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In May 2014 the Lithuanian Office of the Inspector of Journalist Ethics banned Gintañné Sirdis (Amber Heart), a collection of fairy tales for children about minorities. At issue were two tales depicting same-sex love, which according to the Office amounted to "harmful, primitive, and purposeful propaganda of homosexuality," in violation of a 2010 law that prohibits the "promotion of sexual relations or other conceptions of concluding a marriage or creating a family other than established in the Constitution or the Civil Code" (European Parliament, Intergroup on LGBT Rights). As appalling as this decision was, though, it was at least based on a profound understanding of how fairy tales work. The Lithuanian censors fully grasped that the genre not only represents sexuality and kinship but also plays a crucial role in defining those representations as normal, especially for children. When confronted with fairy tales that dared to present desires and relationships they deemed to be abnormal-because they did not conform to the heteronormative Constitution and the Civil Code-they had little choice but to ban them. For the Lithuanian authorities, then, the magic of the fairy tales in Amber Heart was all too threatening and all too real because they had the power to reshape their readers' understanding of what constituted sexual relations, marriage, and family.
As an example of anxiety about the socializing role of fairy tales, the recent Lithuanian incident is not unprecedented, of course. Such debates have swirled around fairy tales from the moment they entered the canon of children's literature-debates about the effects of fantasy, violence, and more recently, gender stereotypes. But what makes the recent Lithuanian case different and noteworthy is the way it foregrounds homosexuality in relation to a genre that has been overwhelmingly perceived as heterosexual.1 What is at stake, then, is whether fairy tales are inextricably bound up with the pursuit and fulfillment of hetemormativity. Beyond the example of Amber Heart, recent developments indicate that this is not the case: a small but growing body of contemporary queer fairy-tale adaptations use nonnormative representations of gender and sexuality,2 and a small but growing body of queer scholarship brings critical attention to those adaptations and, increasingly, to their precursors. The five essays in this special issue of Marvels and Tales are...