all the light you need, pt. 1
a deep dive into the world's most morbid children's picture books, and the evangelical worldview that spawned them
(Content note: this essay contains references to child sexual abuse and homophobia throughout, along with a drawing in a picture book which is suggestive of the former)
Introduction
There is little to be found about the writer-illustrator duo Doris Sanford and Graci Evans in terms of concrete and immediate biographical details, only a breadcrumb trail of picture books among the most abjectly morbid in the recorded history of children’s literature. Predominantly put into print by evangelical1 Christian publisher Multnomah Books and its seeming imprint Gold ‘n’ Honey circa the 1980s to the 1990s, Sanford/Evans books were typically focused on specific issues that may affect children, announcing themselves on their covers as “a child’s book about” the subject at hand—implicitly framing each work as a guide to what should be known and done if one happens to be impacted by the situations described. Their books were traditionally but not exclusively grouped into thematic series—the brunt of the texts I will analyse are contained within the ‘Hurts of Childhood Series’, the ‘Children of Courage Series’, and the ‘In Our Neighborhood Series’. The first is self-explanatory, the second details supposedly true stories of children who showed exemplary bravery under severe pressure, and the third tells the stories of individual fictional children who live in the same neighbourhood. Not all of these books are as troubling as those which I am to dissect, and many could indeed be thought of as innocuous, but several have distinctly sinister elements that sit at the intersection of many then-and-now contemporary religious moral panics.
My focus in the first section will be on Sanford and Evans’ In Our Neighborhood: David Has AIDS (1989) and Something Must Be Wrong With Me: A Boy’s Book About Sexual Abuse (1993), and their respective erasure and deprecation of homosexuality. It will place the messages expressed within the broader context of the AIDS crisis and its intensification by the religious right, including more blatantly homophobic media released around the time, an example being Alfie’s Home (1993), another children’s picture book about sexual abuse written by “ex-gay” conversion therapy advocate Richard A. Cohen. The second section will cover Sanford and Evans’ most infamous text Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse (1990), notorious for being a particularly bleak historical curiosity surrounding the “Satanic Panic” of the eighties to early nineties, during which unsubstantiated accusations of child abuse by satanic cults ran rampant. Here, using historical texts regarding the period, I will use Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy as a springboard for consideration of the ways in which the religious right simultaneously sanctify childhood and mystify the causes of child abuse, a pattern which can be seen to repeat itself in the onsets of recent conspiracies such as Pizzagate and QAnon. The conclusion will attempt to deconstruct the ethos of the Sanford/Evans project using two of their books that, while not being intended for children, are inexorably tied to the ideas in their juvenile writing and provide a mission statement of sorts. These books are How to Answer Tough Questions Kids Ask (1995), which is a guide intended for parents as to how to explain various subjects to children that, unlike the others, includes no Graci Evans illustrations, and the extremely ethically troubling Love Letters: Responding to Children in Pain (1991), which prints unabridged and often distressing letters from children who have written to Sanford along with her responses to each letter. The former imparts Sanford’s hardline evangelical views with the least cushioning, whereas the latter damningly displays her as seriously breaching the confidence of the children whose plights her very career is predicated upon.
What is perhaps most jarring about these books is that, despite their detestable ideological bent and exploitation of children’s trauma, they make for compulsive reading in a manner that cannot be easily laughed off. Evans’ illustrations for each book (example above) exhibit a profound, if subconscious, engagement with the parameters of the uncanny: each image is simultaneously heightened and naturalistic, as if attempting to visually convey how a child would perceive a traumatic event in memory. The Sanford/Evans imagetexts, when temporarily detached from the vantage point of their worldviews, function as especially uneasy pieces of domestic horror, in which the only constant in their pastel-hued vision of America is the suffering of the child. The Biblical leanings of the messaging, when narratively interjected, present a further layer of surrealism since it is often presented in the form of God speaking to the child protagonist in the form of an animal commonly utilised in religious symbolism, such as a dove or a lamb. This dove, known only by the always-capitalised moniker “LOVE-DOVE”, appears twice as the spiritual counsel of two sexually abused children: once in I Can’t Talk About It: A Child’s Book About Sexual Abuse (1986), and again in the aforementioned thematic sequel Something Must Be Wrong With Me.
