A new children's book archive defies the right's effort to erase LGBTQ+ identity

As new fathers, Randall Tarpey-Schwed and his husband loved the bedtime ritual of reading stories with their kids, so much so that they ran out of books that contained their favorite themes: acceptance, community, and love in families like theirs.

“We read all kinds of children’s books to our kids,” San Francisco resident Tarpey-Schwed told KQED. “But I wanted to make sure that some of those showed their kind of family.”

“I’d ask them, ‘What do you want to read tonight?’” Tarpey-Schwed recalled. “Sometimes they would say, ‘Oh, I want a Papa and Daddy book.’”

Those requests set the gay dad on a quest to find every possible children’s book that fit the description. The new Tarpey-Schwed LGBT Families Children’s Book Collection is the result.

Housed in San Francisco at the Mechanics Institute, a private 19th-century library, the collection includes over 200 books, magazines, and other printed materials that feature queer characters, themes, and other diverse representations of families.

It’s one of the most thorough catalogs of early LGBTQ+ children’s literature in the United States, said Myles Cooper, a librarian at the Institute who helps manage the collection.

“This is a very fragile area of collections,” Cooper explained. “They’re being banned, even in public libraries in California. It really is an area that we need to collect and keep and maintain just for our own history.”

As well as telling the stories of LGBTQ+ families, the collection “also tells the stories of publishing,” Cooper said. “Publishers that dared to print some of those first stories that had representation of alternative families.”

Authors, publishers and librarians alike are under fire today as organized banning efforts by groups like Moms for Liberty overwhelm local libraries with demands to erase LGBTQ+ identity from children’s books sections.

The American Library Association tracked 208 unique titles in 2016 that were challenged in public schools and libraries in the United States. That number skyrocketed to 4200 titles in 2025, with nearly 40% featuring LGBTQ+ characters or people of color.

“A lot of the emphasis on book bans and censorship attacks has been around the concept of ‘protecting children,’” said Sarah Lamdan, executive director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the ALA. But “anyone who’s willing to say that And Tango Makes Three could be harmful to anyone isn’t being honest with themselves or the community that they’re addressing.”

That lightning-rod of a children’s book, published in 2005 and based on the true story of a pair of penguin dads, is one of the most banned books in the United States. It’s also a favorite of Institute librarian Cooper for its depiction of a universal desire to raise a family.

“How can you argue with that?” Cooper said. “It’s adorable, and it’s true.”

Tarpey-Schwed’s collection reaches back to 1969 with the gay coming-of-age novel, I’ll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip, and includes both classic and lesser-known LGBTQ+ stories like the lesbian moms tale Megan Went Away (1979), Heather Has Two Mommies (first self-published in 1989), Daddy’s Roommate (1990), 10,000 Dresses (2008), and Operation Marriage (2011), which involves the children of two moms rallying to get them married before the passage of California’s Proposition 8, which briefly banned marriage equality in the state.

All of the books have been challenged or banned from some school libraries.

“Oh my God, I wanna spend hours and hours and hours just looking at all these things,” said 10,000 Dresses author Marcus Ewert, “as little time capsules, as little pieces of history.”

For Tarpey-Schwed, Patricia Polacco’s In Our Mothers’ House (2009) holds a special place in his family’s reading history.

The story follows two moms throwing a block party in Berkeley, which is interrupted when a neighbor storms in and snaps at the family, scaring the kids, Tarpey-Schwed recounted.

“And then — this is going to choke me up talking about it — what happens is that every one of the neighbors, one by one, comes up and gives the family a hug,” he said. “Even though it’s a complicated and nuanced story, at the end, it cuts right through to: ‘But your family is loved.’”

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Originally published here.