Could The Baby-Sitters Club Have Been More Gay?

In her monthly column YA of Yore, Frankie Thomas takes a second look at the books that defined a generation.

This is an allegory, but it’s also true: I grew up in Chelsea, the Manhattan neighborhood that was, at the time, the center of gay life in New York. We moved there in 1989, when I was two. I was one of the only children in my neighborhood. There was a park right across the street from my building, but only grown men hung out in it, and I wasn’t allowed to play there. I was enchanted by the rainbow flags that hung from windows in the summertime, but I couldn’t get any adult to tell me what they were for. “Brotherhood,” my preschool teacher told me, and then refused to answer any follow-up questions. In elementary school we had an art teacher who was openly living with , and every Christmas he had us decorate paper gift bags to donate to a meal service for patients. When he died, in 1996, I was nine years old and had still never heard the term . I was in middle school when I first began to encounter it, but only from classmates, and only as an insult. I was thirteen when I was finally deemed old