Frog and Toad Aren't Gay

On reading Arnold Lobel well

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I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that no children’s author left a larger impression on my very young childhood than Arnold Lobel. Some of my most cherished early memories of reading and being read to are bound up with Frog and Toad, Owl at Home, Uncle Elephant, and other creatures only Lobel’s peculiarly sweet genius could have birthed. What’s more, I never outgrew them. For the rest of my life, my family and I could make passing references to favorite stories and know instantly what we were all referring to. Phrases like “tear-water tea” and “one very last cookie” became the stuff of canonical in-jokes, like bits of favorite novels or movies. Except these were children’s picture books, deliberately pitched no higher than a very specific, very simple reading level. They were literally written for a series labeled “I Can Read.” Nevertheless, they endured. Even now, I can’t re-read Uncle Elephant without getting misty-eyed at the deceptively simple portrait of a baby elephant and the uncle who takes him in when he has nowhere else to go. It was dedicated to Lobel’s grandmother in her last days—possibly the grandmother who helped raise him after his parents divorced.

I would never have guessed that Lobel never even saw himself as a writer. He was primarily an illustrator, having talked his way into the children’s book business when he decided he had no stomach or talent for anything else. (“If I had been successful in advertising, I’d be in an advertising agency now drawing brassieres, and I’d have an ulcer. So I do feel lucky that I didn’t get into that.”) His first assignment was a 60-something page book about salmon swimming upstream. As a young father, he couldn’t be choosy. He took the job, then set about slowly growing a portfolio. He took even the smallest assignments with utmost seriousness. Finding himself bored as he worked on a book about Leeuwenhoek and the microscope, he suddenly remembered that Rembrandt was a contemporary of Leeuwenhoek. For the rest of the project, he had Rembrandt’s paintings at his elbow, trying to capture something of their essence in pictures for children.

When he finally began writing his own books, he was really reaching back to a long-buried gift he thought he had left behind in adolescence. The teacher would call him up to tell a story to a rowdy class, and against all odds, he would hold their attention for 20 minutes at a time with verses and pictures he came up with on the spot. He had locked that part of himself away, embarrassed and ashamed. But perhaps, he thought, it was time to find the key. And the rest was history.

It was also much later that I learned the dark ending to Lobel’s own story: In 1974, at the height of his career, he would come out to his family as gay. After his children were grown, he would separate from his wife, Anita—also a children’s author, also Jewish, as well as a Holocaust survivor—to live in Greenwich village. In 1987, he would die of cardiac arrest, diagnosed as a complication of his long battle with the AIDS virus. He was 54.

His daughter once suggested to the New Yorker that this might shed a new light on his most beloved characters: Frog and Toad. After all, the two creatures “are of the same sex, and they love each other,” which she judges “ahead of its time” in and of itself. Perhaps, she reflects, this was the beginning of her father’s coming out. But interestingly, neither she nor her brother is especially invested in a “queer reading.” In fact, in a new interview with them, she now sounds more definite that for Lobel, the stories really weren’t about “exploring his sexuality,” as the interviewer suggests. As a good liberal, she doesn’t begrudge various fans their various readings. She simply retains some old-fashioned notion of authorial intent, and according to what she perceives as her father’s authorial intent, “They’re just really good friends.”

But a quick search will pull up multiple predictably tiresome essays on how actually, the amphibious couple are “queer icons,” how their stories are “queer-coded,” how sneaky and “rebellious” it was of Lobel to “slip them in,” and on and on. After the fashion of such readings, not even the tiniest detail escapes post-modern retconning. Frog can’t just show up late to Toad’s house. He must be “running on queer time.” The retconning doesn’t end with Frog and Toad either. One of Lobel’s less famous creations, a horse named Lucille who tries wearing fancy lady’s clothes before deciding she’d much rather be a horse, is now “gender non-conforming”—of course.

So entrenched is the new canonical queer reading of Frog and Toad that when Apple TV released its new series based on the books last month, the Daily Beast reviewed it with the headline “Frog and Toad Are Still Gay…If You Want Them to Be.” “You can’t deny it,” director Rob Hoegee informs us. “It is part of the books, it’s part of the legacy.” People for whom the “queer subtext” of the work was very important would be happy, he predicted.

