It's the fact that one complaint can make a book unavailable for thousands of people that she objects to - the "heckler's vote" where one person makes so much noise that no-one else can hear. She's not suggesting that people who don't want to read And Tango Makes Three should be made to do so. The problem is that these children are growing up in a society where some of their classmates are going to come from same sex couples." People who complain about And Tango Makes Three really believe that homosexuality is wrong, that it's against God's commandments, that it's harming society. "We fight," she says, "to keep these books on the shelves. The role of the ALA, Krug explains, is to help librarians resist these requests. Last year the ALA was notified of 546 formal requests for books to be removed from libraries, most of which came from individual parents. When it comes to homosexuality, admits Judith Krug, director of the ALA's office for intellectual freedom, in the US, "people go a little crazy". "One of the areas that parents find very difficult to discuss with their children is homosexuality," he points out, "yet many children have classmates who live in families with two Dads, for example." His description of the book as a useful tool for parents will doubtless alarm its critics. Though Parnell is keen to emphasise the story's connection with classic children's tales, Richardson, who is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia and Cornell universities in New York, focuses on the need that the book answers for many parents. We wanted to be able to stand behind the book and say 'this actually happened'." They also worked against the natural tendency in children's literature to ascribe human motivations to animals, carefully removing anthropomorphism in successive drafts: "We didn't want to put thoughts and feelings into the heads of the penguins." We visited the zoo several times so that we were able to write from what we'd seen rather than just what we'd read.
"We tried to prepare for that in the writing of the book," explains Richardson, "by making it as accurate as possible. They were aware, however, that the idea of two gay penguins striving to raise a child would prove more controversial than, say, the Little Red Hen's attempts to bake bread. "It had the same elements as some of the books we'd grown up with," agrees Parnell, "where an unlikely character tries and tries and eventually succeeds." He started reading it out to Parnell, and "in reading it aloud, it started sounding like a children's story. "The New York Times ran an article called The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name about homosexual behaviour in animals, which started with Roy and Silo's story," remembers Richardson. But this was not a tale: it was, in fact, inspired by a newspaper article, which told how a zookeeper noticed two of his penguins, Roy and Silo, were trying to hatch a stone.
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