Parenthetical.net

Did you know there’s a picture book about the gay penguins? There sure is! (And now my library owns it. ) It’s called And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell and illustrated by Henry Cole, who also illustrated The Sissy Duckling and therefore has carved quite the “cute gay birds” niche for himself.

It’s such a nice little “introducing your kids to homosexuality” primer for us Damn Hippie Liberal types: “Every year at the same time, the girl penguins start noticing the boy penguins. And the boy penguins start noticing the girls. When the right girl and the right boy find each other, they become a couple. Two penguins in the penguin house were a bit different… Roy and Silo were both boys. But they did everything together. They didn’t spend much time with the girl penguins, and the girl penguins didn’t spend much time with them. Instead, Roy and Silo wound their necks around each other… But one day Roy and Silo saw that the other couples could do something they could not.”

Indeed. So the keeper gives them an abandoned egg to take care of, and so hatches Tango, “the very first penguin in the zoo to have two daddies.” Don’t you feel all warm and fuzzy now?