In 1990, same-sex marriage wasn’t even a blip on our cultural radar and men and women were barred from openly serving in the United States military. In 1990, in Eastern Europe, former Communist strongholds were collapsing with dizzying speed and the year’s Best Picture was Driving Miss Daisy. And in 1990, 25 years ago, a children’s book was published for children called Heather Has Two Mommies that, even to this day, has sparked controversy, misunderstanding and a recognition that so-called ‘alternative lifestyles’ were gaining ground.
“I grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island without books about Jews. Also, the prescribed lives that I saw in my childhood were not for me. I didn’t want to marry a man and have children. Yet I didn’t come out until I was 27, and when I did I realized that many people would have a difficult time accepting me,” author Leslea Newman told JewishExponent.com. “When I was growing up, women were not allowed on the bimah,” she added, referring to the section of the synagogue from which the Torah is read. “Now you can have two moms on the bimah.”
The iconic children’s book was initially self-published but was eventually picked up by Alyson Publications and has sold nearly 35,000 copies. Since publishing her first book in 1986, a young adult novel about a young woman struggling with an eating disorder and her sexual identity, Newman has written over 60 books. Many of them are children’s titles and, although she does not have children of her own, she finds that in writing for kids she encounters “emotions that are so raw and personal the child in me needs to be soothed.”
That twenty-five years have passed has not, not unsurprisingly, dampened the consternation and outrage in schools and libraries across America. Over the years, there have been attempts to remove Heather from library shelves. In one instance, copies of the book were returned with the pages glued shut. In Texas, a woman checked out all the copies in her library and refused to return them, according to the article.
Leslea Newman has been married two her wife of almost 25 years, legally since 2004 when Massachusetts was the first state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriages.
