Last night was great! What better way to celebrate Pride month than reading fierce, audacious, queer stories in what must be the queerest bookstore in New York City (if not the United States, the world?).
Many thanks to our fearless leader Tom Cardamone (The Lurid Sea, Green Thumb), and the owners of Bureau of General Services – Queer Division Greg and Donnie!
I’ll keep this post-event dispatch brief, just sharing a few photos from the event with captions.
Here are all the authors (l to r): Nora Olsen (Maxine Wore Black), Ann Apkater (Cantor Gold series), Tom Cardamone (The Lurid Sea), Nell Stark (The Princess Deception), Alexa Black (The Outcasts), and me
My favorite shot from the night. We invited folks from the audience to join us to give President Trump a Robert Deniro Hello from the queer literary community. You can see some of the cool artwork on display throughou the shop.
“Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community — librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers — in shared support of the freedom to seek and express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.”
The United States has an unfortunate history of book burnings and other efforts to ban and censor books that present ‘controversial’ topics, often defined as such by religious institutions. According to the ALA, one of the top reasons for books being challenged – requested to be removed – in library systems is the portrayal of sexuality, particularly in childrens and young adult books that contain LGBT characters.
For example, the top ten challenged books of 2016 include five books with LGBT content, including two books about transgender kids (I Am Jazz by Jazz Jennings and George by Alex Gino).
Here’s a cool video that shows all ten of those books:
Access to LGBT books has both personal and political significance to me. As a young reader, in my late teens, I pretty much desperately searched for books to help me understand my attraction to other guys. I wondered if there was something wrong with me, if it was even possible to live my life as gay. I knew no one who was gay. The little bit I knew about gay people was from overheard jokes, based on stereotypes. Gay men were effeminate, buffoons. And I caught some information from the news, which occasionally covered the AIDS epidemic, a frightening image of what it meant to be gay.
I wasn’t out, and I certainly wasn’t courageous enough to ask a librarian to point me in the right direction. So I quietly and surrepticiously searched the libary catalogue system for words like “homosexuality” and “gay.” In those days, LGBT books tended to be shelved in discreet, back or upper level areas of the stacks. It might have helped on one hand for the books I was looking for to be more visible, to help me understand that I had nothing to be ashamed about. Though at the time, it was helpful for me to be able to sneak into a desolate area of the library, grab a book, hide myself in a cubby, and read without anyone knowing what I was reading. In college, I got a little bolder and actually took some of those books out of the library, though I kept them hidden in my bedroom.
That was back in the late 1980s, and the books I found were either clinical books that were fairly equivocal about the nature of homosexuality – a perversion or a natural place on the spectrum of homosexuality – or they were gritty books about gay subculture and the sex trade (books by William S. Burroughs and Paul T. Rogers’ Saul’s Book, which have been banned or challenged over the years). In most ways, they were pretty far aloft of my experience of myself and the world, but they showed that gay people existed, a fairly mind-blowing discovery for a younger me, and comforting. If I hadn’t found those books, I don’t think I would have shaken off the anxiety and depression that was killing me. A few years later, I embarked on living an honest life as a gay man.
Nowadays, it’s gratifying to see many libraries acquiring a diverse collection of LGBT books, from childrens, young adult, adult fiction and nonfiction, and a variety of genres. I don’t mean to denigrate William Burroughs, but it’s pretty nice that young LGBTs aren’t limited to his body of work as a sole point of reference! And libraries now have LGBT books mixed in with their popular collections and childrens/young adult collections. Some of them even create displays for Pride Month and National Coming Out Day.
From talking to LGBT kids, which was my principal métier as a social worker, I can attest to the fact that many young people can access LGBT-themed books more easily today. They’re coming out younger, with greater confidence and with family support, and some describe LGBT literature as fairly normalized in their schools and libraries, and/or are comfortable with advocating for better representation of LGBTs. Some have parents who take the lead in that regard, and not infrequently, when I meet new acquaintances, readers and other writers, they ask me where to find my books because they have a son or niece or a neighbor’s kid who is gay.
Still, there are some LGBTs who have described their experiences as similar to my own — wanting to read books with characters like themselves but needing to do so privately because they’re not quite comfortable being “out.” And, particularly in socially-conservative rural and suburban areas, it’s not so easy for them to find LGBT books.
