A Brief Piece on Banned Books…

and Why We Must Keep Reading, Watching, Listening to, and Sharing Queer Media

Our class’ decision to create this Pressbook — to make our work this semester open and accessible — began with a conversation about the banning of Maia Kobabe’s Genderqueer. This graphic-novel style autobiography was the most banned book in school libraries in 2021-2022 school year and was removed from libraries on 41 separate instances. While this instance has gained the most amount of media attention, the book bans on LGBTQ+ books hardly stops there. On CBS News’ list of the top 50 banned books in America, an astounding amount of the books deal with LGBTQ+ themes. Other titles that have been highly banned include All Boys Aren’t Blue, which deals with themes of growing up Black and queer, The Lawn Boy, This Book is Gay, Melissa (George), Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, Drama: A Graphic Novel, which depicts a same-sex crush, and Flamer, to name a few, all of which are in the top 20 banned books in America. 2022 saw the biggest number of banned books, nearly double that of 2021. Out of the top 13 banned books, 7 of them were targeted for their LGBTQ+ content.

Banning queer books is not a new trend, however. In 1928, The Well of Loneliness, was the first Lesbian book to be published in the United States and in Great Britain. It underwent scrutiny and faced court charges for being “obscene.” While the writing is not regarded as particularly good, the LGBTQ+ community at the time, responded so positively that many people wrote letters arguing against its ban in the US and UK, writing things like “it made me want to live and to go on.” Almost 100 years later, we are facing the same suppressing of voices through literature and barring the LGBTQ+ community for finding stories and memoirs that are relatable and make us feel seen.                                     – Tristen Leone