Needless to say, I approached the show with some skepticism. To my relief, it wasn’t a disaster. I was eventually convinced that the creators, under the executive producers’ eye of Lobel’s children, actually did respect the source material—for the most part.

Most of the changes involved innocuously broadening Frog and Toad’s storyworld to include a wider cast of characters—a banjo-strumming mink, a nervously lovable lizard, a perky snail, a thespian mole who may or may not be a little light in the loafers. In this and a few other ways, Lobel’s extremely spare text is expanded so that each episode fills out more than the few minutes it would take if it were adapted verbatim. All still fits comfortably within the stories’ original Arcadian, cottage-core oeuvre. Frog and Toad’s world remains tech-free—nobody drives a car or even picks up a phone. Everybody knows everybody else. Fireflies dance around the gazebo while Mink’s band plays Dixieland. Nothing ever changes, and nothing ever will.

Even the new stories, except for one false note, honor the spirit of the originals, though you can still tell which is which. I particularly liked one where Frog cluelessly sets out to bake a cake for Toad, making a ghastly mess of things while Toad watches in horror. Toad intervenes to help Frog bake an actual cake, only to realize on tasting it that he would actually much rather have the cake Frog was going to bake—because it was Frog’s cake. Frog reluctantly puts his disastrous concoction in the oven, with predictable results. But Toad crunches into it cheerfully. It is the best cake he has ever eaten. I actually found myself momentarily unsure if this story was a Lobel original or not, it caught the classic mood so well.

The one false note is the episode “A Night On the Town,” which never overtly makes its subtext more than subtext. But you can tell that the new writer, himself gay, is trying to wink at the audience. The story opens with Frog and Toad prepared to enjoy a quiet evening in, until Frog goes to find Toad’s slippers and discovers a very lonely, very spiffy red jacket that Toad hasn’t worn in years. He proceeds to liberate it from the closet (cough) and suggests that Toad wear it for a night “out on the town.” Because this is still Lobel’s Arcadia and not Fire Island, their wild night consists of harmless sleepy-town fun like jumping in mud puddles, messing about in a canoe, and eating at a fancy restaurant where they’re the only guests, and there is only one table—a table whose two chairs are each carved with a heart. Wink, wink.

The running conceit is that all of this is “for the jacket.” And yet each small escapade leaves the poor jacket progressively more besmirched—muddy, soup-stained, and finally torn at the seams, as the band strikes up and Frog leads Toad in a dance, twirling him, tossing him. “Did your jacket like that?” Frog asks at each turn. Toad isn’t entirely sure, but he’s having a good time. “Frog,” he says anxiously after the dance, “I ripped my fancy jacket.” “Oho,” says Frog. “Your jacket must really like dancing.”

Wink, wink.

For those wondering what Lobel himself would have made of this episode, there’s a clue in an interview where he explains why he decided to close the Frog and Toad canon after four books. While writing the last one, it occurred to him that there might be “a certain cruelty in the relationship, in Frog being the controlling one and Toad being controlled.” It was subtle, but he felt it was there. So rather than go on milking the characters for more product, as he easily could have, he decided to stop.

But no doubt this young gay writer sees himself as simply picking up where Lobel left off. He’s just winking a little harder. After all, Lobel did say that the Frog and Toad stories marked the first time he “turned inward” as a writer—that they were stories “based on adult preoccupations really,” but “tilted” so that children could embrace them. In another much-pulled quote, he observes that “if an adult has an unhappy love affair, he writes about it. He exorcises it out of himself, perhaps, by writing a novel about it. Well, if I have an unhappy love affair, I have to somehow use all that pain and suffering but turn it into a work for children.” This is from an interview given in 1979—after he had come out to his family, but before he and his wife were officially separated.

These are the sorts of quotes people will point to as if it’s case closed that Frog and Toad were always a gay couple. But this utterly fails to understand Lobel’s artistry on its own terms. His entire point, even in quotes like these, is that whatever not-so-innocent turmoil he is experiencing, his stories must be crafted so that children, in their innocence, are protected from it. Of course, this is entirely lost on the activist who attempts to weaponize Lobel and his work against “right-wing” anti-groomer campaigns — as if there is nothing to differentiate Lobel from teachers like the gay man who comes to class wearing a skirt so that little children can learn to be comfortable with distinctly LGBT forms of “dramatic play” (no, as Dave Barry says, we swear we are not making this up).

As Lobel elaborated elsewhere, Frog and Toad themselves are child substitutes. They have adult independence, but childlike preoccupations. Yet because they are a frog and a toad and not two middle-aged men, this combination works. Otherwise, he enumerates “the questions that would occur to you: How old are they? Where are their parents? How do they earn their money? What in fact is their relationship?” When asked if he ever has to censor himself, he says no. “I don’t have to deal with those problems. Frog and Toad live in a world where these things don’t exist.”

In short, Frog and Toad’s relationship needs no explaining. Frog and Toad are friends. Lobel’s readers insist it can’t be that simple. But Lobel has just told them that it is. Literally, the whole point is that it is. And as literary critic George Shannon notes in his excellent essay “Frog and Toad Can Read,” this is in keeping with the stories’ pastoral genre. Frog and Toad inhabit their idylls like two contented shepherds, resting in shade, playing music, exchanging gifts.

To be sure, there is still a pathos about these vignettes, a sense that Lobel has quietly slipped some old pain into them. One feels it in the final story, “Alone,” where Toad wakes up to find a note from Frog: “Dear Toad, I am not at home. I went out. I want to be alone.” Immediately, Toad goes wild with fretting. What does this mean? Does Frog not like him anymore? Does he not want to be friends? He packs a picnic basket and sets off to find out. He finds Frog sitting on an island with his back turned. Toad catches a ride on a turtle, shouting across the water, trying in vain to be heard. “Frog! I am sorry for all the dumb things I do. I am sorry for all the silly things I say. Please be my friend again!” Then he promptly falls off the turtle, whereupon Frog must save him, one last time.

Then there’s perhaps the most haunting story, “The Dream,” where Toad takes a dream stage with Frog his only audience. With each ridiculous new act, Toad becomes more puffed up, and Frog becomes smaller, until he has disappeared altogether. “Frog, Frog, where have you gone?” Toad suddenly cries when he realizes what he’s done. “Come back, Frog,” he shouts, spinning in the dark. “I will be lonely!”

Loneliness also touches the story “Spring,” except this time it’s Frog who becomes anxious when Toad announces that he’s going to hibernate for a month. “But Toad, I will be lonely until then.”

Of course, loneliness is part of the universal human condition. This is what Lobel meant when he said Frog and Toad were “for everyone.” It may be that as a gay man, he had a particular ability to convey loneliness in his work. But this does not make the work “queer art.” It just makes it art.

One writer reads a certain bit of “Spring” as a coded love poem. It is indeed poetic and indeed lovely. “Help!” Toad has been complaining, blinking in the bright sun as Frog drags him onto the porch, “I cannot see anything.” “Don’t be silly,” says Frog:

“What you see

is the clear warm light of April

And it means

that we can begin

a whole new year together, Toad.

Think of it,” said Frog.

“We will skip through the meadows

and run through the woods

and swim in the river.

In the evenings, we will sit

Right here on this front porch

And count the stars.”

Again, there is certainly pathos here. There’s a sense of something searched for and not yet found. I’m reminded of something the gay novelist Andrew Holleran once said in an interview:

Can you arrive at a certain point which is perfect and never have to leave? That peace that we’re looking for? I suppose there is, conceivably, maybe, but that’s a pessimistic way to look at it. I don’t know. Perhaps there is something happy. That’s a theme in a lot of literature, the Great Good Place. You’re going to get to a house, you’re going to get to a lover, you’re going to get to a fireplace, you’re going to get to a town, you’re going to get to a situation, you’re going to get the job you want, the lover you want, you’re going to be at peace finally.... So I’m looking for it, certainly, and if I didn’t think it was really there I wouldn’t look for it so hard.

