letter 102), or a 1964 Time article about two men in North Carolina who were sentenced to long prison terms for committing a single homosexual act between consenting adults. The article notes that one of the men’s sentences was “twice as long as the one North Carolina gives an armed robber, three times longer than a train robber’s, 30 times longer than a drunken driver’s” (Time 1964). The following year Time published the only slightly more encouraging, “Psychiatry: Homosexuals Can Be Cured” (Time 1965). A breakthrough 1964 article in The New York Times, “Speaking Frankly On a Once Taboo Subject,” said that though it was not known how many homosexuals there were in the United States, what was “far more important is that many – perhaps most – are desperately unhappy about it. … They avoid normal sexual activity because they have developed overwhelming fears of their sexual capability and enjoyment with members of the opposite sex. Having been thus cut off from the normal channels for romantic and sexual gratification, homosexuals seek it with members of their own sex. Nevertheless, although basic sexual urges may thus be fulfilled to varying degrees, a feeling of complete attainment of romantic longings probably never occurs” (Times 106).

If gay kids did not pick up the message that they were criminal, sick, evil, and destined to spend their lives miserable and alone, they picked up no message at all. Even Dr. Spock, whose popular books on childcare encouraged post-WWII parents to take a softer, more tolerant approach toward their children, and who addressed at length the sensitive topic of child sexuality, did not mention even the possibility of same-sex orientation in children. It is not surprising that a homosexual child would begin to recognize that he is an alien in his own family.

The next leg of the coming out journey occurs at adolescence or young adulthood when the boy makes some attempt to express his sexual desire and is thrown out or leaves home. When Max puts on his wolf suit and brings out his wild side, he is sent to his room without supper. Even recent studies, in a time of increased tolerance and understanding, show that teen runaways are disproportionately homosexual. A study on the impact of Lawrence v. Texas (the 2003 Supreme Court decision which effectively invalidated laws against sodomy in the United States) in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology notes that “[i]n major urban centers like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, up to half of all of [teenagers who live on the street] may self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT). Nationally, between eleven and forty percent of homeless youth are thought to be LGBT. … [M]ost homeless LGBT youth have been kicked out of or have run away from home…” (Wardenski 1363). Of course, not all gay boys are thrown or forced out of their homes. Many, like Max, leave of their own accord. One of the subjects of Word is Out says that he “decided the best thing I could do would be to leave so as not to disgrace my family, and they wouldn’t have to deal with it” (Adair 5).

At the culmination, the climax, of the coming out myth, the boy seeks and discovers, in a bar, or at a peace rally or protest march, maybe a gay pride parade, that there are others like him. The despair of abandonment changes to a flush of freedom to be himself for the first time in his life. “I … went to this bar – when I was about eighteen – and I learned that it was a bar full of people all of whom liked to have sex with each other. It really opened my eyes. I said, ‘Wow! Look at all these people relating to each other, and they’re having fun… this is for me! I’m one of these people” (Adair 69). Max is giddy, delighted to be leaving home. His frown disappears as soon as the trees start growing in his room, and his grin grows from impish to content by the time he’s on a boat headed across the ocean. And the wild things are thrilled to see him. Even before he subdues them with his eyes, they are smiling expectantly. The text tells us they are roaring “their terrible roars,” but they’re smiling ear to ear. Max’s conquering of the wild things reads more like seduction than subjugation. The wild things are playful and coy, never really threatening.

Though Where the Wild Things Are is known now as one of the most popular and praised children’s books ever published, it was controversial at first. Librarians and parents were afraid the monsters would traumatize young readers. Bruno Bettelheim articulated these fears in a review of the book in Ladies’ Home Journal:

What [Sendak] failed to understand is the incredible fear it evokes in the child to be sent to bed without supper, and this by the first and foremost giver of food and security—his mother. The basic anxiety of the child is desertion. … We’re never going to get a child to believe that he’s really in control of his fantasies if, at the very beginning, the stage is set to show him that if you look clearly at your fantasies and are open about them, you’ll be deserted (Ladies’ 48).

Bettelheim is right that children fear desertion; but, what better antidote than reassurance that there is a place where he won’t be deserted for expressing himself fully? (Later, Bettelheim, after writing The Uses of Enchantment in which he formulated his ideas about the psychological function of fairy tales for children, changed his mind about Where the Wild Things Are.) The fear that the monsters will scare children, expressed in these early reviews, is a parent’s fear. Kenneth Kidd, in  his essay “Wild Things and Wolf Dreams: Maurice Sendak, Picturebook Psychologist,” suggests, by way of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, that Sendak’s way around this parental fear is through the role of an “eccentric, gifted uncle”:

… I suggest that authors for boys especially tend to adopt an avuncular sort of relation to their young subjects and readers, presenting themselves as lay boyologists or character builders.  “Forget the Name of the Father,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick urges us. “Think about your uncles and aunts” (Sedgwick 59).  In Sedgwick’s reading, the “avunculate” or the social formation of aunt and uncle (which may or may not involve blood relation) can provide relief from and alternative wisdom to the traditionally nuclear family, especially for queer kids (Kidd 225).

