LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a message to Chrislove.
There were no books for me to read in order to understand what I was going through as a kid. There were no heroes or icons....There were no road maps or guidelines for the journey. And...because...there wasn't and still isn't much....
...I released the deepest and darkest things about my past in the hope that someone might see a reflection of themselves in the words and know that they are not alone, and they too can grow and thrive.
--George M. Johnson, All Boys Aren't Blue
p. 295
Day by day we learn how the latest set of would-be censors are targeting public schools and libraries across the U.S.
In one sense, this is nothing new.
Since the Tennessee legislature in 1925 forbade teaching evolution in public schools, efforts to ban this science or at least water it down--whether by "balancing" with religious doctrine, prescribing equivocal textbooks, or gluing disclaimer stickers onto more objective ones--never ended, even into the 2000s.
During the last reactionary spasm in the 1950s, a claim that comic books were turning kids into juvenile delinquents caused a Congressional inquiry and self-censorship by publishers. (Alleged horrors included a Batman-Robin gay subtext and a claim that Wonder Woman must be lesbian.)
In the 2000s, the Harry Potter fantasy series became the most challenged books of their time in U.S. schools and public libraries, as some Christians complained that the international best-sellers promoted witchcraft, disobedience, and "anti-family themes."
Now, though: a right-wing extremist political movement that last year came close to achieving a coup is weaponizing moral panic and disinformation at a pace and concerted intensity scarcely seen before.
In the latest book-banning drives, they have set out to erase the history and experience of Black people, people of color in general, and Jewish people--all part of a concerted strategy to consolidate white Christian hegemony for the indefinite future. They have tried to cut back information about sex and reproduction, a perennial right-wing bugbear.
And they have set out to demonize LGBTQ people and allies as sexual predators. In the case of LGBTQ kids, framing them somehow both as victims and a threat to their schoolmates, extremist politicians have decided that a crusade against LGBTQ people, including underage youth, can be an election winner.
So, under pretence of protecting the young,
right-wing extremists are making young people
into targets of hatred.
This is happening even as increasing numbers of young Americans identify as LGBTQ: more than 1 in 10 as of last year.
And though some communities are welcoming, and media offer more images than ever of LGBTQ+ acceptance and support, many of these young people still face a very different experience in real life.
A national survey by the Trevor Project in 2019, for example, found that some 40% of U.S. LGBT youth had seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months, including more than half of trans young people. (Link to PDF can be found here.)
Many young people are still forced to hide their identity and even subjected to abusive "conversion therapy." Removing what social support and validation they do receive represents a threat to their very survival. Even when not accompanied with physical attack.
A recent survey in the UK found that a third of LGBTQ youth had suffered abuse, principally from family members. It seems unlikely that the U.S. is much better.
In this alarming context, I decided it was time to acquaint myself directly with some of the actual LGBTQ-themed works that have been targeted and/or banned.
I was also curious how I might react as an older reader (old enough to be a grandparent), encountering a sample of these volumes labeled as inappropriate for youth and even pornographic.
Out of many worthy choices, I picked three relatively well-known, award-winning coming-of age memoirs.
These are all works for young adults, at a minimum. Not Heather Has Two Mommies. They have been assigned or offered as optional reading strictly at high school or college level. Books for younger readers also deserve attention, but that would be a different diary.
And, oh--spoilers ahead. But you won't be reading these books later for the suspense factor, will you? :-)
The lineup:
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel, Mariner (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 2006. Bechdel's lesbian coming-of-age in the 70s, as the veneer also peeled from her gay dad's double life. Graphic format.
All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto by George M. Johnson, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2020. Complex challenges of growing up gay in a middle-class Black family, as the new millennium opened. Johnson directly addresses young readers.
Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, Oni-Lion Forge Publishing Group, 2020 (initial publication, 2019). Step by experimental step, a budding millenial artist explores eir nonbinary gender and builds an authentic life in a mostly binary world. Graphic format.
Before launching, a last word on perspective:
Reviews are inevitably also about the reviewer. This writer, it must be understood, approached these works from a state of relative ignorance.
Only a handful of years ago I arrived at the mind-bending conclusion that I am, and always have been, what is today known as gender nonbinary. (More on that, if desired. Any pronouns are fine.)
