Hello!

I’ve always been a creative person and my art takes many forms: film, sculpture, drawings, and words. I’ve been lucky enough to work in the wonderful world of stop motion animation for the last ten years and have met many dear friends on those projects. I am also the Author/illustrator of consent book Can I Give You a Squish? and nonfiction book The Rainbow Parade, and I illustrated The Snowman’s Waltz.

Thanks so much for stopping by and please reach out to my agent with any opportunities:

christy@catagencyinc.com

Thoughts on The Rainbow Parade

One of my moms was an elementary school teacher for over 30 years. When she became pregnant with me, several parents removed their children from her class because it was rumored that she was gay. One member of the wider community even tried to get her fired, but her principal stayed strong and my mom kept teaching. Even before I was born, it was up for debate whether I aught to be allowed in the classroom.

My moms started taking me to the San Francisco pride parade when I was a baby. When I was young, pride was just a fun, colorful party where I got free candy and stickers and plastic necklaces.

By the time I was five, I'd begun to notice that our family was different and I understood that Pride was one of the few places in my life where it was normal to have two moms. When I was young there were no queer people in books or on TV and Pride was the only place we went where queer people had any visibility. It was a place where my parents cried tears of joy, sadness, and release. 

By third grade I'd made it known throughout the playground that I had two moms and that I was proud of them. The Pride Parade gave me an indescribable sense of strength and inner calm. Even when other kids thought my family was strange or wrong, in my head and my heart I held onto the image of a million people out on the street, standing with us. One time, my parents took me to a small group of kids with queer parents, but I wasn't interested in going back. It didn't give me the same strength as pride. 

By fifth grade I was fielding questions from peers and parents alike about how it was possible for me to exist. I didn't mind explaining. I knew where I came from. 

By high school, my friends comprised a diverse range of ideological perspectives. Some of my closest friends were the most vocally conservative kids in an otherwise liberal school. We were drawn together by our interest in sharing our often discordant beliefs. One friend and I debated gay marriage every day in social studies. We were very good at disagreeing and I still think about her perspective years later.

I wrote the Rainbow Parade in 2020, the year that SF Pride was cancelled because of the pandemic. I figured I would only get one chance to write a book about pride and that it would be banned by some no matter what I included. So I didn't sensor my memories. I tried my best to capture the feeling, energy, and outfits of pride. I took special care to include the outfits I had the most questions about when I was small. The pictures wouldn't have felt like pride without them. 

The truth is that I felt safe at pride in a way I never felt safe at school, camp, or the other spaces that were curated for children. I appreciated those spaces and knew they were built for most kids, but at the same time it was clear that those spaces weren't built with me in mind. 

The Rainbow Parade is a banned book. It gets banned for nudity and banned for leather outfits and I think if I hadn't put in those things, it'd still get banned for crossdressing or gender ambiguity or whatever else stands out the strongest. But it would've been worse to water down the imagery. That's not how Pride works. It doesn't work when only some are included, it only works when we all show up. 

I try to shake off the heartache around the book bans, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't eat at me. In a perfect world, rainbow kids like me wouldn't need pride in order to feel seen and heard and supported. But if my childhood is any indication, I think we are always just uncommon enough to always feel alone.  Most art I make is for everyone, but The Rainbow Parade centers the kids who, like me, actually go to pride because it a place where we get a sort of validation and joy that doesn’t always shine through the homophobia felt in other environments.