In place of dispensing easy answers, Ungerer invites young readers to think hard. Outsiders and outcasts, they must overcome disadvantages and even violence to find companionship or realize they prefer solitude and are entitled to it. None of Ungerer’s subjects are explicitly represented as gay, but like the author himself, they are queer in the broadest sense. The Man in the Moon hitches a ride to Earth where he is jailed for being an invader before devising an ingenious plan to find his way back to the place where he belongs. A lonely tax collector finds unexpected camaraderie with the curious beast who has stolen fruit from his beloved pear tree. Three robbers steal a young orphan who opens their hearts, eventually leading them to share their wealth with other lost, unhappy, and abandoned children. Ungerer’s stories aren’t simple morality tales.

Many other titles followed, including Rufus: The Bat Who Loved Colors in 1961. The following year he was introduced to the visionary and subversive Harper & Row editor Ursula Nordstrom, who published his first children’s book The Mellops Go Flying.

He came to New York in 1956 with sixty dollars in his pocket and a trunk full of drawings and manuscripts. Who could have come up with such a story? Tomi Ungerer was born in Strasbourg, France in 1931, and grew up under Nazi occupation in Alsace, on the French-German border. He nurses Rufus back to health, and it’s through their tender friendship that Rufus learns to embrace his true self. But then a famous butterfly collector finds Rufus felled in his tulip garden. The first people who see him are so threatened by his difference they try to scare him away. The rainbow-clad Rufus does not find immediate acceptance. Rufus is so inspired by the colorful flowers, birds, and insects he sees that he adorns his wings with paint from an artist’s palette he finds abandoned in a meadow. He stays up all night and in the morning he discovers an entirely new world. It’s unlike anything he’s ever experienced and his life is changed.Ī normal bat would fly right back to what is familiar, but Rufus isn’t normal. The bright colors of the cars are lit by the images projected onto the screen. But one night he stumbles upon a drive-in movie theater. He hangs from the roof of his cave as he sleeps by day, and flies across the moonlit sky as he hunts by night. The Queer Syllabus is edited by Wesley O.

New entries will run on Thursday, September through December, and then will be collected as a living document on the Foglifter website. When we identify our roots, when we point to the work that shaped us as writers and as people, we demonstrate that our stories are timeless, essential, and important-and so are we. The Queer Syllabus is a joint project from The Rumpus and Foglifter Press that allows writers to nominate works for a new canon of queer literature.

Rufus tomi ungerer