Until that point, I simply (and not so simply) lived for decades with chronic and inexplicable discomfort around several aspects of gender and sexuality.
Growing up, you understand, our family was incredibly prudish. I arrived at adulthood almost totally uninformed about the varieties of sexual experience. Even as an adult in a culture that was becoming more open, curiosity was overshadowed by an imperative to conceal what seemed to be a shameful "wrongness" about myself. So until just lately, I had very limited conscious exposure to LGBTQ history and culture.
Naivete has disadvantages for a reviewer. At the same time it does provide a fresh eye, so I hope there is some value in these observations.
Fun Home
The graphic memoir Fun Home is now 16 years old. Almost an eternity in the Age of Instant Media. It's an established classic. It was on the New York Times bestseller list. It won countless awards. Academic studies are published about it. It inspired a Tony Award-winning Best Musical on Broadway in 2015.
Author Alison Bechdel was already known for her long-running comic, Dykes To Watch Out For, before Fun Home appeared in the year that she turned 46. (She also originated the Bechdel Test.)
"Fun" in the title has a double meaning. Alison's father ran a funeral home in Beech Creek, Pa. He also taught English in the local high school and in his spare time, worked obsessively to restore and furnish the family's 1867-vintage house.
Alison and her two brothers had to help out--and played games, and even slept over--in the funeral (family parlance, "fun") home.
As precis, here's a squint at an early version of the musical, before it went to Broadway.
1:34
.
Serious graphic literature has been around for a while now, though some people have yet to catch up--perhaps because the 1950s flap so firmly associated comics with children and restricted comics to the relatively simple and "safe."
From her first words, Bechdel locates Fun Home in a grown-up and intensely literary tradition.
The opening chapter title, "Old Father, Old Artificer," directly echoes the final sentence of James Joyce's classic novel-memoir, Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man.
Joyce named his hero Stephen Dedalus, you may recall, alluding to the Greek myth of Dedalus and Icarus, that tragic tale of father and son. The Irish novelist took his semi-autobiographical story farther in Ulysses--itself a densely allusive work, harking back to Homer's Odyssey with its theme of son-searching-for-father. Bechdel also parallels Ulysses, and its parent Odyssey, in Fun Home. In which Bechdel's father introduces young Bechdel...to the writings of Joyce. (Among other things.)
The very first panel depicts young Alison's father lifting her, a parallel to Icarus, in a game of "airplane." The very last panel returns to the theme, in a different setting and a new, at least partly redeeming, light.
That's a sample of how crammed this volume is with reflections, shadows, overtones, multivalencies, permutations, congruencies, resonances. It's a hero's journey. And an anti-hero's.
What's more, this book is packed with other books. Books packed on shelves. Library stacks. Books being read, books in the bed...an overflowing treasury of gay and other references. Proust (extensively). Wilde (ditto). Charles Addams. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wallace Stevens. James and the Giant Peach??? Yep. And it's packed with family letters too.
The graphics as well are full of resonances. A loaf of Sunbeam Bread, for instance, appears like an inconspicuous phrase, and reappears, its significance ultimately...death????? Death is always close. A grandfather, a child her own age, any number of strangers, and eventually her own father--all pass through the fun home, under young Alison's eyes.
But if all this artfulness doesn't seem too interesting, you can just read it for the plot. Don't miss the humor, either.
What in this book could be so upsetting as to get it targeted by censors? Other than LGBTQ+ characters being central?
In truth, there are genuinely disturbing plot points. Bechdel's father led a secret life. He was involved with underage boys, including the children's regular babysitter. Bechdel's mother felt miserable in the marriage and stifled by the provincial small town, yet chose to stay, and by doing so, helped cover up the truth. A teenaged Bechdel was puzzled by her father's arrest for "offering a beer" to an underage youth, till later, when Bechdel-turned-detective figured out the code. And learned from her mother that there was...more. Meanwhile, when Bechdel came out to her parents as lesbian, neither had much to say.
A more predictable source of discomfort might be some of the art. Male genitals fully displayed, surprise, on a corpse in the embalming room, as much a shock to the reader as to pre-teen Alison, when her father called her into the room.
College-age Bechdel and her girlfriend in bed, happy portrayals, warm and humorous. Going down on the girlfriend for the first time. Periods. Masturbation. Oh, the horror. Complaints have also noted the suicide plot point, and college-age Bechdel smoking pot.
