Frog and Toad

This is fascinating. Arnold Lobel, the author of the beloved children's book series, "Frog and Toad", was gay and the stories, with a 2016 sensibility, can be read as exploring gay intimacy. I went back and read "Frog and Toad Together", and it is obvious: "In the end, the trials of their relationship are worth bearing, because Frog and Toad are most content when they’re together." Here is what Lobel's daughter said recently in an interview with Colin Stokes in the New Yorker:

Frog and Toad are “of the same sex, and they love each other,” she told me. “It was quite ahead of its time in that respect.” In 1974, four years after the first book in the series was published, Lobel came out to his family as gay. “I think ‘Frog and Toad’ really was the beginning of him coming out,” Adrianne told me. Lobel never publicly discussed a connection between the series and his sexuality, but he did comment on the ways in which personal material made its way into his stories. In a 1977 interview with the children’s-book journal The Lion and the Unicorn, he said:

You know, 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.

Lobel died in 1987, an early victim of the aids crisis. “He was only fifty-four,” Adrianne told me. “Think of all the stories we missed.”

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