Cricket Media Provides Contrast in Kids’ Magazine LGBTQ Inclusion

cricket_excerptAfter an Internet uproar over the past few days over Highlights magazine’s initially weak response to why they haven’t included LGBTQ families in their pages, I reached out to Cricket Media, another long-time behemoth in children’s magazine publishing, to see if they had ever done so. Here’s what they said.

I received the following message from Stephanie Hoaglund of Cricket’s media relations department:

Thank you for the question.  We have indeed shown LGBTQ families and stories.  Our magazines continually feature content that tries to honestly represent the experiences of kids today.

Cicada, our magazine for kids 14+, continually strives to represent teens in the LGBTQ and other underrepresented groups. Cricket Magazine, our magazine for kids 9-14, also has many examples but you can look to the Jan 2005 issue of Cricket [actually, the Jan 2015 issue, per Danny Resner, associate editor of Cricket’s Spider magazine, via his comment below], where we answered a question by one of our young readers recognizing all types of families: (see below [image above —Ed.]) And also included an activity about creating your family tree that recognized all types of families — (see attached file).

These are just a few of the examples where we represent the lives and experiences of kids honestly.

Regards

Stephanie Hoaglund

Beyond the examples Hoaglund mentioned, I found a poem on their online forum for teen writers, the Slam, titled “My mother asked if i was ‘gay.’” In it, the author describes being in love with both a boy and a girl.

I’m fairly pleased by Cricket Media’s LGBTQ inclusion (assuming the above examples are indeed just a few of many), although I would also love to see representation in their titles for younger children, too.

It’s worth noting, too, that Highlights has posted on its website an official statement about LGBTQ inclusion, basically reiterating what Editor-in-Chief Christine French Cully posted on Facebook earlier. The key part, I think is:

We want to reiterate that we believe all families matter. We know that there are many ways to build a family, and that love is the essential “ingredient.” This conversation has helped us see that we can be more reflective of all kinds of families in our publications. We are committed to doing so as we plan future issues.

I hope you’ll continue using the #HighlightLGBTFamilies hashtag launched by author Megan Dowd Lambert to suggest ways Highlights (@Highlights) and other children’s media venues (like Sesame Street, @SesameStreet!) can better include our families. Make sure to thank Cricket (@CricketMediaInc) for being in the forefront here, too (and urge them to do even more—and in their magazines for younger children as well)!

4 thoughts on “Cricket Media Provides Contrast in Kids’ Magazine LGBTQ Inclusion”

  1. I’m glad to see this, but I’m disappointed in mombian being so accepting of Cricket’s response. Their most interesting example is from 2005 — eleven years ago. There may be other, more recent examples, but the fact that they pointed to one that is eleven years old makes me wary. And yes, it is great that their family tree example talks about how all families are different, but then the chart to fill in is totally heteronormative, and essentially “others” families that are different. So, while it’s great that they don’t object to having LGBTQ families discussed and mentioned, I’m not exactly leaping out of my seat to get a subscription.

  2. @stalkingsarah Cricket employee here—that letter is from our January 2015 issue, not 2005.

    And thank you for the feedback! I can’t praise my coworkers at Cicada enough for the wide range of voices they’ve published in the past few years. Here’s another piece you might like, from May/June 2016: http://www.cicadamag.com/files/cicada/CIC1605_ArtistAllies.pdf.

    But I very much agree our younger magazines have room to improve. The first step is acquiring the content—and we welcome writers from all underrepresented groups, including LGBTQIA+ folks, to submit stories, poems, etc. etc.! https://cricketmag.submittable.com/submit

  3. Thanks so much for responding, Danny. I’ll send you e-mail separately — your media relations rep definitely wrote “2005” in her e-mail to me, so you might want to have a word. I’ll update my post to reflect 2015, though. I appreciate your openness to improvement — I’ll definitely spread the word about submitting content.

Comments are closed.

Scroll to Top