Older generations, in fairness, might reasonably be expected to feel more startled and upset by some of the graphics than most of today's young young people, who have grown up with the likes of Sex Education and Queer As Folk. Not to mention much better actual sex education in many cases, an even--for good or ill--internet porn on tap.
But nonsense like this, from a college freshman who opted out of a voluntary reading of Fun Home (and thereby scored, of all things, an OpEd in The Washington Post )?
My choice had nothing to do with the ideas....I know that I'll have to grapple with ideas I don't agree with, even ideas that I find immoral.
But in the Bible, Jesus forbids his followers from exposing themselves to anything pornographic.
Pornographic? There are various definitions, but in general, pornography's main job is simply to, er, arouse. No greater purpose. Incidental excitement, if it occurs, does not pornography make.
Still more to the point, that young man would have done better to spend the time he saved in furthering his acquaintance with the actual Christian gospels--because on the subject of pornography, Jesus had, so far as recorded, exactly nothing to say. Zero, zip, zilch, Nichts, nada.
Pure evangelical virtue signaling. In the course of the next four years, we can hope that this student acquired some critical thinking skills.
In a more recent irony, a Kansas City resident who joined a push to get Fun Home banned by the local school board was later charged with child molestation, domestic assault, and furnishing pornographic material to a minor.
Fun Home was removed this year by fiat from a 10th grade Honors English reading list in Clark County, Nev. Other attempts to ban or restrict it so far appear to have failed. But it is difficult to be sure. Not all book bans make the news.
All Boys Aren't Blue
In All Boys Aren't Blue, journalist and activist George Matthew Johnson presents selections from a complex, layered life story in 16 chapters.
The narrative starts with birth into a middle-class Black family in Plainfield, N.J. (in 1985, per other sources). It runs through Johnson's coming out as gay, which happened while serving as fraternity president at a historically Black university.
Johnson's memoir has received many recognitions, among them being listed among the top 10 Rainbow Books by the American Library Association. A TV show based on it has reportedly been optioned. Ironically, bans helped propel the book onto the New York Times bestseller list.
Shortly after its publication in April 2020, Johnson also came out as nonbinary.
"Blue" in the title is multivalent.
It refers of course to the pink-and-blue dichotomy imposed on infants. "The Blue" is also is a slang term for police, a conventionally masculine career that Johnson's father followed--and a two-edged profession for Black people in the age of #BLM. (Those are just two of several resonances.)
Johnson brings alive traumatic and character-forming events, a richness of interrelated personalities, and the texture of communities. Each episode contains a genuine gift of self, and also a teaching.
Thoughtful observations on Black history and culture, family and responsibility and self-respect, gender and sexuality weave all through the narrative.
Johnson as a child met with comments for jumping rope with the girls at school. They received correction at home, for speaking in a way adults identified as effeminate. Johnson craved acceptance. They tried to conform. They took up traditional boys' sports, excelled, and gained respect.
At the same time, though, some extended-family members quietly showed indirect support. Brothers fought with neighborhood bullies to protect their younger sibling. A grandmother, who had a major role in Johnson's upbringing, opened pathways for this child who was obviously "different." A cousin who was trans, and the cousin's friends, impressed young Johnson at family gatherings. One aunt was lesbian.
By the end of high school, Johnson knew they were gay and made a plan to come out at college, far from home.
It didn't work out that way.
At Virginia Union University, Johnson first waffled, then adopted a new and specifically straight, masculine goal: joining a fraternity. The months-long, challenging process created a deep emotional bond with fellow initiates (called "line brothers")....but also required Johnson to deny directly that they were gay.
All the same, it was at college that Johnson first came out privately. And then in the course of time, Johnson became fraternity president--and several of their "line brothers" turned out to be gay as well. A satisfying resolution.
The story's not all sweetness. For one thing, no Black parent or grandparent can shield their child from many uphill battles in life. A traumatic childhood assault by an older cousin formed Johnson's introduction to sexual activity. The death of Johnson's beloved grandmother from brain cancer was a painful lesson in grief. The trans cousin died of AIDS.
And yet this theme persists: understanding, support, and love can spring from unlikely sources; also, remember to give back.