Because You Were There: Homophobia in Something Must Be Wrong With Me and David Has AIDS
It is notable that Something Must Be Wrong With Me is a sequel of sorts, since there is no other occasion in the Sanford/Evans bibliography where a single subject has two books written about it from diverging perspectives. Elsewhere in their works, regardless of the gender of the protagonist, each book is assumedly meant to be read by any child who “needs” it. I will pick one book from their oeuvre at random illustratively, in this case I Know the World’s Worst Secret: A Child’s Book About Living With an Alcoholic Parent (1988). Despite the child at the narrative forefront being a girl, the experience of having an alcoholic parent may not be experienced divergently enough between children raised as girls and children raised as boys for a second book with a male protagonist to be needed, even in the most essentialist framework of gender difference. Due to how closely and intimately sexual abuse is experienced, and the fact that the stigma caused by patriarchal social conditioning means boys are less likely to seek help in adulthood for dealing with past sexual abuse, some sympathy can be had for Doris Sanford and Graci Evans later being compelled to write a second book for boys on the subject2. While the wide-ranging motives and dynamics behind each act of sexual abuse cannot be slotted into neat binaries, it is notable that Annie, the protagonist of I Can’t Talk About It, is sexually abused by her father, whereas the sexual abuse in Something Must Be Wrong With Me is a category of predation outsourced from the home: its protagonist, Dino, is sexually abused by his basketball coach.
The approach to each book’s treatment of abuse is markedly different: the text of I Can’t Talk About It is among the most viscerally upsetting in their entire child-aimed catalogue, but the father—and therefore his abuse—remains unseen, the narrative being situated in the aftermath of this abuse. Something Must Be Wrong With Me is somewhat more tactless visually, avoiding graphic visualisation of the coach’s abuse but still containing highly suggestive imagery of the direct lead-up to it. For instance, the book’s second pagespread (below3) depicts the two in the shower while Coach Tom leers at Dino, with the off-kilter semirealism of Evans’ house style furthering the discomfort inherent to this prelude to molestation. Compared to the complete omission of depicting the heterosexual patriarch who is Annie’s abuser, the choice to depict the looming figure of Coach in the first two pagespreads is notably insidious in what it suggests to its readers when one takes into account the evangelical views of Sanford and the fact that he is the only character associated with homosexuality in any Sanford/Evans book. As a decision it carries the characteristics of fearmongering: rather than providing meaningful advice for children who have been abused, it appears more like it functions in order to imprint a disturbing depiction on the minds of children or parents.
A common homophobic rhetorical move by the religious right is the conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia, a paradigmatic historical example being the 1961 public information film Boys Beware, which attempts to warn teenage boys about molestation through a portrayal of one being groomed by a gay man, who the narrator describes as “a homosexual, a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex4”. Daniel Marshall states in an essay about controversies stoked in Australia regarding the dissemination of educational writing about homosexuality by gay teachers that “homosexuality is commonly described with close reference to adolescence for the main purpose of emphasizing the extent to which homosexuals and young people should be kept apart5”. Indeed, the Coach, by being uncharacterised except for the abuse he inflicts, becomes a stock character: the archetypal figure of the Gay Pedophile, which has historically been evoked to question the suitability of LGBT+ people for jobs which involve interaction with young people, such as teaching. This is a phenomenon which can be most recently and representatively observed by the development of “groomer” becoming the slur du jour for conservative media pundits’ attacks on queer people, particularly in relation to the issues of teaching about LGBT+ issues in schools and the medical care of trans children. Evans’ positioning of Dino and Coach on the first pagespread (below) is notable in that it frames Coach as already secure in his targeting of Dino through mere proximity, and that any abuse from then on (“then on” being in this instance the second pagespread) is an inevitability. The mention in Sanford’s text on the second page of “Coach and his wife” frames a commonality among often-closeted and/or multiply marginalised gay men of marrying into heterosexual relationships, “largely because of social expectancy, or because of [societal] concern over homosexuality6”, as suspect. Coach’s wife, never mentioned again, is a background detail instead of a person: within Sanford’s text she exists only to prove his sin more heinous in a Biblical sense by rendering it triply adulterous, pedophilic and homosexual, rather than only the latter two.
