The fight for queer literature

Growing up through secondary school, the school library was my favourite place to be. I’d tear through books a week at a time and come out with the highest read word count in my class every term, but it wasn’t until I moved schools during sixth form that I realised how important even the smallest details can be for young minds.

I was surprised to discover famous theoretical texts such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman or Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the hugely well-organised non-fiction section of the library, and the school’s access to JSTOR. Down to the monthly highlights section, which ranged from Black history to Pride month, or simply how well the lights were placed over a section; all of it had some kind of impact on what we stumble across and what we learn to read as young people, and how we learn to think.

It is not strange that books are one of the first things to be banned, no matter non-fiction or fiction. Words printed on the page transfer information like telepathy to one’s head, lightweight and easy to transport, harder to document and track readership of than digital access.

Stories are intricate pieces of human interaction, psyche, and behaviour that we can learn from or replicate in our own lives. Studies have shown that when we hear a story that we can relate to and understand, our brainwaves sync with the teller of that experience. They are incredible sources of soft power.

36% of the books banned featured people of colour, 25% included LGBTQIA+ characters, 28% of which were transgender or genderqueer characters

The rapid erosion of free speech and democracy in the US has been a point of concern across the world. It is no wonder that with Trump’s crackdown on DEI, the slashing of climate funding, the rise of tech billionaires’ influence in government, distorting statements of “gender ideology extremism”, and other violent funding cuts into LGBTQIA+ health, public libraries and books are amongst the first to be attacked. Book banning has been occurring across US states for many years now, with data from PEN America showing that there have been 16,000 instances of book bans across public schools in the US since 2021. This is a number rivalling that of the McCarthy era’s Red Scare. Books included in these bans, recorded by PEN, are trendy romance-fantasy novels by the highly popular Sarah J. Mass, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Similarly, from the timespan of 2023-2024, 36% of the books banned featured people of colour, 25% included LGBTQIA+ characters, 28% of which were transgender or genderqueer characters, as reported by the Guardian. Much of the justification given to the removal of these books from school shelves has been claims that they are harmful to children, with a particular hullaballoo around LGBTQIA+ indoctrination or immorality.

Pulling minority imaginings from the shelves of children’s libraries will only reinforce the incredibly violent norms of white American heterosexuality and gender essentialism

But what these groups miss, intentionally or not, is that if these books were indeed morally questionable, what could be more harmful than to remove them entirely instead of encouraging children’s critical thinking in differentiating between right and wrong? It would certainly be more concerning if a child believed everything they read, and in the age of corporate media dominance, should parents really be denying children the practice of discernment? The only question left is who is really benefiting from this?

Pulling minority imaginings from the shelves of children’s libraries will only reinforce the incredibly violent norms of white American heterosexuality and gender essentialism that these ‘pornographic’ books challenge. A smearing away of discussions on other forms of gender and sexual expression inhibits crucial questions that we should be asking about our way of life and how our economic systems are so overwhelmingly structured around the heterosexual nuclear family.

The stripping of a group’s basic rights, no matter the excuse, is an attack on everyone else’s

What is happening in the US is ultimately a form of censorship. The stripping of a group’s basic rights, no matter the excuse, is an attack on everyone else’s. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the 1000-strong number of “highly skilled workers” in the UK, who, despite being permitted to stay on paper, were faced with deportation threats from the Home Office during their campaign against the dangers of “terrorism” in 2018. When any basic right is taken away on any basis, it produces an incredibly slippery slope in which any action can be justified on those subjective grounds.

This bleaching of LGBTQIA+ and ethnic minority concerns follows a general trend in the rise of right-wing ideology across Europe and the US. Recent local election data places far-right party Reform UK at the top of the vote share at 31%, winning 41% of seats. This is concerning following the Supreme Court’s ruling, which placed the legal definition of woman upon the gender essentialist premise of biology, setting out a worrying projection for the future.

Though daunting, there are things that we can do. Perhaps you could get involved with one of our LGBTQIA+ societies on campus, start a queer book club between friends, email your MP about your concerns, or simply swap books with people you love. Getting involved in your local public libraries and volunteering can be a very good way to show your support for these important third spaces.