Four Out Of Five Top Banned Books Are LGBTQ. This Must Stop.

71% of Americans don’t agree with banning books, but the hateful minority is screaming louder

I was walking from the parking lot to the PRIDE parade with my kid on a beautiful summer day in June when some butt-ugly biker revving his bike at a red light screamed at us.

How does it feel to be a f*cking pedophile, he screamed over the racket of his bike and I was stunned silent for a minute. My kid, however, was not.

How does it feel to be a f*cking bigot? my kid screamed right back and vehemently flipped him the bird.

He stood up like he wanted to have a go at us, but the light turned green so he revved the engine, gave us the finger and was gone.

It took a minute for my heart to stop pounding.

I guess he didn’t like our shirts, I finally say and we laugh.

Utter hate because we were wearing PRIDE shirts. Bigots like that guy are everywhere. And they’re rising up. Not just in the streets, but in our public libraries.

“I was five years old when I got my teeth kicked out. It was my first trauma.”

That’s how George Johnson starts his memoir “All Boys Aren’t Blue.”

In hindsight, he wasn’t sure if it was because he was effeminate or because he was black. How are you supposed to know when one of the kids beating you is black and the other is white?

He couldn’t calm down until his mom rushed home from her job at the police station and wrapped her arms around him. He was five. Five!

His memoir is written for young adults.

He talks about things like racism, being gay, and toxic masculinity. It’s written in words suitable for a young adult. For kids struggling like he did in a world that doesn’t like them because they’re black or gay or both.

Haters call his book too sexually explicit for high school students.

Except, no. It’s not.

A media review committee for secondary schools spent weeks reading and discussing his book. Their conclusion? The book is appropriate for use in high school and should, in fact, be retained as a resource.

“This resource is appropriate for use and should be retained as a resource available to teachers and students in our high school.” (source)

Doesn’t matter. “Some” parents don’t happen to agree. They call people like him groomers. Pedophiles.

“All Boys Aren’t Blue” is the second most banned book in America now.

Culture control isn’t new. Banning and burning books has always been one of the ways humans try to control each other.

The first emperor of the Qin Dynasty burned books back in 213 BCE. They burned books in Rome, France and Spain. Henry VIII burned books.

The Nazis burned 25,000 books on May 10, 1933. Lit a big bonfire and threw in books by Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, G. K. Chesterton, Jack London, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and more.

Here’s the ugly part.

While the books burned, Joseph Goebbels screamed “No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state!”

Forty thousand people roared their approval and gave the Nazi salute.

That’s what it’s about. A small number of people deciding what moral corruption is and foisting their beliefs on everyone else.

And it’s happening again in a very big way.

Can I show you something? Have a look.

That chart was compiled by the American Library Association. The number of books being challenged and censored by angry bigots has shot up in the last two years.

2023 is going to be a wicked jump. From January through August this year alone, 3923 books have been targeted for censorship. That’s with four months still left in the year.

They aren’t burning them. They’re banning them.

You don’t have to burn books if you just force libraries to get rid of them. Let the librarians figure out what to do with them. As long as they’re not on the shelves. Get them off the shelves. That’s all they care about.

I don’t need to tell you what books they are, do I? Four of the top five books targeted for censoring are from LGBTQIA+ writers.

“It is not lost on anyone that the vast majority of titles and authors criticized…are by and about people of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community.” — ACLU (PBS)

It’s happening across America. Coast to coast. The American Library Association created an interactive map where you can mouse over any state to see how many books are being targeted.

The darker the color, the higher the number.

In Virginia, a local conservative group held two book-banning barbeques this summer. Their posters said “beer and babysitting!”

They had a list of 150 books they wanted banned and got 500 signatures on the forms. They took them to the county board of supervisors, who then voted to withhold 75% of the library budget.

In August, the library directory resigned.

That’s what’s happening across America.

According to the American Library Association, parents aren’t challenging the odd book here and there. They are walking in with lists of hundreds of books they want stripped from libraries.

They go after anyone who disagrees.

In Clinton, Tennessee, conservative groups are calling for the resignation of the library director because he publicly defended the right to offer books they want banned. Members of the group went to the sheriff, claiming the public library violates Tennessee’s criminal obscenity laws.

In Iowa, the Des Moines Register obtained a list of 374 books that were flagged for banning by a conservative group. Among the books removed from libraries are The Kite Runner, The Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World, Beloved, The Color Purple, Native Son, Gender Queer, All Boys Aren’t Blue, and The Hate U Give.

I don’t need to tell you that the people calling for books to be banned haven’t read them. If a book is about gay people or black people, they don’t want it in the library. End of story.

In Iowa, they’re using ChatGPT to determine if a book is sexually explicit. Problem is, the answer depends on how the question is phrased.

The scary part is that once they succeed at the school level, they attack the public library. Because doesn’t matter if it’s not in the school library if the kids can get the book from the public library, right?

Here’s how it all starts. Whispers on Facebook.

That’s why Amanda Jones was afraid to go to work or out in public. She was so afraid for her safety, she bought a taser and pepper spray. She even took a sabbatical from her job to get away from the abuse.

She’s the president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians and has worked as an educator and librarian for more than twenty years. She was the 2021 School Librarian of the Year.

It all started when she spoke out against censorship.

“Just because you don’t want to read or see [a particular book], it does not give you the right to deny others,” she said. “It becomes a slippery slope, and where does it end?” she added.

That’s when the attacks started.

Parents said she showed sexually erotic and pornographic materials to children as young as six. They said she advocates teaching anal sex to eleven year olds. They called her a deviant and a danger to kids.

None of that stuff is true but she got death threats and doxed.

It’s what happens to anyone that fights back.

So she took them to court. In late 2022, she filed defamation lawsuits against the owners of two conservative Facebook groups that were targeting her.

“Nobody stands up to these people,” she said. They just say what they want and there are no repercussions and they ruin people’s reputations and there’s no consequences.” (source: NBC)

Judge Erika Sledge dismissed the lawsuit. She said those people are just stating their opinions and they have a right to do that.

Amanda Jones wasn’t having it. She launched a GoFundMe to pay the legal fees and appealed. She’ll be back in court next month. She is willing to take the fight as far as the Supreme Court if she has to.

All she wants is $1 and a public apology.

The numbers back her up. A national poll commissioned by the American Library Association this year found that 71% of voters, regardless of party lines, oppose efforts to remove books from public libraries.

But the bigoted minority is winning. Because they scream louder. They fight uglier. And it has to stop. It has to become a voting issue. We have to ask our political representatives to take a public stance or no vote.

October 1–7 is banned books week. If you’re a reader, it’s a great time to go order some fall reading. Here’s a list of the most banned books in 2023.

Happy reading.

“Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.” ― Henry Louis Gates Jr