Google Salutes Maurice Sendak

Today's Google Doogle pays tribute to gay author Maurice Sendak, who died last year.  Sendak came out in 2008 at the age of 80 and revealed a 50-year relationship with his partner.

For what would have been his 85th birthday on Monday, Google has drawn up a wonderfully imagined Google Doodle as a tribute to the beloved illustrator and children’s book author Maurice Sendak. It begins, of course, with Max sailing to the land of Where the Wild Things Are, but soon also ventures to the surreal cityscape of In The Night Kitchen and ends, appropriately, with the birthday party from Sendak's 2011 book Bumble-Ardy. Happy birthday, Mr. Sendak.

Gay Author Maurice Sendak Dies At Age 83

Where The Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak has died at the age of 85.

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963.

I don't think I ever actually read Sendak's most famed book, but I recall there being a indoor playground and restaurant based on it at San Francisco's ill-fated Metreon complex.

RELATED: Sendak came out publicly three years ago.

Was there anything he had never been asked? He paused for a few moments and answered, “Well, that I’m gay.” “I just didn’t think it was anybody’s business,” Mr. Sendak added. He lived with Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst, for 50 years before Dr. Glynn’s death in May 2007. He never told his parents: “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.”

Where The Wild Things Are Gay

Maurice Sendak, author of the beloved children's classic, Where The Wild Things Are, has come out at the age of 80. From an interview in the New York Times:

Was there anything he had never been asked? He paused for a few moments and answered, “Well, that I’m gay.”

“I just didn’t think it was anybody’s business,” Mr. Sendak added. He lived with Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst, for 50 years before Dr. Glynn’s death in May 2007. He never told his parents: “All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew.”

Children protect their parents, Mr. Sendak said. It was like the time he had a heart attack at 39. His mother was dying from cancer in the hospital, and he decided to keep the news to himself, something he now regrets.

A gay artist in New York is not exactly uncommon, but Mr. Sendak said that the idea of a gay man writing children books would have hurt his career when he was in his 20s and 30s.

His latest book is one he started about four years ago, right after Dr. Glynn became sick with lung cancer. The illness and setting up of round-the-clock care in their home were just “so unbelievable,” he explained. Mr. Sendak is mostly finished with it, but he admitted that for the first time, “I feel extremely vulnerable.”

He is afraid — not of death, which is as familiar to him as a child’s teddy bear — but of not being able to finish his work: “I feel like I don’t have a lot of time left.” After Dr. Glynn’s death, Mr. Sendak said he was “still trying to figure out what I’m doing here. I wanted to take his place,” he said. “His death became a demarcation.”

Welcome, Mr. Sendak. And thank you.