I Was a Gay Sneetch (Living in a Star-Belly World)

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Dr. Seuss was in the news again recently when a school administrator in Ohio stopped a reading of his classic, ‘The Sneetches,’ after a child compared the treatment of the starless Sneetches to racism. “It’s almost like what happened back then, how people were treated … like white people disrespected Black people, but then, they might stand up in the book.” It was insightful enough to startle the administrator, and she ended the reading of the book, which was being done as part of an NPR podcast.

I don’t have any patience for terms like ‘cancel culture’ (or ‘woke’ or ‘critical race theory’ or ‘groomer’), but it’s evident that silencing others is not the terrain only of one faction or another. Unfortunately, the right is always better at finding meaningless little nuggety words and phrases with which to assault people who don’t submit to their orthodoxy. ‘Cancel culture’ is just the sort of smug accusation that works for limited minds with no capacity for introspection.  Meanwhile, right-wing extremism marches merrily along, doing its best to roll over and silence anything that challenges its privileged and fragile assumptions. There are few more potent and effective practitioners of cancel culture than Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson, Libs of TikTok, and the entire right-wing echo chamber.

Now that I’ve got that preamble out of the way, I will say that ‘The Sneetches’ was one of my favorite childhood books. I knew I was different—what I would later call and identify as gay—and that I lived in a star-belly world. Where this school administrator saw critical race theory lurking beneath the book’s illustrations, I saw an astute illustration of how I felt in a society I knew was hostile to my truest self.

Everyone, child or adult, who feels different in this world can identify with the starless Sneetches. Smart kids, tomboys, Black and Brown kids, kids who love to read books instead of trying out for Little League, kids whose parents aren’t like other kids’ parents, kids whose curiosity gets them in trouble and whose imaginations are accused of being too wild.

To silence that reading was to silence that child. The school administrator, and all the adults she imagined could be offended by words from the mouths of babes, succeeded only in letting that child know he has no star. The star-belly Sneetches are the ones banning books, and forcing young people to conform or kill themselves, and silencing the starless. It either outrages you or breaks your heart, or both.