Librarians face censorship over LGBTQIA+ books - now is the time for allyship
Being able to find LGBTQIA+ books easily, with adult support, is essential for our children’s health and empowerment.
Librarians in the UK are seeing increasing intimidation to remove books about marginalised people, seemingly emboldened by similar censorship movements in the United States. Here, however, the threat’s focus is largely levelled at LGBTQIA+ books in school libraries, according to a survey by Index on Censorship.
Such censorship is often directed at our youth because it restricts our future liberation. I understand this because I see its reflection in my own experience.
Queer books weren’t promoted or prominently shelved in my local or school libraries. I grew up in the later years and ensuing long shadow of Section 28, being eight years old for its abolition at the turn of this millennium. Part of the insidious nature of the UK’s own historic '“Don’t Say Gay” law, is that I’ve only understood in retrospect how queer people of my generation were denied knowledge of ourselves, and our histories.
Having come out as nonbinary trans, polyamorous, demisexual, and aromantic, all in the last four years, I now realise how much was suppressed in my education. How even the bookshops I visited were likely affected by ambiguous government pressure not to “promote homosexuality” or support LGBTQIA+ identities. Its sinister normalisation of bigotry kept me from questioning that suppression – or even knowing it had been written in law – until I began to discover meaningful queer community and connection at the age of 30.
One of my most unsettling realisations is that, despite an entire Year Nine History module devoted to World War II, I’d been clueless about the full context behind a famous photograph of the first Nazi book burning on 10th May, 1933. It took place outside the first ever Trans+ medical clinic, Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology. Days before, its library had been occupied, raided, and stripped of irreplaceable early research on Trans+ identities and healthcare.
Despite these gaps in my learning, libraries and reading have always been inseparable from my identity. Even when I didn’t know much else about who I was, I knew I was a reader, and a writer. Signed up to my local library by my mother at a few weeks old, I was read to in this space and knew its curving staircase and long, low-ceilinged first floor cavern of books almost as a second home.
But LGBTQ+ identity never factored intentionally in my education, at home or school. I had to stumble on these books accidentally, or find equally accidental relatability. In primary school, I found Bill’s New Frock by Anne Fine in the library, my favourite teacher introducing me to the subtly gender-transgressive action fairies of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books. By the age of eleven, I was unconsciously reading the trans masculine into The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In my teens, I discovered His Dark Materials, delighted by the love between Baruch and Balthamos, two openly gay angels in the series’ second instalment The Subtle Knife.
Even then, books like these were rarely written by LGBTQIA+ people, for our community. We’ve reached a zenith in such stories being written in spades and brought to everyday mainstream attention. Landmark titles, such as 2007’s Call Me By Your Name, or the 2019 first volume of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper, have paved the way for queer and gender nonconforming authors to write our stories and uplift our youth. Scott Stuart’s My Shadow is Pink is a profound work of the author’s allyship to his son, and of advocacy for other young people who don’t conform to binary gendered expectations.
It's reactive, queerphobic backlash to this achievement in kids’ literature that calls these same titles into the spotlight of the same alarmist hatred that birthed Section 28.
Being able to find LGBTQIA+ books easily, with adult support, is essential for our children’s health and empowerment. All these things rely on adult allies standing against the censorship of knowledge and personal truth. I see the unconditional support for children in my own local library, and feel chilled by knowing how its absence stunted my young queer self. I’m determined we won’t grieve the loss of what a confident and fulfilled Gen Alpha could bring to the world.
About the author: As a queer, trans and disabled journalist, William Elisabeth Cuthbert (any/all) writes about the humanity in being marginalised. They hope this causes a shift in the minds of some who are otherwise ignorant, or indifferent, to the lives led by people too often viewed through ‘controversy’. In between, they spend their time writing queer historical fiction.
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