Ban Every Single Book With an LGBTQ Character? What? How?!

Imagine you’re a school librarian in Florida. Suddenly, your boss comes rushing through the door, demanding the impossible. Every single book with an LGBTQ character? Pull them from your shelves immediately.

That’s right, every single one. It’s a daunting task to comprehend when you consider how many novels have some sort of queer or trans figure in them. Not to mention all that homoeroticism across the Western canon. Shakespeare? Good bye! Mrs. Dalloway? Out the window! The Illiad? Whatever was going on with Achilles and Patroclus might not be safe for Florida schools anymore.

According to a new report by Popular Information’s Judd Legum, school librarians in Charlotte County were told to pull any book with an LGBTQ character from their libraries. The decision came in late July, when Charlotte County librarians were requesting policy clarification on Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law while speaking with school district superintendent Mark Vianello and the school board’s attorney, Michael McKinley.

LGBTQ characters and themes ‘cannot exist’

More specifically, librarians asked if novels with LGBTQ characters were allowed in school courses and libraries as long as they didn’t have “explicit sex scenes,” “sexual descriptions,” and “‘how to’ manuals for how to be an LGBTQ+ person.” Vianello rejected this and told school librarians that the school district must implement a sweeping ban on all queer characters in the school district’s libraries.

“Books with LBGTQ+ characters are not to be included in classroom libraries or school library media centers,” Vianello said. When asked if books should be banned based on a character having “two mothers” or “because there is a gay best friend or a main character is gay,” Vianello confirmed, “yes.” Those are banned.

Additionally, librarians asked for guidance regarding students reading books with “LGBTQ characters or themes” during “silent sustained reading in class, or book reports, or anything involving instruction.”

“In other words, to ensure LGBTQ characters or themes do not exist — or can they exist, but not cross into pornographic territory?” the librarians asked.

“These characters and themes cannot exist,” Vianello said.

The chilling effect of ‘Don’t Say Gay’

Charlotte County librarians were seeking guidance in response to 2022’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, also known as the Parental Rights in Education Act. The law claims to “reinforce the fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding the upbringing and control of their children” by “requiring school district personnel to encourage a student to discuss issues relating to his or her well-being with his or her parent or to facilitate discussion of the issue with the parent.”

In one section, the law states that “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade three or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

According to Popular Information, Charlotte County’s school district is particularly concerned about students in elementary school courses accessing the library mid-class. “[T]here are elementary schools that utilize their school library media center as classrooms… [for] elective courses that our students are officially scheduled into and attend on a regular basis,” a school district spokesperson told Legum, claiming that the library “is considered a classroom setting.”

The school district’s attorney “advises that we do not make books with these themes available in media centers that serve as classrooms since this would be considered ‘classroom instruction’ and such instruction and/or availability of these themes may not occur in Pre-K-grade eight,” the spokesperson said.

Additionally, “if a teacher were to bring a class of students to the media center and provide instruction, books with these themes cannot be included in that instructional time unless supported by the academic standards of that course of study,” the spokesperson told Popular Information.

There isn’t exactly a legal precedent for banning LGBTQ and queer-adjacent books from Florida libraries. According to Legum’s report, a Lake County School Board lawsuit resulted in the Florida Department of Education claiming that the state’s “age restriction on sexual orientation and gender identity does not apply to library books.”

Nonetheless, the “Don’t Say Gay” law clearly allows different Florida school boards to approach LGBTQ books differently. One must wonder whether Charlotte County will open the door for more extreme bans on LGBTQ characters in schools, erasing books with queer characters from school libraries across the state. Given one school district’s policy essentially dismantled its schools’ libraries, it’s certainly possible. Over a dozen Florida school counties have pulled LGBTQ and queer-adjacent books from school libraries, according to an August report from Popular Information.

That said, is an LGBTQ character ban like Charlotte County’s sustainable in execution? Is it even possible to maintain such strict censorship across the course of a whole school year? That remains to be seen.

(Featured image: LearningLark/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)