There is an unsettling implication that the dissolution of the traditional nuclear family structure enabled the occurrence of Coach’s predatory acts towards Dino in the second pagespread, on the left side of which Sanford writes that “Coach told Dino he was going to teach him some things about being a man since Dino didn’t have a dad”. On the first pagespread, the absence of his father is explained as being a result of “his parents’ divorce”, despite the phrasing on the second indicating a death in the family. That the act of divorce results in the symbolic death of Dino’s father, allowing for an interloper in the place of his father to sow the seeds of sexual abuse, is indicative of Biblical teachings equating divorce to adultery and regarding it as a sin (Mark 10:11–12; Matthew 19), a position which, despite not being agreed upon by all Christians, is echoed by some denominations. In terms of considering Sanford and Evans’ approach to the family, queer theorist Lee Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurism” is applicable: a claim to the future by means of procreative propagation, which “works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child7”.
Dino is not the only child who is the generative outcome of this failed partnership: he has a younger brother—unnamed and only once witnessed—who he has been “fighting so much with” (9) in the fallout of his sexual abuse. His mother tells him that his brother is “one other person who needs to know what has happened to [him]... He deserves to know.” (11) without providing a concrete reasoning. Reading between the lines, what can be inferred from this supposed obligation is that Dino is to function as a living cautionary tale for his younger brother, so that he too is not led astray by false father-figures, and that the family unit in this absence of a patriarch must be privy to all the happenings in the lives of one another to be better insulated from harm. There is only one family member left for Dino to divulge his abuse experience to, and any secrets kept may further fissure the already disunited unit. Theorist Tony Fahey, while stating that privacy “is a flag of convenience which can be attached to very many different things and relationships”, elaborates that one of these is “[use] by subordinate groups to fight against controls8”. Dino, subordinated by being a child under the jurisdiction of a parent, along with the compounding factor of being a survivor of a traumatic sexual assault, is forced into the deprivation of such privacy. Another factor that Dino’s mother frames as an unavoidable must is an invasive forensic examination by doctors of “[his] body, even the parts that were sexually abused” (10). Even though such a procedure, especially pertaining to someone as young as him, has a transparent potential of retraumatisation, his mother does not let him know that any other less intimate method of information-gathering is possible, only that “the doctor’s touching is for [his] health, and is okay”. This particular aspect of the narrative is never mentioned again and therefore glossed over, presumably happening offpage without protestation, which is evidential of a blind faith in institutions on Sanford’s part, as a reckoning with the emotional turmoil a child would have when asked to continually restate and renew their trauma in the pursuit of justice would require a level of nuance this book evidently does not have. Here, judicial institutions are always depicted as having the best interests of the child at heart even though they are textually granted the same degree of access to Dino’s body as Coach, but this time it is made clear he is not allowed to protest this invasion of privacy, since the long arm of the law is permitted to override the comfort of any individual who is used to gather its evidence.
The first appearance of LOVE-DOVE on the fourth pagespread (above) qualifies as an unsubtle deus ex machina, since it is heavily implied that he is God speaking to Dino in the guise of a dove. However, following on from Sanford’s suggestion that the lack of a father figure in his life was a gateway to being groomed by Coach, LOVE-DOVE is principally a pater ex machina, a father-figure sent down from the heavens to engage the child in candid conversations about weighty questions he might not have the confidence to ask anyone else. A furtherance of the notion that LOVE-DOVE is the logical conclusion and literalisation of “God the Father” as a concept is that his only other appearance in a Sanford/Evans book is to counsel the protagonist of I Can’t Talk About It, whose father has breached his duty of care by routinely sexually abusing her. A common homophobic rhetorical trope is that both homosexuality and susceptibility to sexual abuse is a direct consequence of fatherlessness, an idea most disturbingly emphasised by another controversial children’s picture book about sexual abuse: Alfie’s Home by ‘ex-gay’ conversion therapy advocate Richard A. Cohen, which makes the subtextually reactionary elements of Something Must Be Wrong With Me its primary text. In it, the titular character Alfie’s father is perpetually at work, and this absence leads to him being sexually abused by his uncle, a situation which leads him to believe he is gay. The supposedly “happily-ever-after” conclusion is the coercive rejuvenation of the nuclear family structure, with both conversion therapy and time spent with his father causing Alfie to decide that he is not gay, rather that he “just missed [his] Dad’s love and was taught wrong things by [his] uncle9”. Dino’s ability to confide in LOVE-DOVE has similar, though more inexplicit, curative quantities, although the suggested omniscience of this deific dove (“it was almost as if he already knew how Dino felt before Dino spoke” (21)) creates the overarching intimation that either God stood by while this sexual abuse happened and did nothing, or He sanctioned it Himself in order to have a starting-point for teaching Dino life lessons. While God looms large over the Sanford/Evans books, Sanford seems wholly unable to engage with the question of why exactly He would allow such anguish to occur to the children He presides over, while still holding Christian teachings as an objective moral rulebook even given the thorny theological questions evoked by the suffering her writing forefronts.
