There’s a touching, beautifully illustrated new children’s book out that’s drawing five-star reviews on Amazon and bringing adult readers to tears. “Katy Has Two Grampas” is by an Iowa man, Bob Schanke, and his Minnesota-based adult daughter, Julie Schanke Lyford. The storyline stems from an experience Julie’s daughter had as a preschooler, and the authors say they don’t know of any previous children’s book to feature a pair of openly gay, married men as grandparents.
That seems appropriate coming from one of the first states to have recognized a right to same-sex marriage, and one whose population skews older: Close to 20% of Iowans are in their mid-60s or older.
But the fact that the title character, Katy, has a pair of gay grandpas she’ll be bringing to class on Grandparents Day isn’t presented as the source of the trouble that follows; it’s her difficulty communicating that because of a speech impediment which her teacher doesn’t understand.
It’s like night and day comparing the joyful public reaction to this story with the outrage generated by the 1989 seminal children’s book “Heather Has Two Mommies,” about a girl who was born through artificial insemination to a lesbian mother and her partner. “Heather” became the American Library Association‘s ninth-most challenged book of the 1990s in the U.S., a lightning rod, according to the Los Angeles Times. “It was banned and challenged, the subject of public debate and railed against in Congress.”
The Katy book, titled as “an homage” to the Heather one, according to the authors, seems to have garnered only praise so far.
But the evolution of attitudes during that period was also true of gay couples themselves. Just consider Bob Schanke and his spouse, Jack Barnhart, the “Grampas” in the new book, who are in their 37th year as a couple and once never expected nor cared to marry. To Schanke, a now-retired college theater professor, marriage was “a straight thing to do.” He and Barnhart, a retired social worker, each had already been married, to women.
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In fact, before same-sex marriage was even perceived as a right worth fighting for, or one which could be won, some gay men and lesbians who finally felt safe coming out in the ’70s and ’80s saw marriage as another social construct of a straight society they didn’t need to emulate. But after the 2009 unanimous ruling by Iowa’s Supreme Court, when marrying each other actually became possible for Iowa’s same-sex couples, these two recognized the legal and financial advantages it could bestow. And on July 3, 2010, 25 years into being together, they had the profound experience of pledging an institutional commitment to one another.
Meanwhile Schanke’s daughter, Julie — from his marriage to his former wife and still close friend, Ruth — had made her way into adulthood campaigning for those rights because of her dad. She traveled Minnesota with the group Minnesotans United for All Families to advocate for marriage equality. Asked how she felt as a high schooler when she’d first become aware her father was gay, she says matter of factly, “To me it was a non-issue. It was a bigger issue to him. He couldn’t understand why I wasn’t more upset about it. … He was my dad and I loved him.”
From 2019:On this day 10 years ago, an Iowa Supreme Court ruling legalized gay marriage in the state
But she had to learn to navigate the attitudes of others in high school. “I was allowed to tell my best friend. She didn’t really speak to me anymore.” They’ve since become friends again. And then there were her own dating experiences. After some awful reactions to her father’s orientation from prospective boyfriends saying things like, “He can never be around our kids if we have them,” she devised a simple test to gauge their suitability on the first date. She’d go to Blockbuster and check out either “The Crying Game” or “The Birdcage,” both feature films with gay or transgender subtexts. If her dates were too shocked, it would be their last date. Her eventual husband, whom she married in 1999 and is still married to, Rafe Lyford, “was fabulous from Day 1.”
Today Lyford is in her early 50s, her daughter Katy is in high school and her other daughter Madi is in college. Schanke and Barnhart both are or soon will be 81, and are moving out of their longtime Pleasant Hill home with its hot tub, tiki hut, luscious lawn and renowned former treehouse where friends would gather. (My parents, my late husband and I were lucky to be among them.) They’re moving into a retirement community.
More:The first Pride was a protest. For LGBTQ activists, action is still the priority.
Time passes, and some days you look up in amazement at how societal attitudes have evolved, to where Pride Month even feels mainstream. But there’s a cyclical aspect to it, and it’s easy to forget all the hard work of organizing and marching and advocating that went into changing laws and cultures — and the pushback.
You read the responses to this upbeat children’s book, which manages to subtly convey the universality of human experiences without sounding preachy or political, and note some don’t even mention the gay part. “Beautiful story about overcoming fear of public speaking,” said one Amazon review. “Absolutely beautiful example of how representation matters for all kids,” said another. One person wrote of her mother who had speech problems as a child but “was a product of a segregated school in the ’50s so no one cared if little Black children had any issues. However, when the speech teacher came to her high school and worked with her, it made all the difference.”
One woman wrote, “I had no queer role models, no one to tell me everything is OK or tell me that a woman does not HAVE to be with a man. I wish I had this book as a kid — my life would have gone very differently.”
Find the book
“Katy Has Two Grampas” is published by Wise Ink of Minneapolis and stocked in libraries from New Zealand to Manchester, England, and in 40 U.S. states. It’s widely available online.
