Our Queer Children’s Heroes

One year after same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States, the political and personal realities for LGBTQ+ Americans are still fraught. Just this week, 49 people were killed in a gay-friendly nightclub in Orlando, simply because of who they are and whom they love.

Children’s television programs are meant to not only entertain and occupy the time of impressionable children, but to teach them lessons to prepare them for life. But when programs reflect a white, heterosexual supremacy rather than the diversity of the real communities and identities children live in or around, they’re failing to engender pride or tolerance for difference.

It hasn’t been easy to get queer characters into children’s shows. When Sailor Moon debuted in the U.S., Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune were changed from girlfriends to cousins. Lest you think this was just a thing that happened in the 1990s and earlier, in 2014 the Cartoon Network censored a kiss between two men on the show Clarence, and Adventure Time has been unable to run an explicit storyline about the relationship between Princess Bubblegum and Marceline.

This April the new Powerpuff Girls included a transgender storyline that seemed great in theory but crashed and burned in practice. The episode featured a pony that wanted to be a unicorn, but saw the pony forcibly outed by Buttercup (who…