Johnson's book was the one that, as I read, ended up with the most page flags stuck at various quotes. Examples:
If I couldn't see parts of my Blackness as respectable, there was no way I was ready to see my queerness as respectable either. But now I know that queerness is a part of Blackness, and that there is no Blackness without queer people. (p. 9)
Notice my confusion in how strong I was in some moments and how weak I was in others, because that is what coming out truly is. It is not a final thing. (p. 237)
When people ask me how I got into activism, I often say, "The first person you are ever an activist for is yourself." If I wasn't gonna fight for me, who else was? (p. 102)
Should you not like your name, change it. It is yours, and it will stay with you forever, so do with it what you wish. (p. 50)
Other observations could be expected to stick in the craw of anti-CRT vigilantes:
American history is truly the greatest fable ever written. (p. 88)
A handful of episodes are blunt in their sexual frankness, including the assault that Johnson experienced as a young teen from a "cool cousin" who was sleeping over.
I contemplated whether I would write about you now that you are dead. (p. 197)
The experience shook Johnson profoundly and was obviously difficult to write about. Johnson writes of this cousin with complex feelings that include an element of compassion (not unlike Bechdel and her father) but is crystal clear on how wrong and harmful the behavior was. Just to read of it is disorienting.
Yet, in a world where such things can happen to children, is it wrong for young adults to be made aware?
Johnson also narrates their first consensual sex experiences, which took place as a college student. There's uncertainty and awkwardness in these accounts; discomfort too. But they are human reality.
Some readers flinch. On the other side, isn't it more healthy for young people to be exposed to unvarnished human reality, than to have only images--as a college-age Johnson did--taken from (of all things, heterosexual) porn?
Given that both Black and LGBTQ+ authors have been heavily targeted by would-be censors, it's not surprising that All Boys Aren't Blue as of last fall had been banned by school districts in eight states. As of this February that figure was up to 15 states, Johnson told South Florida Gay News. In Florida a white school board member filed a criminal complaint about the book, on the grounds of obscenity.
Since Florida's new "Don't Say Gay" law and "Stop W.O.K.E. Act," which extremists in other states may try to imitate, the silencing of voices like Johnson's may become more pervasive--unless and until voters draw a line.
Navigating in a space that questions your humanity isn't really living at all. It's existing. We all deserve better than the ability to just exist. (All Boys Aren't Blue, p. 75)
Gender Queer
Youngest of the authors here, Maia Kobabe (pronounced"maya co-bayb") was born in 1991, attended Dominican University in California, and earned an advanced degree from California College of the Arts. E produced this, eir first full-length book, before age 30.
Gender Queer won multiple awards from the American Library Association but by 2021, became reportedly the single most banned and challenged book in the U.S.
Kobabe uses Spivak pronouns (a term that sounds more intimidating than this really is). E, em, eir cover most situations and aren't hard to remember. As Kobabe shows in Gender Queer, everyone makes mistakes with new pronouns at first, no big deal.
Gender Queer has what might be called a modular format. Short, contained episodes or reflections are presented in anywhere from a single page to a seven- or eight-page spread.
Any one could stand alone as an entity, similar to the structure of a serial comic. Cumulatively, they tell a story that moves steadily forward, with repeating and deepening themes. It exemplifies "Show, don't tell."
With Maia's story we are in a different world and a different era. Maia grows up in a hippie sort of white family in rural California and attends a Waldorf school.
It's a world that features a school LGBTQ club which somehow morphs into an LOTR fan club; boy bands; flash drives; "shipping" and fanfiction; the "banana test"; academic studies in cartooning; casual questions about a person's sexuality; Tinder; webcomics; Johnny Weir (I had to look up some of this stuff); discussions about shaving of pubic hair; asexuality; binders; Fun Home; a vibrator; dogs and cats living together...(no, that last bit's a joke).
It also includes menstrual-period horror, traumatically painful Pap smears, a discussion about "tasting oneself" (Kobabe decides no), and an experiment with a strap-on that doesn't really work out.
But stop; the book really isn't the way I've made it sound.
This is a gentle and thoughtful work, essentially, and we're a leisurely 68 pages in, before 12-year-old Maia even encounters the word "transgender." Sixty-eight pages of an increasing, pervasive but inarticulable discomfort around gender. This part starts with exclusion from a treehouse because "girls have cooties" (some things apparently never change!) and reaches the point of maintaining an elaborate fantasy about a lost male twin.
