Watershed children book freshened up 25 years later

A playful picture book about a little girl named Heather and her two happy mommies was a cultural and legal flashpoint 25 years ago, angering conservatives over the morality of same-sex parenting and landing libraries at the center of community battles over placement in the children's stacks.

Today, Heather - of Heather Has Two Mommies - has a lot more company in books for young kids about different kinds of families, but hers was out of print and seemed visually dated. That's why creator Leslea Newman decided on a new version, updating the look of her watershed story with fresh illustrations from a new artist and tweaking the text to streamline.

There's one big change, but you have to squint to notice: Heather's Mama Kate and Mama Jane wear little matching rings on their marriage fingers.

"I don't specifically say that they're married but they are," Newman explains from her home just outside Northampton, Massachusetts. "I don't know where I could have smoothly inserted that into the text. That's not what the story is about. The story is really about Heather."

Heather was Newman's first picture book and is certainly her most well-known. The latest edition, out this month, is from Candlewick Press, with illustrations by Laura Cornell replacing those of Diana Souza.

Newman wrote the story in 1988 after a chance encounter in Northampton with Amy Jacobson, a lesbian mom who was looking for reading material that better reflected her life with her partner - now wife - and their young daughter - now grown.

Newman, a full-time writer and poet at the time, chronicles Heather's love of all things "two", including her moms, one a doctor and the other a carpenter. When Heather joins a home-based play group - changed to "school" in the new version - she is saddened when teacher Molly reads the children a story at nap time focused on a daddy.

As the children chime in with their fathers' occupations, Heather bemoans, "I don't have a daddy", when asked what hers does for a living. The original story has her tearing up as she wonders if any other family looks like hers. The update has the children chiming in with the work of their mommies and daddies, and it eliminates Heather's tears.

The process of getting Heather published in 1989 was a slow one.

"After I wrote the book I sent it to many, many publishers. ... Nobody was really interested," Newman says.

That's why she co-published the book with a friend who had a desktop printing business. The two found an illustrator and financed the endeavor mostly from $10 donations, promising each contributor a copy from the 4,000 they printed up.

Soon, writer and businessman Sasha Alyson came knocking. He had just put out another picture book, Daddy's Roommate, about a divorced father who lives with his same-sex partner, when he spotted Heather in a bookshop and offered to take it on. But opposition to both books grew in New York City.

A pastor from the First Baptist Church even waved them around during a sermon and blasted them as unsuitable for children, among other things.

That and other stories barely touch the trouble encountered by Heather Has Two Mommies in hot spots around the country. Newman says it was banned, burned and even defecated upon by a library patron in Ohio. It was among the nation's most challenged books in libraries for a good part of the 1990s.

"It's the book that brought to the forefront the issues, the conflicts over what materials concerning GLBT identity, lifestyles should be available to young kids," says Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director for the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom in Chicago. "It was a time when we were really first acknowledging what we call the culture wars now, and the idea that there would be books actually acknowledging that families headed by same-sex parents existed."