A Town Full of Babies: Queer Life and Children's Media (Patreon)

Image taken from Strange Suspense Stories #60, artist Jack Kirby, pub. Fawcett Comics, August 1962

Over the past two decades, “adult who consumes primarily children’s media” has gone from a reviled fringe identity — think Bronies, adult male fans of the My Little Pony revival, monopolizing cons and fanart forums meant for actual children — to a more or less normative way for grown people to relate to art. In the queer community especially, shows like Rebecca Sugar’s Steven Universe, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Noelle Stevenson’s She-Ra and the Princesses of Power have found significant cultural purchase among older teens and adults well into their 30s and 40s. That this particular segment of fandom has often turned to intense online harassment when upset over their chosen fiction is a separate issue addressed in part by my piece on online puritanism. But why, in the first place, are queer adults forming such intense emotional bonds to children’s media, and what effect does a steady diet of soft-edged pastel art have on the adult mind?

The uniform visual inoffensiveness of such art presents its own questions: if we’re never exposed to images which cause discomfort, does that impact our ability to feel empathy for people society deems outcast or unattractive? Exposure through fiction to the inner lives of people we consciously or unconsciously consider offensive is a powerful tool in expanding our ability to connect with others, to learn to automatically acknowledge their full humanity. The near-universal acceptance in creative circles that all fictional characters should be, at a minimum, easy on the eyes is an aspect of representation in art which often goes undiscussed. Imagine stripping The Sopranos of James Gandolfini’s deviated septum and hulking, heavy frame, or Perfume of Grenouille’s insectile repugnance. So much is lost by accepting the standardization of bodies that goes hand in hand with feel-good media.

This unwillingness to engage ugliness is troublesome no matter a piece of artwork’s audience. Children must be exposed to things that trigger learned, taught, and unconscious disgust so that they can begin to unpick society’s toxic conditioning and more fully and naturally accept themselves and others. The matter of intended audience is sticky in its own right, and while there’s an argument to be made that creators of children’s art are banking on and catering directly to adult fans, it’s ultimately beside the point, which is that adults are consuming this work and treating it as an acceptable resting place for one’s tastes. Here I’ll take a moment to stress that enjoying a children’s cartoon is not a bad thing. I thought Over the Garden Wall was delightful, as a teenager I loved The Last Airbender, but I recognize that at a fundamental level these shows were not made for me and do not challenge my adult faculties. They’re art for children which I happen to enjoy, just as I enjoy reading Peter Pan and The Hobbit out loud to the kids in my life. When you bring adult focus to bear on art for children the results are disturbing, and the reverse — difficult subject matter repackaged as safely and palatably as possible — is often clinical, dull, and unengaging.

At a certain point, if you’re interested in becoming conversant in art and able to analyze it in good faith and with functional insight, you have to start challenging yourself. You have to watch and read things more emotionally and morally complicated than a Goofus and Gallant comic, and to accept discomfort as part of a mature experience of art. Does that mean you have to go out right now and watch Cronenberg’s The Fly and Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover if you want to understand art? No, but it does mean you should probably stop smugly claiming that Gravity Falls is a more thematically and emotionally complex and coherent story than Game of Thrones or The Sopranos. Letting go of the idea that children’s media is somehow purer or richer than art for adults is a crucial part of growing up, of developing an adult sensibility and learning to see things in a more nuanced way than the confines of an 11-21 minute cartoon which can’t include sex or a realistic conception of violence can express.

In a world where the oppression-fueled capitalist dream of self-sufficiency in which so many of us were raised has now fully and irrevocably collapsed for even the comparatively privileged, adulthood can feel elusive, even threatening. Perhaps in clinging to children’s art, in insisting that it’s for us, actually, and that it can nourish and challenge us as fully as adult art can, we’re deferring that frightening responsibility. Perhaps we’re trying to reclaim a childhood lost to abuse, or to poverty trauma. As queers, many of us live with a sense of having been robbed of something early in our lives. Raised by straight cis parents, kept in the closet by fear or ignorance or outright coercion, growing increasingly aware with every passing year of the parts of ourselves that have vanished into that sense of wrong, that false, unrealized life. Of course we want it back. Of course we want the tenderness and carefree wildness life denied us. But no one gets a second childhood, and an hour with any six-year-old should tell anyone all they need to know about whether or not an adult should be held to the same standards of reason and responsibility to which we hold our children.

In seeking to hold onto something that’s already gone, to warp ourselves around a stunted recreation of our childhoods, we’re missing out on the complex joys of adulthood. If along the way we find solace or self-expression in children’s art then that’s all to the good, but without a relationship to adult art there’s a hard limit on how far that solace can bring you and how much of yourself you can perceive and puzzle out. Infantilizing ourselves cuts us off from a whole world of potential, not just in our relationship to art but in our ways of moving through the world. As queers we have a long, rich history of raising and caring for one another in ways the straight world refuses to care for us. If we aren’t willing to do the hard work of putting aside childish things, how will we give that to the next generation when they come to us in need? How will we carry the fire of queer liberation, of community, of the radical act of keeping each other alive, into a world that grows more hostile towards us every day? Cultivating an adult relationship to art and forcing ourselves to expand our circles of empathy in that way isn’t all of it, but it matters. It matters.

EDIT: Due to reader interest, I am including an indicative but by no means comprehensive list of my favorite adult fiction.

TV: The Young Pope, The New Pope, Euphoria, The Sopranos, Halt and Catch Fire, Better Call Saul, Hannibal, The Leftovers, Boardwalk Empire, Deadwood, Mr. Robot, Suburra: Blood on Rome, Rome, The Terror (Season 1 only), Fargo, The People vs. O.J. Simpson, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Game of Thrones, The Affair, Dark, The Act, The Prisoner, Channel Zero.

FILM: The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia, Akira, Sorry to Bother You, Dead Ringers, Crash (Cronenberg), Raise the Red Lantern, The Handmaiden, Sword of Doom, Lady Snowblood, Showgirls, The Love Witch, Cat People (1942), Under the Skin, Birth, Sexy Beast, Boogie Nights, The Invitation, Jennifer's Body, Come and See, The Devils, Possession, The Wicker Man, The Witch, Night of the Living Dead, Jackie Brown, Hagazussa, Raging Bull, Casino, Belle du Jour, Eyes Without a Face, It Follows, Trouble Every Day, Marie Antoinette, Antichrist, American Psycho.

BOOKS: Lilith's Brood, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Lolita, Wolf Hall, Beyond Black, The Left Hand of Darkness, The End of the Affair, Wilding (Melanie Tem), We Have Always Lived in the Castle, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Blood Meridian, Geek Love, Black Is the Color, Laid Waste, Disorder (Erika Price), Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, The Masker, F4 (Larissa Glasser), Corrupted Vessels (Briar Ripley Page), Psycho Nymph Exile, John Dear (Laura Lannes), The Waves, Ulysses, In the Heart of the Valley of Love, The Lathe of Heaven, The Haunting of Hill House, IT.