During Dino’s penultimate meeting with LOVE-DOVE on pages 21-22, the outlier is not the stark truisms that the dove directs at him, but the specificity of what Dino sees fit to tell him: “LOVE, do you know that sexual abuse doesn’t cause homosexuality? Not even if it felt good!” On a surface level, this statement contradicts the reactionary message in Alfie’s Home that experience of sexual abuse is a leading reason for early homosexual feelings, though in context it further aggravates the subtextual homophobia of the book for a selection of reasons. One is due to the pathologisation inherent to the phrase “cause homosexuality”, which takes the heteronormative as the default and homosexual behaviour as an aberration from said default. While the blatancy of the message here is far from the degree of hate found in Alfie’s Home, looking at homosexuality in terms of possible causations in a similar manner to the observation of a disease could easily be a stepping stone for conversion-therapy rhetorics, since in the medical profession a cure is commonly worked for when a cause is made clear. Boys Beware can again be evoked since it calls gay men “mentally ill” and “sick… a sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious: a sickness of the mind”. Even pre-AIDS, the seeds had already been sown for the widespread association of homosexuality and disease, as evident in this mainstream piece of pseudo-educational propaganda, and even if it was not intentional here it is likely that cultural homophobia had a subconscious influence on how Sanford and Evans chose to tell the story. Another reason that this statement is problematic is that in the story itself the only reference to homosexuality is first as the unspoken sexual orientation of a pedophile, and then as spoken but rebuked as a possibility. There is another reference however, but this is in a postscript section common to their books which is addressed to the hypothetical parent of any child who may be reading. It specifies that “child molesters are single, married, heterosexual, homosexual, male and female” (27), which again is a reasonable statement in that there is no demographic that has a higher propensity for committing child abuse than any other, but is marred by it preceding a narrative where it is specifically the homosexual male who is singled out as the likeliest abuser of a boy such as Dino. There could have very easily been factors that complicated this representation, such as hearing stories from the children in Dino’s support group that differ from his, but given the evangelical position of homosexuality as sin it is highly unlikely that Sanford and Evans would have interest in complicating such a representation. An example of a similar narrative which intelligently dodges the homophobic undertones is Scott Heim’s 1995 novel Mysterious Skin, adapted into an acclaimed 2004 film by cult queer director Gregg Araki, which begins with an abuse scenario incredibly similar to the one which Sanford and Evans describe. After two boys are sexually abused by their male baseball coach, the novel picks up in their late teenage years where their contrasting coping mechanisms (complete repression vs. hypersexuality) are evidenced and analysed. Homosexuality as a subject is not evaded like in Sanford or scorned like in Cohen, since Heim is gay and therefore includes multiple gay characters who are not figures that exist purely to inflict sexual trauma, including one of the two protagonists, whose homosexuality is not framed as resulting from the abuse but preceding it—an early indicator being him rifling through a Playgirl magazine and realising it was “different; [he] didn’t want to deface these models. All of them were males10”.
