Yes, Heather Has Two Mommies Is Banned!

Heather Has Two Mommies is a picture book about a little girl named Heather who has two mothers, Mama Jane and Mama Kate. She goes to playgroup, discovers that families come in all shapes, and feels fine about hers. That’s it. That’s the whole book. First self-published in 1989 with a $4,000 budget raised through donations, it became one of the first children’s books to depict a same-sex family. Candlewick Press published an updated edition with new illustrations by Laura Cornell in 2015.

The American Library Association ranked it the 9th most challenged book of the 1990s. In 1992, it became a flashpoint in the battle over New York City’s Rainbow Curriculum, a multicultural education program that included the book. In Texas, a pastor in Wichita Falls checked out every copy from his local library and wrote the library a check, refusing to return them. In 2022, Flagler County superintendent Cathy Mittelstadt ordered the book removed from all school libraries. Challenges have been recorded in Kansas, Oregon, and dozens of other locations over more than three decades.

Why You Should Read This

The book is 32 pages long. Heather goes to school. She plays with friends. She draws a picture of her family. A child reading it sees that families look different and that’s okay. That’s the entire radical message that’s kept this book on banned lists for 35 years.

Newman wrote it because a friend told her there were no children’s books showing families like hers. She scraped together the money to self-publish because no publisher would touch it in 1989. The fact that it’s still getting pulled from shelves in 2022 tells you something about how slowly the world changes, and how fiercely some people resist even the smallest acknowledgment that LGBTQ+ families exist. Read it to a kid. It takes about four minutes. Then ask yourself what, exactly, anyone was afraid of.