Last night, I saw a video of Louisiana Senator Kennedy reading just the sexual bits from the book All Boys Aren't Blue in a Senate hearing on book banning in schools. The way he read it really put me off my lunch. I'm pretty sure that was his plan.
On the Forbes YouTube channel, they have this listed as SHOCKING MOMENT: John Kennedy Reads Graphic Quotes From Childrens' (sic) Books At Senate Hearing. All Boys Aren't Blue is listed as "Young Adult" reading level and is a collection of autobiographical essays from the author about his life when he was a teenager. Saying the book is for children, I would say, is inaccurate. Young Adult means young adult, i.e., teenagers. It's a book about gay teenagers written by a man who was a gay teenager.
The witnesses in the hearing were teachers, librarians, parents, and students. The issue was: How do Public School Libraries choose their books, and should parents have a hand in removing books they find objectionable. This process is often called "Book Banning" or "Book Burning," although none of these groups have yet moved to try and make these books entirely unavailable, just entirely unavailable in schools.
When I was younger, I heard Ray Bradbury speak on what motivated him to write Fahrenheit 451, and I had several opportunities to ask him questions. This is the sort of thing that motivated him to write the book. I don't know how far we have to go from Republican Parents making banned book lists to firemen burning books instead of putting out fires, but he felt, and I feel, that we're on the way.
When I was in High School, most of my free reading was science fiction, so I didn't really need that much help contextualizing what I was reading, but for the books I had assigned in class, Candide, The Red Badge of Courage, All's Quiet On The Western Front, Of Mice and Men, Dr. Zhivago, Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, did, at times, have passages, particularly violent or emotionally brutal passages, where I'm glad I had really good teachers to help me contextualize what I was reading.
None of the books I read had much sexual context. Candide had a lot of sexual subtext, but that's a different story. I'll be honest with you, though: at sixteen and seventeen, I was having a great deal of sex, both with my steady girlfriend and a couple others along the way. Besides that, my Biology Teacher, Dan Rose, taught the whole class pretty extensively about birth control and then went on a side venture to describe how people in New Guinea take care of feminine hygiene needs that left quite an impression. I don't think I grew into a degenerate, and even if I had, I don't think you can blame Dan Rose or some freckle-faced girl.
They say that teenagers are less sexualized now than they were when I was sixteen, and that may be true, but they also have the internet on their telephone, so I'm pretty sure they know a whole hell of a lot more about it than I did when I was sixteen. Teenagers are making sexual decisions and learning much more about sex than we can ever control. That's what people like Sen. Kennedy are afraid of, but I don't think that's what's going on here.
I haven't read "All Boys Don't Wear Blue." I probably won't unless this controversy gets much bigger. I have read the reviews and the ratings on it, though, and this is clearly a major work, and it's won several awards. For teenagers who are gay and black and looking for books that include people like themselves, this might be an important book for them.
I'm assuming that what Senator Kennedy read aloud was the most graphic passage in the entire book. The part of this you don't see is all the staff members frantically reading books with a young adult rating for lascivious passages the Senator can berate his witnesses about.
If that paragraph is the most troubling thing in the entire book, then I really don't think the Senator has much of a case. If conservative parents consider their being able to control the school's library collection, I recommend private schools for them.
A public school Librarian has an obligation to select books that speak to as many of the students as possible and not to obfuscate the perspective of any student because of their sexuality. Honestly, if you can get a student to read the entire book just to get to that one-hundred-word passage, then I'd say that was a win.
There are books written just to be pornographic, but there are also really significant books that include sexual issues to tell the whole story in the same way that other authors use violence or other extreme or private human events. It takes a lot of work to become a librarian. Their job is to figure out which books are just using sexual experiences to make money and which books use sexual experiences to say something important about the human condition. I heard the testimony of the librarian in these hearings, and I have to say, I agree with her; despite Kennedy's every effort to discredit her and her position.
In her opening statement, Emily Knox, professor of information science (formerly known as library sciences), said, "When the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom released its data for book challenges in 2022, the headlines were glaring. “A record 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship, a 38% increase from the 1,858 unique titles targeted for censorship in 2021.” Almost all of the books can be categorized as “diverse” or books by and about “LGBTQIA, Native, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities."
What Knox, and the American Library Association are alleging (if not outright stating) is that this rapidly growing movement to limit access to books is based on bigotry. If the numbers gathered by the American Library Association are correct, then their conclusion might also be correct. I fear it is. All of the passes Senator Kennedy read, with a face like he was walking through sewage, were from books about the experiences of gay men.
This entire movement to limit library books is the result of certain conservative forces spreading the idea that schools are unacceptably liberal and using their position as educators to indoctrinate your children. It's openly a fear tactic. I've known hundreds of professional educators, maybe even a thousand. I was married to one, and I grew up supplying their material classroom needs. From my experience and a lifetime of working with these people, I can say without hesitation that there is no organized effort to indoctrinate your children. You are being told a lie to help gain your political obedience.
Ray Bradbury said that Joseph McCarthy stoked the fires that led to his fears about books. Hitler and Stalin too, but having this happen in America was particularly disturbing to him. Bradbury wrote the novel in the basement of the UCLA Powell Library because, in the basement, they had typewriters that you could rent by inserting a dime into a slot every thirty minutes. When he was trying to figure out what to write next, he would wander the aisles and let the books' physical presence infect and inspire him.
Several years ago, I learned that electronic books were easier for me to read than physical books, I had a collection of books that had grown massive, and I didn't want to take them with me to my new home, so I gave most of my books to St. Andrews. If your child at St. Andrews ever brings home a play or a book on film from the St. Andrews library, there's a chance it came from my collection. Most of my reading I now do on my tablet or on my phone. I take some comfort in knowing that nearly my entire library goes with me most of the day, nestled safely in my breast pocket in my cellphone. Just knowing that books exist and I can access them means something.
Like nearly all of the social issues of the day, I believe that these things should be left up to the professionals, not some jaybird in Washington. It's a lot of work to become a librarian, and there's fierce competition for good ones. In 1987, when both Millsaps and The University of Mississippi applied for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the reason Millsaps won and Ole Miss didn't was because the review board thought we had the better library. Libraries are important, even at the high school level. Parents who are concerned about what their children might read should focus more on communicating their values to their children than trying to put limits on how librarians do their job.
I'm starting to have trouble trusting some of the conservative elements in our country. If their goal is to limit the amount of homosexuality or limit the visibility of homosexuals in our schools, then I wish they'd be upfront about it and not hide in an effort to control library books. Let people decide the issue on its own face, without trying to accomplish your goals by fighting through other issues by proxy. Librarians are not responsible for children becoming homosexual, and their providing books for students who are homosexual isn't part of some political agenda.
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