Returning to the rhetoric of homosexuality as disease that is the springboard of the promotion of conversion therapy (and already referenced to be implied through subtle word choice in Something Must Be Wrong With Me), it is important to place it in the context of the HIV/AIDS crisis that was still ongoing in the early nineties, killing millions in the United States. In the early years of the spread of AIDS, the Reagan presidency responded with derision and inaction, Reagan himself not even publicly mentioning AIDS until 1985. In a leaked press conference from 1984, the Reagan administration’s press secretary Larry Speakes said “[he hasn’t] heard [Reagan] express concern” and that “[he] must confess [he hasn’t] asked him about it11”. When journalist Lester Kinsolving suggested that he ask Reagan, Speakes mockingly responded with “Have you been checked?” followed by laughter from the press pool. This conference was a microcosm of the Reaganite party-line towards the seriousness of AIDS, and part of the reason why it was ignored for so long was because it was framed by large swathes of the right as a “gay plague” that not only supposedly solely affected people who had engaged in homosexual sex acts but was seen by some as divine punishment for engaging in such acts. It was believed by gay rights activists, many of whom were affected by HIV/AIDS or had lost loved ones to it, that action only began to be taken by governments when it became apparent that heterosexual sex had an equally high risk of AIDS transmission for the participants involved, at which point the disease had already spread far enough to be difficult to contain. A representative piece of AIDS awareness media in terms of this development in understanding was an Australian public service announcement from 1987 in which the Grim Reaper knocks over people with pins in a bowling alley as a metaphor for the disease’s fatality: the opening narration states “At first, only gays and IV drug users were being killed by AIDS. But now we know every one of us could be devastated by it.12” Doris Sanford and Graci Evans’ take on the AIDS epidemic, In This Neighborhood: David Has AIDS, was released two years after this PSA, and is a cultural artifact of similarly grim fascination in terms of representing the gradual collective realisation by the heterosexual world that they were not invulnerable to HIV/AIDS.
David Has AIDS has a very matter-of-fact title: the child protagonist David does in fact have AIDS, and the progression—along with ultimate conclusion via death—of his character arc is entirely motivated by the disease. In a weary prayer to God, David is responsible for the exposition that he “[has] AIDS from a blood transfusion13” (10), a subtle means of setting him apart from the aforementioned “gays and IV drug users” even though any instance of a child sexually contracting AIDS from an adult would count as rape. It would be a less moralistic choice to not disclose the means through which David acquired the disease, as even evangelical Christians who ultimately became sympathetic to AIDS victims retained their prejudice towards those who acquired it through intravenous drug use or unprotected gay sex. There is a sketch in Chris Morris’ satirical comedy show Brass Eye which lampoons this perception of the disease by having a fictional TV presenter played by Morris separate it into “Good AIDS” (contracting it through a blood transfusion) and “Bad AIDS” (contracting it through homosexual activity), proclaiming that “this ribbon means I support someone with Good AIDS because they caught the virus through no fault of their own14”. This, in effect, is Sanford and Evans’ implied stance on AIDS. While the narrative decries the prejudices of his classmates, who refuse to play with him because he has AIDS, the book’s refusal to mention homosexuality, along with a presentation David performs in class to change their minds—which in context is the explicitly educational section of the book much like the afterword of Something Must Be Wrong With Me is—suggests that the selfsame prejudices are held by Sanford and Evans but not insisted upon.
At first (above) it seems fairly innocuous, proclaiming it “hard to catch” (11) and emphasising that everyday activities will not result in AIDS, even if one is interacting with a person who has it. The only moment of pause in the initial pagespread of the presentation is the vagueness of “some body fluids”, though it is understandable that one might not want to mention semen in a children’s book (although in Sanford and Evans’ case it is undeniable they have alluded to far more difficult material, especially in I Can’t Talk About It and Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy). The last line of the presentation (below) is by far the most questionable in the entire book, proclaiming that “the most dangerous person with AIDS is the one you DON’T know has the disease” (13). Since it is unlikely, apart from rare circumstances such as blood pacts, that someone could contract AIDS from another for reasons other than needle-sharing or sex, Sanford’s writing gives the suggestion that those who have not made it apparent that they have AIDS are disreputable, a subliminal ascription of predatory intentions to a certain portion of a demographic. Since AIDS’ primary association, even now but especially in its early years, was with homosexuality, the cautionary note David leaves the presentation on feels like the closest thing to a mention of homosexuality in the entire book due to its echoing of the idea inherent to the “gay plague” myth that some people with AIDS are “dangerous”. It is also bizarre that while this presentation is framed as David finally standing up for himself and combatting the stigma that has been attached to him by his class, there is no indication whatsoever as to whether their stance changes as soon after, he reaches the late stages of AIDS and becomes homebound. Despite the fact that around the time this book came out there were multiple cases of HIV/AIDS and other bloodborne viruses being transmitted via transfusion, these instances, as regrettable as they were, contributed to the instatement of multiple homophobic laws in various countries which restricted blood donation from men who had sex with men even if they had tested HIV-negative. A case in point is that in the UK, a ban was instituted on blood donation by gay and bisexual men in 1980 which was only loosened in 2011, despite the fact that heterosexual individuals also have a propensity for having multiple sexual partners and a risk of catching HIV/AIDS from unprotected sex.
