“Learning How to Be the Boy or Girl You Are”: Me Tarzan, You Jane, the Crusade to “Cure” Pre-homosexual Children, and the New Face of the Ex-Gay Movement in the United States

This essay examines Janice Barrett Graham’s Me Tarzan, You Jane (2011) as a new form of narrative for children offering a negative viewpoint about homosexuality. While young people have long been the target of anti-LGBTQ efforts, Graham’s text signals the expansion of interventionist strategies even further into the realm of childhood. The confidence with which Graham’s narrative claims that behaviors predictive of homosexuality can be both easily identified and quickly eliminated re-energizes longstanding efforts by the ex-gay movement to medicalize homosexuality while they also serve to pathologize nonconformist children and unconventional childhoods. Finally, the book’s use of characters from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s problematic novel reveals how the anti-gay rhetoric is heavily imbricated with other discourses of intolerance, namely racism, Western imperialism, and xenophobia.