Think of the Children! Cereal, the Gay Agenda, and Transphobia of Today
Looking through the homophobic and transphobic hysteria of the past and present … and how it all connects to cereal.
BY: MICHELLE KRASOVITSKI
Walking down the cereal aisle of your local supermarket, you’re met with a difficult decision: which cartoon-mascotted colourful box are you going to choose today for your soy or almond or oat or cow’s (gasp!) milk? Sure you may enter the aisle intent on picking the healthy, full-of-fibre bran one, but you usually end up leaving with something so sugary, you’d be right to worry about your blood turning saccharin. For the most part, going by the commercials we see in between day-time TV programs, we can categorize cereals into two distinct camps: those that are tooth-rotting and repped by anthropomorphic tigers and toucans, and those that are healthy and good for your gut.
And though it may feel like both are pitted as opposites, they all stem from one man: John Harvey Kellogg.
Born in Michigan in the 1850s, John Harvey Kellog is a man who sits proudly in monochrome pictures, sporting a bushy walrus mustache on his upper lip. His eyes peer into you inquisitively from his 1899 portrait, and you get the impression that this is a man of community: a preacher or a school principal or someone else along those lines. And you would be right: Kellogg began his career as the director of the now-defunct Battle Creek Sanitarium. While sanatoriums—note the different spelling; Kellogg changed two letters to reflect the different protocol of his institution—were hospitals, usually housing chronically ill individuals such as those with Tuberculosis, Battle Creek was a health resort.
Under his direction, Battle Creek promoted vegetarian diets, sobriety, and exercise to its clientele. Along with these more conventional lifestyle choices, Kellogg invented many machines he believed would improve health, most involving electricity or water. One particularly troubling invention was an enema machine that pumped 15 quarts (roughly 14 litres) of water into the patient’s bowels.
Thankfully, his most famous invention involves no electrocution, water, or yogurt enemas—yes, something he was an enthusiastic proponent of. As you may have deduced given his last name, John Harvey Kellogg invented cornflakes. In partnership with his brother Will, Kellogg invented corn flakes to keep Battle Creek’s guests’ organs free of congestion. In 1906, much to his brother’s chagrin, Kellogg added sugar to the cornflakes to make them more appealing to the mass public. And appealing they were: to this day, more than a century later, you can find the rooster-repped cornflakes on your grocery aisle shelves, beside boxes of rice krispies, which Kellogg invented in 1928.
Kellogg’s legacy is not sequestered to the mad-science and cereal fields; Kellogg was also a eugenicist and a spearheader of gruesome protocols to quash sexual deviance. The most furious battle he waged was one against masturbation, something he believed was caused by a bad diet and could be remedied by castration and genital mutilation.
As you can see, the history of cereal is storied. The man behind the crunch is both a quack and a visionary. And the saga of cereal’s bizarre place in the public consciousness does not end with Kellogg’s death in 1943.
In 1987, an essay by Michelle Handelman and Monte Cazzazza entitled “The Cereal Box Conspiracy Against the Developing Mind” was published in the anthology Apocalypse Culture edited by Adam Parfray—who himself was as an interesting character; making a career out of publishing perverse material and anointed the “forerunner to 4Chan and Reddit” by Vice. In the disturbing essay, Handelman and Cazzazza claim that a cereal line where Barbie graces the front of the box would turn little straight boys gay. According to the authors, the boys’ drives to obtain the scantily-clad plastic blonde on the cover would turn them into consumers—and given the fact that market surveys had found that homosexual men shopped more than their straight counterparts, this Barbie-buy would be the first pebble cast in a long, capitalist, gay road.
Reading this now, in retrospect, the idea that one glimpse of an illustration on a carton box could alter a child’s sexuality is absurd, but at the time, this line of thinking—that gay people were trying to change the culture to implicitly convert people to homosexuality—was rather common. In fact, it even had a name: the Homosexual Agenda. The term, invented by members of the Christian far-right, referred to what they saw as an endemic campaign to normalize homosexuality; one that would result in the legalization of same-sex marriage, adoption rights for LGBTQ couples, and the decriminalization of sodomy—yes, this supposed “agenda” was considered to be overly-progressive and a direct threat to the American heterosexual, nuclear family.
ACT UP members hanging a banner in New York Grand Central Station 1991 / Photo courtesy of Ron Frehm
In the 1980s, the notion that your child was gay wasn’t simply a threat towards traditionalism or religious values, it was perceived as a serious health risk. You see, the late-1980s saw the AIDs crisis grip Americans and steep stigma to a peak. Referred to initially as the “Gay Plague,” AIDs was seen as an illness that affected solely gay people. Thus, people were scrambling to find ways of preventing the onset—seen as homosexuality—which is why conspiracies similar to the cereal box theory began to pop up. Understanding the historical context of the time, it is easier to see why a piece like Handelman and Cazzazza’s was written and published—though it does not make it any more palatable.
And we could look back at this time and chuckle—“what silliness!”—were it not for a similarly backwards conspiracy theory to cloud public consciousness in the past decade. I am of course referring to the anti-transgender bathroom hysteria.
Though bathrooms have always been brought up in contentious discussions about trans rights, this hysteria began to bubble in the United States in the mid-2010s, when states began to change discrimination laws and government officials began to make their bigoted stances clear. In 2015, former-Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee remarked that he wishes he knew that he “could have felt like a woman” in his high school years to shower with the girls. In the very same speech, given at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, he called it absurd to stand idly by when your “7-year-old daughter” can now be greeted in the washroom by an adult man “who [felt] more” like a woman. And there we spot the pattern: with the cereal conspiracy, there was an appeal to think of young sons; a couple of decades later, attention has shifted to the daughters.
Two years later in 2017, North Carolina made national news for passing a law that would restrict transgender individuals to only using the bathroom that corresponds to their assigned gender identity. In the state, only people who undergo gender-reassignment surgery are able to legally change the sex on their official documents, and so there was rightful backlash, asserting that many trans people would be put in precarious positions because of this law. The laws’ proponents channeled back their idealized, pig-tailed daughters, claiming that this bill was passed in the interest of public safety—specifically: in the interest of little Sally and June being able to go to the bathroom without worry.
Without mincing words: this fear is completely unfounded. Many states in the US have trans-friendly laws pertaining to bathroom-use and none have reported an uptick of harassment. There is no link, according to a 2018 UCLA School of Law study, between transgender-friendly policies and the safety of public restrooms.
A rally in support of transgender people in New York City / Photo courtesy of Drew Angerer
North of the border, Canadian politicians are not exempt from delivering these dog-whistles. Only a couple of months ago, back in May, Conservative leadership candidate Peter McKay called out opponent Erin O’Toole—who went on to win—for voting in support of a transgender-positive bathroom legislation bill years earlier.
It is disturbing seeing such a harmful myth being perpetuated by someone in a high position of power, yet we’re seeing the recycling of hysteria: in the early 1900s, masturbation could result in poor health; in the late 1980s, cereal box illustrations could cause homosexuality which would lead to AIDs; and now in the late 2010s and early 2020s, allowing transgender people to use their chosen bathroom could result in little Sally being hurt.
The time when Kellogg was at his peak has long since passed, and yet we still find ourselves buying into bizarre myths in hopes of quelling things that supposedly threaten our safety. No longer do we give yogurt enemas to clear out the bowels (thank god!) and no longer do we steer our sons away from the cereal aisle—so when are we going to stop pretending that transgender people going to the bathroom pose a serious threat? And how many years will it take until we look back at this period in time and shake our head in shame, embarrassed by the transphobia that took an ivy-like grip over our collective concerns?