Maybe the bleakest element of David Has AIDS is David’s largely unanswered prayers to God, where he wonders why it had to be him who contracted the disease. The continual contradiction at the heart of Sanford and Evans’ fiction is that many are about children attempting to reckon with their belief in a God who they know has not stopped them from experiencing terminal illness or severe trauma, while these same stories are also vehicles for religious proselytism. God cannot—and does not—save him from his predestined death, though He is framed as providing momentary comforts which should supposedly function as redemptive grace notes in such an untimely and lonely death, such as David’s prayer that “Please God, [he needs] a friend” (3) being immediately followed by a letter to him from a boy named Washington, who wants to play and includes the postscript “I know you have AIDS. I’m not scared.” (4) However, when he is on his deathbed and asks God “what is dying like?” (18) he is responded to by his grandmother instead, who is drawn by Evans as wearing white with a somewhat angelic ethereality to her presence, and has a seemingly preternatural knowledge of the process of death (below). Her explanation is convoluted and metaphorically incoherent—“Davey, dying is like going to a movie theater early and seeing the end of the story before you see the rest, and then staying to watch the movie from the beginning” (19)—but her concluding, simplifying emphasis is that “God will be there . . . and you’ll have all the light you need” (26), which seemingly causes David to be at peace with his oncoming death as it is the point at which the book ends. The children of Sanford and Evans’ books are at the mercy of a passive and platitudinous God who can only appear as a dove or a grandmother; but more principally at the mercy of two active and moralistic Gods who authored them into an existence of being vessels for covert propaganda, of being barely anything but—to again quote Edelman—“the Child whose innocence solicits our defense”.
WaterBrook & Multnomah, About WaterBrook & Multnomah, 2023. https://waterbrookmultnomah.com/about-us/.
Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy, while being about sexual abuse, is not gendered in its presentation due to the specificity of the type of abuse it alleges habitually occurs.
Sanford, Doris and Evans, Graci. Something Must Be Wrong With Me: A Boy’s Book About Sexual Abuse. Gold ‘n’ Honey Books, 1993.
Boys Beware. Dir. Sid Davis. Perf. Timothy Farrell. Sid Davis Productions, 1961. Film.
Marshall, Daniel, et al. Bodies of Evidence : The Practice of Queer Oral History, Oxford University Press, 2012.
Higgins, Daryl J. “Gay men from heterosexual marriages: attitudes, behaviors, childhood experiences, and reasons for marriage.” Journal of homosexuality vol. 42,4 (2002)
Edelman, Lee. No Future : Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004.
Fahey, Tony. “Privacy and the Family: Conceptual and Empirical Reflections.” Sociology, vol. 29, no. 4, 1995, pp. 687–702.
Cohen, Richard. Alfie’s Home. International Healing Foundation, 1993.
Heim, Scott. Mysterious Skin. HarperCollins, 1995.
Vanity Fair. Reagan Administration's Chilling Response to the AIDS Crisis. 2015. YouTube.
Steve Covello. Australian AIDS PSA - Grim Reaper Bowling. 2018. YouTube.
Sanford, Doris and Evans, Graci. In This Neighborhood: David Has AIDS. Multnomah, 1986.
“Sex”. Brass Eye. Channel 4, 19 Feb 1997. Television.