This article reports on a critical content analysis of contemporary picturebook biographies featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ+) protagonists. Recognizing the increased rights and legibility accorded queer life within the United States, we analyze a textual corpus of 26 texts to spotlight how nationalist norms shape representations of LGBTQ + history in picturebook biographies. In particular, the queer theory concept of homonationalism provides conceptual purchase for illuminating instances of pinkwashing (the exclusion of certain racialized and sexualized others from a nation's citizenry) across these books. To spotlight these practices, we follow homonationalist focal subjects-the individual(s) and objects through which readers experience the storying of queer history-and analyze their effects upon representations of that history in children's nonfiction. Findings from our critical content analysis suggest that the homonationalist focal subject manifests in two ways: (1) as humans "out" in their occupations and (2) as regulatory queer icons suppressing gender and sexual transgression. Both iterations, as this article suggests, advance a progress narrative that positions the United States as a "gay-friendly" nation. However and often unintentionally, this narrative pinkwashes queer history, obscuring the continued oppression of those LGBTQ + individuals who remain, simply put, too deviant to be recognized and protected by the nation.