Kobabe works hard to show the reader by accumulation of details that young Maia's nonbinary identification is a genuine, consistent, and distinctly non-typical reality. In eir story I recognize, in fact, certain aspects of my own nonbinary experience, though e and I are not alike in every way; there is great diversity among nonbinary individuals.
A rhythm builds up. Anxiety involving some dimension of gender and sexuality comes to the fore. This leads to further questioning and investigation, conversations, perhaps experimentation in the real world. Maia finds a more comfortable way. The issue is resolved or mitigated, and then there is the next thing.
In this way Maia works from simple matters like hair length and clothing through more complex ones like pronouns, dating, sex, and how consistently to come out, and with whom.
With a little help from eir friends. Though Maia is often nervous or embarrassed, and there is angst along the way, the story as told is remarkably light on episodes of bullying or negativity.
Maia's mother is supportive, scarcely even surprised, though regretful that Maia doesn't want kids. A sister, also queer though in a different style, is a cheerful and reliable friend. Fellow students supply friendship and zest. Older LGBTQ co-workers are protective. Maia's first lover proves open-minded and open-hearted. A lesbian aunt has some TERFy objections to Maia's pronouns; she comes around. In all there is much human warmth, and the general trajectory is upward.
The story culminates with Maia as an adult, teaching a class for beginner cartoonists, wondering how many of eir young pupils might themselves be LGBTQ and possibly lacking in role models. The journey isn't over. Maia vows to be forthright in class about eir gender "next time."
In all, Gender Queer is the lightest and most "cosy" of the three books.
It's hard to be certain what upsets censors most. Details like some of those cataloged above? A single image of an ancient Greek vase depicting pedophilia? Or the shattering of the gender binary?
"I feel like my book in particular has been caught up in a viral social media movement because it's a comic, because you can snap a picture of one panel and and share it completely removed from context...," Kobabe has said.
Gender Queer just this month topped the American Library Association's list of the 10 most frequently banned and challenged books. (All Boys Aren't Blue was No. 3.)
Oddly, the first place Gender Queer was banned from schools seems to have been in heavily blue Fairfax County, Va. (literally a quarter-mile from where I live, btw). But apparently, bannings have helped to popularize it.
So...in conclusion?
Bechdel, Johnson, and Kobabe each needed a lot of guts to come forth with these very human testimonies. In the fight over whether young people should have access to books like these, here's where I came down:
We don't continue to pretend there's a Santa Claus after children reach the age of six or so. And it's wrong to try and keep teens and younger adults sequestered from messy human complexities. In other words, to keep them from growing up.
Young people, moreover, who happen to be LGBTQ+ can't be prevented from growing up as who they are by keeping them in the dark.
It's also worth noting what older adult readers can gain.
"I've heard of young people using [Gender Queer] as a teaching tool with their parents and grandparents," one local activist told the Santa Rosa, Calif., Press-Democrat.
A personal reflection from working on this diary: We've all heard pop-cultural references to "the inner child."
In spite of being somewhat skeptical about all that, I found reading these works a pretty emotional thing. Almost as if somewhere inside myself there was still an "inner teen" who really, really needed these memoirs. Or others like them.
Who regretted having been born into one of the most socially reactionary periods of American history. Who wondered how different this life could have been. Who wished...but all of us just enter the timeline when we happen to, and all we can do is run the course presented to of us. The best we can.
Worth remembering btw: there are other worthy LGBTQ+ authors writing for younger people, authors the publicity lottery hasn't blessed, and whose banned works too often drop quietly out of sight. They too deserve support.
It seems fitting to close with this:
Thanks for reading.
LGBTQ Literature Schedule (2022):
If you are interested in taking any of the following dates, please comment below or send a message to Chrislove. We’re always looking for new writers, and anything related to LGBTQ literature is welcome!
January 30: Ushka Waso
February 27: OPEN
March 27: Chrislove
April 24: Clio2
May 29: OPEN
June 26: OPEN
July 31: OPEN
August 28: OPEN
September 25: OPEN
October 30: OPEN
November 27: OPEN
December 25: OPEN
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE