Yes, Daddy's Roommate Is Banned!

Daddy’s Roommate is a picture book about a young boy whose parents have divorced and whose father now lives with another man named Frank. The boy describes everyday activities he does with Daddy and Frank: they eat together, clean the house, shave together in the morning, go to the ball game. His mother explains that Daddy and Frank are gay, and that “being gay is just one more kind of love.” Published in 1990 by Alyson Wonderland, it was one of the first children’s books to depict a gay parent.

The ALA ranked it the second most challenged book in America from 1990 to 1999. In 2023, Miami-Dade County Public Schools pulled it from school libraries during an audit, claiming it contained “adult content” or “sexually charged language,” despite the book containing neither. In Centerville, Indiana, the school board tried to ban it in 2005 to “protect students from controversial materials.” It has been challenged in public libraries from Oregon to North Carolina, and a Wichita Falls, Texas minister removed all copies from the public library in 1998, the same stunt pulled with Heather Has Two Mommies.

Why You Should Read This

The book is about eating breakfast, mowing the lawn, and going to baseball games. Frank and Daddy do the same boring stuff every couple does. The only difference is that two men are doing it, and that single fact has kept Daddy’s Roommate near the top of banned book lists for over 30 years.

Miami-Dade’s claim that the book contains “adult content” is almost funny if you’ve actually read it. There’s a single illustration of Frank and Daddy napping together on a couch. That’s as steamy as it gets. The real issue has never been content. It’s visibility. Some adults can’t tolerate a children’s book that shows a kid with a gay parent having a perfectly normal, happy life. But those kids exist, millions of them, and they deserve to see their families reflected in the books on their school’s shelves.