Wild & Free Game

Reading Harriet the Spy today as an adult, I find a queer subtext throughout. Not only is Harriet the quintessential baby butch, but her best friends, Sport and Janie, run exactly contrary to gender stereotypes. Sport acts as the homemaker and nurturing caretaker of his novelist father, while Janie the scientist plans to blow up the world one day. It was as if Fitzhugh was telling us kids back in the sixties that you didn’t have to play by society’s rules, the first lesson a queer kid has to learn in order to be happy. Harriet’s whole ordeal — being ostracized by her friends after they invade her privacy by reading her spy notebook — sounds to me very much like a coming-out story. Her parents’ response to it all is to take her to a psychiatrist for analysis. Sound familiar? Most importantly, the sage Ole Golly resolves matters with a piece of advice that takes on special meaning for queer kids: Sometimes you have to lie. But to yourself you must always tell the truth.