GLR July-August 2025

ESSAY Banning Books Is Back in Fashion G IANNA H OLIDAY

E VEN BEFORE Donald Trump entered his sec ond term in office, there was a resurgence of censorship in progress in public schools and li braries across the United States in the form of book-banning initiatives. Restricting public ac cess to literature is not a new practice, nor is it unique to this administration or this nation. Throughout recorded history, literature that confronted uncomfortable truths or raised people’s awareness of human rights abuses has often been met with hostility. During the U.S. Civil Rights movement, books such as Ad ventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird faced challenges from school boards for bringing attention to racism as well as for their “obscene” content. During the Jim Crow era, organizations such as the United Daughters of the Con federacy—a neo-Confederate movement—worked to ban schoolbooks that portrayed the Confederacy unsympathetically. They sought to enforce the “Lost Cause” ideology that framed the Civil War as a fight for states’ rights rather than the preser vation of slavery. Some books, including Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , are still commonly chal lenged in schools despite their impact on civil rights education. posed to “inappropriate” content. This form of censorship, portrayed by its advocates as an effort to protect children, is re ally about protecting a social order that often leaves queer peo ple out of the picture. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, groups that support book bans—notably Moms for Lib erty, the national clearinghouse for these state and local initia tives—frame LGBT books as a threat to “family values,” mimicking strategies historically used to justify suppressing Civil Rights-era literature that promoted racial justice. In 2024, according to the nonprofit organization PEN Amer ica, which promotes free expression in literature, around one fourth of the bans on books directly affected the LGBT com munity. A PEN America report states that the uptick in book bans began in 2021, coinciding with the aftermath of the wide spread push for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, and by conser vatives’ reaction to the election of Joe Biden. Gianna Holiday recently completed a master’s degree in English litera ture at the Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte, where her research fo cused on queer theory, censorship, and the cultural politics of education. The most recent wave of book bans serves a similar mission of reducing discourse sur rounding marginalized communities. The rhetoric used to justify these bans often centers on ideas such as “parental rights,” “age-appropriateness,” “religious val ues,” or preventing children from being ex

These bans evoke disturbing historical parallels. Authori tarian regimes have long used censorship to repress ideas deemed dangerous to their political agenda. In Nazi Germany, efforts to control cultural life culminated in a 1935 order stating that literature must be kept “pure from all harmful and undesir able [content] ... to protect the youth from corrupting influ ences,” including books containing information about gender and sexuality, Communism, and democracy. The parallels be tween past attempts to destroy “anti-German” literature and cur rent efforts to target “anti-American” works are striking and represent a familiar pattern of repressing information or ideas that diverge from a preferred ideology. At the forefront of the modern U.S. book-banning move ment are groups like No Left Turn in Education and the Her itage Foundation, which have created extensive blacklists of titles to be targeted, the majority of which feature LGBT mate rial. Such groups are active in dozens of states, including Re publican-led Florida, Texas, South Carolina, Missouri, and Tennessee. The 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act, often called the “Don’t Say Gay” law, enacted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, prohibits the teaching or discussion of sexual ori entation in the classroom from kindergarten through eighth a children’s book about two male penguins raising a chick to gether. Other frequently challenged titles include Melissa , by AlexGino, The Hate U Give , by Angie Thomas, and ThisBook IsGay , by Juno Dawson. All of these books, which are intended for young adult readers, give voice to marginalized communi ties, and all have drawn scrutiny from conservatives for their representation of diverse genders, races, and sexualities. The titles being challenged are often critically acclaimed and award-winning books. Take Gender Queer , by Maia Kob abe, a memoir of the author’s self-discovery of an existence out side of the gender binary that received an award from the American Library Association; or All Boys Aren’t Blue , by George M. Johnson, which explores growing up Black and queer in America and was included on several lists of the best young adult books of 2020. Both were discussed during a Sen ate Judiciary Committee hearing on book-banning in September 2023. Chaired by Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the hearing brought national attention to the escalating trend of censorship in schools and libraries. In most cases, what’s “ob jectionable” in these books is no more explicit than what’s found, and tolerated, in stories about heterosexual characters grade. After its passage, Florida school li braries were instructed to pull hundreds of books from their shelves. These titles in clude Last Night at the Telegraph Club , by Malinda Lo, which explores women-loving women and representations of drag during the Red Scare, and And Tango Makes Three ,

The groups leading today’s book banning movement have created extensive blacklists of targeted ti tles.

TheG & LR

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