Sendak has often spoken of himself as an adult who, unlike parents, understands what it is like to be a child.

The traditional psychological interpretation, as expressed by Sarah Gilead in “Magic Abjured: Closure in Children's Fantasy Fiction” says that Max conjures up the dream of the wild things in order to confront and befriend them as they represent his anti-social anger. In the end, Gilead says, “the dissolution of the dreamworld implies that the dreamer has introjected the messages conveyed and can now achieve intrapsychic and communal integration” (Gilead 280). I do not mean to discount this more universally appealing interpretation of the story: that Max takes his journey in order to make peace with his inner monsters. But by following the trajectory of the coming out myth, Sendak has created a tale that can advise and comfort young gay boys. Bettelheim says that “as with all great art, the fairy tale’s deepest meaning will be different for each person, and different for the same person at various moments of his life. The child will extract different meanings from the same fairy tale, depending on his interests and needs of the moment” (Bettelheim 12). Max’s tale would have been a great comfort to a child negotiating a world of contingent approval and conditional love, to know of the possibility of a secret erotic world of wild pleasure where love and approval might be chaotic, dark, and exhausting, but not conditional, not contingent on conformity to a heterosexual ideal. At the end of the story, Max goes home reassured that, no matter how much he may feel at odds with his family, there is another family, his family of wild things like him who dance and howl with joy in a land far away but reachable. Returning home, he stands at the prow of his boat looking serious, calm, and satisfied.

Notwithstanding his mother’s gesture of forgiveness (his supper waiting for him upon his return), there is no reason to assume that, in the end, Max has left behind his wild friends in favor of home and heteronormativity. Perhaps he will always feel a tension between two worlds, as many gay men have felt torn between their biological and acquired families. Max is home, for now, but he’s still wearing his wolf suit. And the moon shining through the window suggests that it was not “just a dream,” that the world of wild things will always be available.

Works Cited

Adair, Nancy, and Casey Adair. Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives. San Francisco: New Glide Publications, 1978. Print.

Bettelheim, Bruno. Rev. of Where the Wild Things Are, by Bruno Bettelheim. Ladies’ Home Journal Mar. 1969: 48. Print.

- - -. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Vintage Books, 1975. Print.

Bieber, Irving. “Speaking Frankly on a Once Taboo Subject.” The New York Times 23 Aug. 1964: n. pag. Print.

Cohen, Patricia. “Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are.” nytimes.com. The New York Times, 10 Sept. 2008. Web. 13 Aug. 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/‌2008/‌09/‌10/‌arts/‌design/‌10sendak.html?_r=2&sq=sendak&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print>.

Gilead, Sarah. “Magic Abjured: Closure in Children’s Fantasy Fiction.” PMLA 106.2 (1991): 277-293. Print.

Hentoff, Nat. “Profiles—Among the Wild Things.” The New Yorker 22 Jan. 1966: 39-40, 66, 70. Print.

“Homosexuals Need Help.” Science News-Letter 13 Feb. 1965: 102. Print.

Kidd, Kenneth. “Wild Things and Wolf Dreams: Maurice Sendak, Picturebook Psychologist.” The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. Ed. Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

“The Law: Out of the Briar Patch.” Time. Time, 25 Dec. 1964. Web. 13 Aug. 2009. <http://www.time.com/‌time/‌magazine/‌article/‌0,9171,830980,00.html>.

McGillis, Roderick. The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Print.

Mickenberg, Julia. "Jews in American Children's Literature," Jews in American Popular Culture, ed. Paul Buhle. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2007

Overholser, Winfred, M.D. “Homosexuality: Sin or Disease.” The Christian Century 11 Sept. 1963: 1099-1101. Print.

“Psychiatry: Homosexuals Can Be Cured.” Time. Time, 12 Feb. 1965. Web. 13 Aug. 2009. <http://www.time.com/‌time/‌magazine/‌article/‌0,9171,840542,00.html>.

Sendak, Maurice. Caldecott & Co. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. Print.

Vacha, Keith. Quiet Fire: Memoirs of Older Gay Men. Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1985. Print.

Wardenski, Joseph J. “A Minor Exception: The Impact of Lawrence v. Texas on LGBT Youth.” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 95.4: 1363-1410. Print.