Catherine Hernandez got what you might call a lesson in the ABCs of homophobia.
The children’s book author says Charlottetown Junior Public School in Scarborough refused her offer to read her LGBTQ-friendly book M Is For Mustache to kids there before school was let out for the summer recently.
Hernandez, who is also a well-known theatre artist, says a teacher at the school had asked her to do a reading, but that the vice-principal raised concerns about a possible “backlash over the province’s new sex-ed curriculum.”
Hernandez says someone at the Charlottetown arranged for her to do a reading at Nelson Mandela Public School’s daycare centre instead. Her readings there and at the school’s literacy centre seems to go off without a hitch.
But Hernandez says “now there is homophobic backlash from the literacy centre and the school itself for the reading.”
Hernandez did get a chance to do a reading of sorts at Charlottetown Public School, only it was for us. Watch the video and hear Hernandez tell her side of the story – and explain who Marsha P. Johnson was.
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