Maurice Sendak & Gay Identity

Coming out in “Outside over There” (from Horn Book)

Maurice Sendak, “Outside Over There” (HarperCollins)

Jonathan Cott’s new book There’s a Mystery There(Doubleday) is a terrific examination of what its subtitle calls “The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak.” It accomplishes this by focusing on a single book, Sendak’s masterpiece, Outside Over There (1981), winner of a Caldecott Honor and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. And Cott’s objective is to identify every possible understanding of this celebrated picture book.

Sendak himself had offered clues, noting, for example, how the kidnap of a child (which sets in motion the action in Outside Over There) arose from his childhood obsession with the Lindbergh kidnapping, and how its story of a changeling was inspired by the Grimms’ tale “The Goblins.” Critics, too, have puzzled out additional meanings and supplemented our growing body of insights. There’s a Mystery There extends that endeavor through interviews with four experts (two psychoanalysts, an art critic, and a friend of Sendak’s), providing even more to our multivalent understanding of Outside Over There.

That said, to my way of thinking there is one thing missing in Cott’s otherwise comprehensive discussions of the book: how Sendak’s story takes up his identity as a gay male, albeit in a deeply symbolic way.

Jonathan Cott, “There’s A Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak” (Doubleday).

It isn’t that Cott was unaware of Sendak’s sexuality. Indeed, in his lengthy introduction, he provides a sympathetic overview: noting how Sendak was in a long-term relationship with Eugene Glynn, his partner of fifty years, and how he didn’t come out until a 2008 interview in the New York Times when he was eighty years old. As for why he was closeted for so long, Sendak offered a tortured if familiar reason: “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy.”

But another reason Sendak concealed his sexual identity was his worry that the public might turn on him if they learned that he was a gay man writing children’s books. It was a reasonable worry at the time. Indeed, while Sendak’s sexual orientation was widely known among his friends, we didn’t talk about it in public. That’s why Sendak was especially…