That’s why Banned Books Week remains necessary. It reminds us that the progress we have made is both fragile and not fully realized when you look across the country, and wider across the globe. As recently as last year, This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki, a young adult graphic novel with LGBT characters, was removed from libraries in Minnesota and Florida through challenges. The ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom tracks book challenges and finds that 10% of them lead to the removal of a book. That might not sound like a lot, but in each community where censorship occurs, it affects many thousands of people, in addition to perpetuating the view that portrayals of sexuality, particularly LGBTs, are unnatural and unsafe for young people.
You can support the freedom to read by raising awareness of Banned Books Week, and books that are targeted themselves. Here’s a handy resource page from ALA and an infographic that shows the scope of the problem:
The Ninth Annual New York City Rainbow Book Fair is coming up: Saturday, April 29th 12:00 – 6:00 PM at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (524 W. 59th Street). I’ve booked a spot on the 3:30 PM Reading Panel, and I’ll be around and about Bold Strokes Books’ exhibit table, talking up The City of Seven Gods, which is a 2016 Foreword INDIES finalist, in case you hadn’t heard.
The Rainbow Book Fair has a special place in my heart since it was the first venue where I did a public reading. That was back in 2013, seven months before my first novel The Seventh Pleiade came out. Eager to start doing some publicity, I answered my publisher’s call for readers, got an early run of promotional bookmarks with the cover art, and invited a bunch of my friends. Then the panic set in. What had I done? Willfully scheduled the most terrifying experience of my life? I had overcome my fear of public speaking by then, grown quite comfortable with it actually as an adjunct professor, but reading my own work was a lot more personal, sharing something I had created, in my own, less than smooth and arresting voice, in a room full of literature afficiandos. The situation brought back the horror of having to sing in front of people in sixth grade chorus and play cello solos in orchestra. Neither of those artistic pursuits panned out for me by the way.
When the day came, it was far less scary than I had pictured. One thing that makes readings a hell of a lot easier than other kinds of performance is that no matter how petrified you are, you can’t forget the words, the notes to hit, since they’re right there in the book you’re holding in your sweaty, shaking hand. Unless the panic strikes you blind. I guess that can happen. But it didn’t happen for me. I gave a well-articulated, stilted reading of one of my favorite scenes from the book, and people clapped politely while my awesome friends cheered and congratulated me. Afterwards we went out for drinks to celebrate. It turned out to be one of those great days you remember forever, and I was so proud to be part of the LGBT literary community.
Now, with that kind of personal endorsement, how could you not check out The Rainbow Book Fair this year?
I’ll be on the 3:30 Bold Strokes Showcase which includes three lesbian authors (Jean Copeland, Maggie Cummings, M. Ullrich), and gay horror author and my good pal David W. Kelly. Before or after that, you can catch me at my publisher’s exhibit table or hobnobbing around the floor. The Fair is a good place to discover lesser-known LGBT titles, both fiction and non-fiction, children’s, young adult and adult, and with the shrinking number of brick and mortar LGBT bookstores, how often do you get a chance to physically browse books these days?
You might find the title to be a bit charitable after you read the article and see her pie charts and graphs. (Yay for Pie Charts and Graphs!) In an industry that publishes thousands of young adult books every year, on average only fifteen of those books portray LGBT teens and/or “LGBT issues” such as growing up with same-sex parents or bullying in school.
Yuck.
Anyway, as always, Lo is thoughtful and precise in her consideration of the dilemma. Part of that precision is focusing on big publishers only. The number of LGBT titles from small presses, or those self-published by authors, is very challenging to count and analyze. Including those titles could skew perceptions. It’s important that LGBT books are published, but it’s also important that they have a wide distribution so that they get to teen readers. That’s not to say that LGBT titles at big publishers are better. I like the way that Lo addresses this issue:
“In some ways, I see the largest YA publishers as analogous to the broadcast networks on television. Broadcast networks have historically had the widest reach, even though much quality programming happens these days on cable channels that have smaller distribution in the television marketplace. An analysis of the broadcast networks — or the major publishers — doesn’t negate the contributions that smaller networks (or publishers) can and do make, especially in representation of minorities, but I do think the major networks (and publishers) have a greater responsibility due to their greater reach.”
