Creative Commons
A Pride-themed book display at the Northland Public Library in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
When staff at the American Library Association analyzed recent efforts to ban or censor books, it noted several disturbing trends. Not only did the ten most challenged works of 2021 deal with gender identity, sexuality, and race, but most of them were also written by people of color.
“Restricting what kids can read has always been part of the agenda of the Christian right.”
“LGBTQIA+ books have been among the most challenged works since 2018, but there has been as escalating effort to conflate gender or sexual identity with pornography or pedophilia,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, tells The Progressive.
And while the American Library Association does not believe that any of the targeted titles meet the legal definition of pornography—which requires them to lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” and to appeal to “prurient” interests—the right’s effort to “protect children” has successfully limited what kids can read in some parts of the country.
Last year, the association tracked 729 challenges to 1,597 books, an increase from 377 challenges in 2020 and 156 in 2019.
One of the most frequent targets is George M. Johnson’s award-winning All Boys Aren’t Blue, a coming-of-age story about growing up as a queer, Black child. Johnson’s 2020 release has been pulled from libraries in Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, and Virginia.
Similarly, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir about nonbinary identity, has been removed from schools in Florida, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.
“Restricting what kids can read has always been part of the agenda of the Christian right,” Caldwell-Stone says. “Over the past few decades, they’ve been carefully building an infrastructure aimed at denying human rights to queer people. Since this is a moment when conservatives are in control of many state and local governments, they feel they can introduce legislation or pressure schools or libraries to limit what kids can read and learn.”
No Left Turn in Education, one of the most vocal proponents of book bans, refers to book removal as “restoring parental function in public education” and sees its mission as pushing back “against the radical indoctrination and injection of political agendas in K-12 education.” According to the organization’s website, “All too often words like diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice, systemic racism, human rights, and health education conceal an aggressive, radical ideology.”
Alongside Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, No Left Turn’s perspective has garnered attention from rightwing media, and its message has been promoted by Fox News and long-established conservative groups including the Heritage Foundation and the Leadership Institute.
And this attention has paid off.
Ruth Weiner, publicity director for Seven Stories Press, has been on the receiving end of rightwing animus. “Sometimes it’s just two, three, or four vocal people who control ten different media feeds, and they activate all of them at once in protest,” she says.
Most recently, the 2008 picture book 10,000 Dresses, by Marcus Ewart, about a child whose family insists that boys can’t wear dresses, has come to the right’s attention. “It’s disheartening for us and for our writers when a book is targeted,” Weiner says. “But it comes in waves. A group gets wind of a book and there’s a call out. It will explode on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or Twitter for a few weeks or so. We try to ignore it and block the senders.”
“The right acts as if books are being shoved on children when, in fact, young people are choosing to read books about LGBTQIA+ identity and racism and finding affirmation in seeing themselves reflected in someone else’s story.”
This, she adds, typically causes the protesters to turn their attention elsewhere. A frequent target: the growing spate of books about trans identity and gender diversity that serve as reliable outrage generators for those threatened by defiance of a rigid male-female binary.
Winter Miller, author of the just-released children’s book Not a Cat—which features a presumed cat, Gato, who ponders whether he might also be a bunny, cow, duck, horse, or human—says that books telling readers that “it is okay for you to be you, to be who you are meant to be and not be boxed in by gender expectations, can be unsettling for some people.”
But this is not new. “The right wing has been going ape-shit for a long time,” Miller says. “Remember Anita Bryant’s homophobic Save Our Children campaign? It launched in 1977.”
Nonetheless, Miller notes several things that differentiate today’s attacks on queer writers and queer-affirming books from previous campaigns. “Social media allows people to aggregate their hate more easily,” she says. “The right has also been emboldened by the anti-mask, anti-vax response to COVID. This unifying call to arms has now pivoted to schools and libraries” and works in concert with movements to oppose abortion, gun control, school-based sex education, affirmative action, and critical race theory.
Caldwell-Stone agrees with Miller’s assessment. Yet she is also heartened by growing initiatives to combat book bans and censorship, from banned-book reading groups to community read-ins and more conventional protests.
“We’ve seen that when people stand up at a school or library board meeting and oppose book removals, it is much less likely that books will be taken off the shelves,” she says. “When students testify about how specific books have helped them find a way forward, helped them feel less frightened or alone, or helped them deal with a struggling friend, it’s moved people to consider what removals actually mean. The right acts as if books are being shoved on children when, in fact, young people are choosing to read books about LGBTQIA+ identity and racism and finding affirmation in seeing themselves reflected in someone else’s story.”
Groups that are fighting book bans, Caldwell-Stone notes, include Red, Wine, and Blue, FReadom Fighters, and the American Library Assocation’s Unite Against Book Bans and Freedom to Read Foundation.
Additionally, both the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library have launched programs to allow anyone over the age of thirteen, in any part of the country, to access no-cost eBook or audiobook versions of many banned titles.
Response is expected to be brisk since most Americans oppose bans and censorship. According to an American Library Association poll conducted earlier this year, 71 percent of those queried said that they were against removing books from public or school libraries. Among parents, 74 percent told researchers that they trust librarians to know which books to suggest for classroom or out-of-school use. This, Caldwell-Stone adds, cuts across party lines, with 75 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans supporting broad access to materials.
“Libraries do not make choices for readers,” she says. “They provide access to works that appeal to a wide reading audience. If parents want to steer their kids away from particular materials, they can do so.”