The 239-page graphic novel depicts Kobabe’s journey of gender identity and sexual orientation. Kobabe, who is nonbinary, said it was written to help others who are struggling with gender identity to feel less alone. The book also explores questions around pronouns and hormone-blocking therapies.
“I can absolutely understand the desire of a parent to protect their child from sensitive material. I’m sympathetic to people who have the best interest of young people at heart,” Kobabe, the 32-year-old author based in California, said in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “I also want to have the best interest of young people at heart. There are queer youth at every high school — and those students, that’s [who] I’m thinking about, is the queer student who is getting left behind.”
May didn’t read the book, but what she saw — a few pages of explicit illustrations depicting oral sex — was disturbing to her. It took less than a day for May and other parents to get the book removed from the district. May tweeted that same day that after school officials had been notified, the book was removed from a student’s hands.
This moves me to recall the conversations we had in my sophomore year of high school. We were all reading The Godfather, and we all knew what was meant by "p. 29" (or whatever page it was in the paperback edition we all had). The rest of the sex was buried late in the novel, mostly involving the same woman, and some truly bizarre pulp fiction notions of "surgery." Coppola left A LOT of the weird out of that book. Even Tarentino never filmed the truly weird of most pulp fiction. I still think pulp fiction is why a whole generation thinks they were "worldly" and "wise," when honestly they don't know shit (like Fleming's famous "paint the skin but leave a patch at the base of the spine, or death occurs." Utter pulp fiction nonsense that I'm sure some grew up accepting as gospel.*)
As usual, I digress.
My point here is not to defend pulp fiction or say we should buy every teenage boy a copy of Puzo's novel, or that such matters inevitably find their way to young minds (they do, they do. The same parents appalled that their children are getting these books in the library are NOT checking their kids browser histories.). It's that we are a visual species, and what's seen in a drawing is MUCH WORSE! than what is said in words.
Remember The Rainbow Club (I think that was the title)? A story about teen girls passing an initiation by putting on brightly colored lipstick and sucking one cock, serially, so that the lipstick left their color on the cock? People were appalled that this reflected a real-life activity. It didn't. It also wasn't a graphic novel. Imagine how much worse that would be. (Or just imagine somebody turning that book into a film.)
We respond more viscerally to images than to words. Censorship in public school libraries will always be with us. You aren't going to find L'Histoire d'O in a public school library (I found it in the UT library, which is technically a public school, but....), and for good reason. Well, I mean: it's French!
You get the idea. These matters need to be discussed, and mostly that's going on at the local school district level, where it should go on. But in my school district a small group tried to force the firing of the principal because this book (or another, I was never clear what book it was) was found in her school's library. They were laughed away, even by the new Board member who was elected to represent the newly empowered crazy people in the district (I still blame covid primarily for that). The whole subject of books on library shelves has now all but disappeared in this district. Elsewhere? Well, Abbott is trying to flog it. Krause, who started this, has gone quiet.
By the way, here is an article about three of the 850 books on that infamous list Krause is now so quiet about.
One is a picture book based on the two male penguins in the New York Zoo who raised an egg together (remember stories about gay penguins? The book came out in 2005. You might not remember it well.) . Yeah, same sex penguin couple. How dare they?
The second is a self-help book for dealing with bullies. Apparently it's suspect because it talks about bullies picking on gays, lesbians, trans, or people with disabilities. Yeah, don't want to make bullies feel uncomfortable, huh?
The third is a YA novel:
The book details their struggles as they come of age and traverse the close relationships in their life, particularly Ari’s relationship with his parents: his father, who’s a Vietnam War veteran, and his mother, who is a teacher and often empathetic toward Ari as he grapples with young adulthood. In the book, Sáenz delves into the dynamics of familial relationships and romantic relationships as Ari and Dante’s feelings for one another deepen.
Throughout the book, readers see Ari try to deal with the intricacies of being a teenage boy along with his anger at his parents — who refuse to talk about his brother, Bernardo, who went to prison when Ari was 4 years old — and at himself, as he struggles to admit he has feelings for Dante, who’s opened up to Ari about his attraction to boys.
In addition to exploring sexuality and masculinity, the book touches on race, ethnicity and what it means to be Mexican American.
The book contains some profanity, violence and nudity along with mentions of teenage drinking, sex and the trials of puberty, but there are no intimately explicit scenes.
At its core, the book is about love, family and learning to communicate one’s most vulnerable feelings. Benjamin Alire Sáenz, the book’s author, said it’s also about “belonging and accepting” and posing the question, “Why do we exile people?”
So I guess the problem is gays (reading about it will make you one; or at least tolerant of them?), race, ethnicity (two things that make white people uncomfortable, I guess) and the question "Why do we exile people?" Well, because they make white people uncomfortable, right? And even asking that question makes white people uncomfortable. So...
Yeah, I don't think this controversy is gonna last long.
*of course there are the Hollywood westerns, based largely on the "dime novels" that preceded pulp fiction. Utter bullshit too, about "quick draw shoot outs" in city streets, and all the crap we think is American history west of the Mississippi. American fiction has a LOT to answer for.
