Last fall, I was the keynote speaker at the North Dakota Library Association’s annual conference. The theme was “Libraries: The Place For Everyone.” There were rainbow flags, paper-link chains and multicolor glitter scattered across tables. It was the safest I have ever felt back home as an out, gay man. When I was a young person, libraries were where I went to find stories that made me feel I could fit in, not only in North Dakota, but in the wider world. But two pieces of legislation that may soon be signed into law in North Dakota would make it possible to restrict libraries and, in some cases, to imprison librarians.
House Bill 1205 would prohibit public libraries from keeping and lending “books that contain explicit sexual material.” The bill’s definition of explicit material could include “pictorial, three-dimensional, or visual” depictions of anything from sex scenes in movies to educational materials meant to teach teenagers about puberty. As the bill states, libraries have until Jan. 1, 2024 to create a procedure “for the development of a book collection that is appropriate for the age and maturity levels of the individuals who may access the materials, and which is suitable for, and consistent with, the purpose of the library.” Currently, the bill contains no explanation of what “the purpose of the library” means or how to determine “appropriate” age and maturity.
The more far-reaching Senate Bill 2360 prohibits organizations open to minors from displaying “objectionable materials,” whether image or text, including visuals or descriptions of “nude or partially denuded human figures posed or presented in a manner to exploit sex, lust or perversion.” The bill defines “nude or partially denuded human figures” as “less than completely and opaquely covered human genitals, pubic regions, female breasts or a female breast, if the breast or breasts are exposed below a point immediately above the top of the areola, or human buttocks; and includes human male genitals in a discernibly turgid state even if completely and opaquely covered.”
note: politicians - especially the wingnuts way out there on the right - are fond of trying to "legislate their values". They're always telling us how they put a lot of themselves into the laws they wanna pass. So I guess the ND legislature includes a bunch of swollen bombastic pricks(?)
By that definition, a photograph or even a written description of the Venus de Milo could — depending on the eye of the beholder — be out of bounds. It’s not just a matter of interpretation, though: Senate Bill 2360 would make it possible to charge offending librarians with a class B misdemeanor, punishable with up to 30 days in jail and a fine of $1,500.
With these bills, North Dakota stands to become a model for other towns, cities and states to censor not only their libraries, but also their citizens.
Growing up in the closet in North Dakota in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I found sanctuary in libraries that I couldn’t find anywhere else. I ate breakfast every morning in Bismarck High School, combing the stacks and reading books by authors like James Baldwin, Truman Capote and Willa Cather. When some of the school’s football players circulated a petition to have the one openly gay boy in my class change in the girls’ locker room, I went deeper into the library shelves, tried to keep quiet and hide who I was.
The summer after graduating from college, when I was outed by my aunt, and my home was no longer a safe space, I searched the stacks of the Bismarck Veterans Memorial Public Library for stories of gay people disowned by family members to help me find my own way to stable ground. During those evenings, I would settle into a plush armchair with a pile of books and magazines and read. I read authors like Kent Haruf and Amy Tan and Mary Karr. I would listen to classical music CDs to try and calm myself. I was free to roam, peruse, and free to be myself, at least privately.
North Dakota is a part of a growing national trend. Between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31 of last year, the American Library Association recorded 681 attempts to ban or restrict library resources. There were 1,651 book titles targeted, up from 1,597 in 2021. According to PEN America, 41 percent of books banned throughout the 2021-22 school year contained L.G.B.T.Q. themes, protagonists or prominent secondary characters. Bills similar to North Dakota’s have also been introduced or passed into law in states like West Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Montana, Iowa, Wyoming, Missouri and Indiana.
Under Missouri’s new law banning the provision of “explicit sexual material” to students, school districts removed works about Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo; comics, such as “Batman” and “X-Men”; visual depictions of Shakespeare’s works; and “Maus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust.
But let’s be honest: It’s not the Venus de Milo these laws are going to come for first. It’s books with L.G.B.T.Q. stories, or books by L.G.B.T.Q. authors — the kind of books that have provided so many queer young people with a lifeline when they needed it most. I don’t know where I would have ended up if I couldn’t read my way out of despair. My heart breaks to think of all the kids now who won’t have that option.
Libraries should be places where everyone is welcomed, no matter who they are, and where everyone can find themselves reflected in the stories on the shelves. Laws like these make that a lot less likely.
Censorship of this kind is a flat-out straight-up contradiction in a country that's supposed to be all about equality, and free speech, and the unfettered pursuit of knowledge, and progress, and self-actualization.
So the good news comes from that glittering icon of liberal truth, Ayn Rand, who said:
Contradiction exists,
but it can't prevail
because it's self-defeating.
BTW, we've been here before.
And - oh yeah - today marks the last day of Freedom To Read Week.
Some of the most controversial books in history are now regarded as classics. The Bible and works by Shakespeare are among those that have been banned over the past two thousand years. Here is a selective timeline of book bannings, burnings, and other censorship activities.
Some highlights:
1973: The school board in Drake, North Dakota, ordered the burning of 32 copies of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and 60 copies of James Dickey’s Deliverance for, respectively, the use of profanity and references to homosexuality.
1954: Mickey Mouse comics were banned in East Berlin because Mickey was said to be an “anti-Red rebel.”
1933: A series of massive bonfires in Nazi Germany burned thousands of books written by Jews, communists, and others. Included were the works of John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Lenin, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, Upton Sinclair, Stalin, and Leon Trotsky.
1885: A year after the publication of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the library of Concord, Massachusetts, decided to exclude the book from its collection. The committee making the decision said the book was “rough, coarse and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.” By 1907, it was said that Twain’s novel had been thrown out of some library somewhere every year, mostly because its hero was said to present a bad example for impressionable young readers.
1807: Dr. Thomas Bowdler quietly brought out the first of his revised editions of Shakespeare’s plays. The preface claimed that he had removed from Shakespeare “everything that can raise a blush on the cheek of modesty”—which amounted to about 10 per cent of the playwright’s text. One hundred and fifty years later, it was discovered that the real excision had been done by Dr. Bowdler’s sister, Henrietta Maria. The word “bowdlerize” became part of the English language.
1559: For hundreds of years, the Roman Catholic Church listed books that were prohibited to its members; but in this year, Pope Paul IV established the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. For more than 400 years this was the definitive list of books that Roman Catholics were told not to read. It was one of the most powerful censorship tools in the world.
35: The Roman emperor Caligula opposed the reading of The Odyssey by Homer, written more than 300 years before. He thought the epic poem was dangerous because it expressed Greek ideas of freedom.
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