Wild Visionary by Golan Y. Moskowitz

Author:Golan Y. Moskowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Several years later, Night Kitchen became a similarly subversive account of children’s awareness of the physical pleasures of which they are expected to pretend innocence, such as sexuality and the nocturnal amusements of urban life.88 For his own gratification, Sendak infused the book with coded references to his own narrative battle of overcoming obstacles impeding his maturation. On one of the buildings of his kitchen cityscape, Sendak divided the word “trademark” into “Trade Mark,” potentially referencing the name he sometimes used as a discreetly gay young man in Manhattan, qualified by the term “trade,” which in gay slang refers to a straight-identified man who also engages sexually with other men. While working on the text for Night Kitchen, Sendak wrote to Dowell, requesting in the same breath suggestions for words to use in the picture book, as well as details about Dowell’s sexual exploits on Shelter Island.89 Sendak finished the book in an apartment just a few short blocks from the Stonewall Inn as the gay liberation movement erupted. About a week after the Stonewall Riots, he created a dummy in which a naked Mickey displays what appears to be a full erection and cries “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” as he slides down the side of a giant bottle labeled “The Milky Way.”90 Never published, these rather explicit elements would be neutralized in later drawings, Mickey’s penis shrunken and flaccid, the “Milky Way” label removed, and Mickey’s arms now imitating rooster wings, rather than raised above his head. Speaking about the process of creating the book, which he described as a farewell to his own childhood, the artist declared, “I was now old enough to stay up at night and know what was happening in the Night Kitchen.”91

In the wake of Night Kitchen, American attitudes moved to favor increased censorship in popular culture, as the nation negotiated definitions of decency following the liberal social revolutions of the 1960s. Without noting the personal references from Sendak’s own life, critics deemed Night Kitchen an “inappropriate” urban fantasy of a naked boy mixing batter and spilling milk in the moonlight among men while his parents slept at home in ignorance. As one book review stated, “Something very sexy is going on in ‘In the Night Kitchen.’ . . . It celebrates eating and staying up late, and the child’s voracious desire to participate in those grown-up activities.”92 Another review in Elementary English saw Night Kitchen as striking “a literary blow for the Kid Lib movement” in its invitation to “vicariously wallow nude in cake dough and skinny dip in milk.”93 Sendak’s assistant Eric Pederson recalled a flood of letters from the Northwest disapproving of Mickey’s nudity, as well as related hate mail throughout the artist’s later years.94 But Nordstrom stood by Sendak’s decision to draw the protagonist, Mickey, in full-frontal nudity, because “the hero of a story about forbidden pleasures and the awakening sense of self needed to be naked.”95 She distributed a press release on June 9, 1972, comprising 425 signatures of professors, librarians, artists,

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