If you’re a little lesbian who is afraid you’ll never find your match, Christine Gayle has written a book for you – assuming you can read on a first grade level. Gayle’s new story Dottie the Sock: How I Found My Pair! is the tale of a young sock who is quite happy, until she realizes she hasn’t found her match.
The book’s descriptive blurb reads:
She won’t give up until she finds [her match]. She asks her Mom. She asks her Dad. She asks her Sister. She asks her Brother. She even asks her Nana and Papa. She doesn’t find her pair, until she looks inside of herself and follows her heart.
Dottie, you see, is a little queer sock.
How I Found My Pair! is only the first of Dottie’s adventures. Once she finds her pair, the little lesbian sock is going to star in a 10-book series, through which Gayle hopes to teach children to accept and respect themselves, as well as their peers. She dedicated the first Dottie story to four grade-school children who committed suicide after being tormented by classmates.
Dottie isn’t written PSA-style. The language is simple and fun, the pictures are colorful, and the little sock’s escapade is believable: she’s just a girl sock looking for another girl sock to love her.
“The story I’m trying to tell is that Dottie is just like anyone out there,” Gayle told NBC. “It doesn’t matter if she’s black or white or Muslim or lesbian.”
With a mission like that – one which Gayle calls “Operation True Change” – Dottie is sure to be universally loved, right?
Wrong.
When Dottie was released last week, Gayle began receiving emails from angry parents saying there should be some kind of Big Gay warning on the outside of the book. It seems so non-threatening, then you open it up and – BOOM! – homosexual stockings. How is a kid supposed to recover from something like that? Oh, and also: writing about lesbian socks will cause God to doom America to hell.
If conservative parents don’t like Dottie the Sock: How I Found My Pair!, wait until they get a load of the next books in the series: Dottie the Sock: How I Discovered I’m a Top!, Dottie the Sock: I Won’t Be Your Cross-Stitch Experiment! and the shockingly poignant Dottie the Sock Discovers The Dryer!
(Kidding, Parents Council.)
Gayle said, “Many parents will not buy my books, due to the fact that Dottie is a lesbian sock. But the parents that decide to change the way they view others and accept others for their differences will change the world forever.”
You can find out more about Dottie at her website: dottiethesock.com, or you can follow Christine Gayle on Twitter.
Do you think Dottie’s adventure is one worth reading?