Of course, the bitter tragedy of Lobel’s life is that he did have a house. He did have a lover. A lover with whom he could and did have children. One of Holleran’s protagonists, explaining how a gay friend had had a child, speaks of “the one ejaculation that had consequences, consequences in time.”

Amazingly, Lobel and his wife kept up a vibrant creative collaboration. To read this 1982 profile in the Washington Post, you would never guess that anything was amiss. One of their last books together, published three years before his death, was a so-called “proliferative” work called The Rose in my Garden. This meant that each page added a new layer of text accompanied by a new layer on top of the same picture. The picture being thus proliferated is a garden. He writes, she draws. “This is the rose in my garden.” “This is the bee/That sleeps on the rose in my garden.” “These are the hollyhocks high above ground,/That give shade to the bee/That sleeps on the rose in my garden.”

“Do you have children?” Lobel once paused mid-interview to ask. “Yes,” said the interviewer, “a son.” “Well then you know that they’re amazing. Once they bite into reading, they’ll read anything. Once they are enjoying it, nothing stops them, even if they come to a word that they have to sort of sound out and fight with a bit. They just kind of devour it very quickly.” This was why he wasn’t too worried about including a longer word like “avalanche,” which was really “a great word for a child to have.” Once a child has a word like that, learned in the context of a story he loves, “why, he’ll always have it, I think.”

Another interviewer asked if he got a lot of letters from children. “Oh yes, it’s getting to be a big problem, because I get lots of letters, and I answer them.” At first, he wrote long letters with little pictures. Then, as they piled up, each child got “a great big picture and a little letter, sort of like Joan Crawford in Hollywood.” He felt awkward interacting with children in person, but it was always gratifying when a child walked up to him at a speaking engagement and said, “Got your letter.”

Sometimes, he was discouraged by letters that were clearly based on a form supplied by a teacher, complete with blanks where all the names should go. One literally concluded, “Love, NAME.” But he came to not mind even these so much. After all, the child could have picked any author out of the library to write to, but he picked Lobel. So why not be grateful?

He was often asked if he would consider writing a longer children’s book. He always demurred. He always considered himself “a picture-book person.” “Maybe some day when the eyesight fails and old age comes in, maybe I’ll try.”

One of his very last works, posthumously published, was an ambitious solo piece called The Turnaround Wind. It was the story of an anthropomorphized black cloud that sweeps down to send an unsuspecting little community into chaos. Each illustration is an optical illusion, designed to be examined “crone and young woman” style by flipping the book upside down, with upside-down text to match. Two characters are thus revealed, and the way they respond to the storm reveals something about their relationship. Of course, the whole thing is an allegory for the AIDS epidemic, one queer reading helpfully enlightens us. Presumably, we have no choice but to conclude that bits like the below aren’t actually talking about a husband and wife. It’s just that he had to make it a husband and wife, because the world was so terribly, horribly heteronormative like that:

The slender wife held tightly to her stout husband. They had been married for forty-five years and had been through thick and thin together.

The stout man embraced his slender wife because he loved her. He had no intention of letting her blow away.

He had to be very sneaky about this, you see:

The soldier flashed his dark eyes with delight because the wind pushed him very close to the maiden.

When the maiden found herself near the soldier, she smiled broadly, though her teeth were not as perfect as she would wish.

There are other kinds of relationships too. There is just about every kind of relationship, in fact. Between a nurse and her baby, a girl and her dog, a boy and his boat. Between a man and his cat, a man and his parrot, a man and his book. Between an artist and his canvas.

“I’m continually dissatisfied,” he said in finishing out an interview. “I make a religion of being dissatisfied. I don’t think there is a point in doing a book and saying, ‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ Then you don’t learn. When people ask what’s the best book you ever did, there’s no point in saying, ‘Oh, that was four years ago.’ That means everything since was worse, right? So I say, it’s the next book. Then, you know, even though I’ve done the best book I think I can do, I know the book I’m going to do might be even better. It’s all delusion, but it does keep one trying one’s best.”

At his funeral, he was eulogized by fellow children’s author James Marshall, who would follow Lobel in the same kind of death only a few years later. “Tell them,” he told Marshall to say, “that if they wish to do something nice for me, ask them to look at the books. Because that’s where they’ll find me.”