I gift LGBTQ+ children’s books to my nephew every Christmas. This is the first year I’ve hesitated.

Not long after my nephew was born, I started keeping a list of books to give him. If I’m being completely honest, it’s a bit of a life hack for a lazy guncle: Whenever his birthday creeps up on me unexpectedly or if I’m stumped as to what to get him for Christmas, I can just turn to this convenient database of potential gifts.

This is not to say that I haven’t put any thought into the titles on The List. My brother and sister-in-law are not what I would call readers, so I feel a responsibility as both a writer and an avid reader to try to instill in my nephew a love of books. Anytime I hear of a particularly interesting children’s book or recall one that I loved as a kid, I list it for future gift-giving purposes.

Related:

The new “Frog & Toad” series is the perfect queer love story for families

What joy it must be to get together and watch something so sweet, cozy, and queer.

But it goes deeper than that. My nephew is white. He’s growing up in rural North Carolina, in an area where in recent years homemade pro-Trump signage touting the Big Lie has become a permanent fixture on some people’s lawns. At seven and a half years old, he is about as rough and rowdy a boy’s boy as they come; obsessed with Godzilla and King Kong and dinosaurs and sports. He’s kind-natured, but I worry that he is developing a very narrow worldview molded by the heteronormative, lowercase-C-conservative environment in which he’s growing up. And as a gay uncle, as a feminist, as someone who strives to be anti-racist, who cares about social justice and equality for all, I want to foster those values in my nephew by exposing him to stories and ideas he might not otherwise encounter.

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So, I have carefully curated a list of books that feature characters of color, LGBTQ+ characters, and characters who don’t fit neatly into the traditional gender binary. All age appropriate of course. Several years ago, I gave him a copy of And Tango Makes Three for Christmas, and among others, the list currently includes Jessica Love’s Julián Is a Mermaid and Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle.

My brother and sister-in-law have never objected to any of this, so I have never thought twice about my ongoing book-giving project, which I have jokingly referred to as “reprograming.” Until this year.

I have spent the better part of 2023 covering the anti-LGBTQ+ laws that have been introduced in states across the U.S., the hateful anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and false narratives that seem to be resurging online, and the efforts to ban books featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes from schools and public libraries. I’ve written and read about armed members of hate groups showing up at drag queen story hours, Pride events, and all-ages drag brunches. I’m reminded almost daily of the hideous lies proliferated by the likes of Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik and members of Moms for Liberty and Gays Against Groomers. More than one of these stories has involved small-minded, reactionary wingnuts challenging completely innocent children’s books, movies, and TV shows, describing them as “obscene” or “pornographic” merely for depicting LGBTQ+ or gender-nonconforming characters.

It is, at best, an uneasy time for LGBTQ+ people in America. At worst, it’s a frightening one. But I hadn’t realized the extent to which all that bad news had wormed its way into my subconscious until I was shopping for a Christmas gift for my nephew this year.

I was in a bookstore trying to figure out whether Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad books were the right reading level for him. I was also thinking about how the books have been read as subtly queer, as they center on a close, loving relationship between the two male title characters. And then, sort of out of the blue, it occurred to me that giving a seven-and-a-half-year-old a set of books that have a reputation for being vaguely gay might not be the best idea in 2023.

It was less a serious concern about any actual, real-world repercussions than a vague…awareness. An awareness that there are people out there—likely quite a few of them in North Carolina—who would viciously misinterpret my whole project of giving my nephew books featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes as “indoctrination” or even “grooming.”

And yeah, I’ll admit it: I am trying to “infect” him with the so-called “woke mind virus”—i.e. foster empathy and an awareness of and respect for people who are not straight, white, cisgender, and/or able-bodied.

I’m not especially worried that anyone in my immediate family will interpret any of this as sinister or inappropriate. My brother, sister-in-law, and mother are all supportive. But I’m less sure what others in our extended family, many of whom are deeply conservative Trump supporters, might think, let alone anyone else in their community.

North Carolina, after all, passed a law this year banning instruction on “gender identity, sexual activity, or sexuality” in kindergarten through fourth grade. According to PEN America, 58 books have been banned in the state this year alone, while the American Library Association has reported that between January 1 and August 31 there were at least 18 attempts to restrict access to books across the state. According to GLAAD, in 2022 there were 10 instances of drag events being threatened or protested in North Carolina. The only state with more was Texas. In June of last year, a group of 15 masked Proud Boys invaded a library in Wilmington, NC, terrorizing parents and kids who were there for a drag queen story hour.

Wilmington is just an hour’s drive from where my nephew is growing up. The county where he lives has its own Moms for Liberty chapter. (Its leader’s name? Karen, naturally.)

I think about all of that, and I wonder whether I’m courting disaster by giving my nephew even a vaguely queer children’s book. I find myself imagining Kafkaesque scenarios in which he brings a book to school or the playground and some Moms for Liberty type pitches a fit, confronts his parent, maybe even reports them to the police.

I am, of course, catastrophizing. But this is what the current political environment has done to me. This is the chilling effect that takes hold when anti-LGBTQ+ voices have convinced themselves and others that any depiction or mere suggestion of queer people constitutes child abuse. It’s not just that schools and libraries will no longer make these kinds of stories available to young people. In an environment where a single anonymous complaint about a book recently led to a police search of a Massachusetts classroom, we run the risk of policing ourselves for fear of scurrilous, unfounded accusations from ideologues and radical busybodies.

Ultimately, I did buy a copy of Frog and Toad for my nephew. (I did not buy him Julián Is a Mermaid or Scott Stuart’s My Shadow is Pink or Heather Has Two Mommies, so it’s not like I’m some profile in courage.) But I nonetheless will watch him unwrap it on Christmas morning, and there will still be a tiny part of me that wonders if there will be consequences.