A library advisory board in Victoria, Texas, did support the professional judgment of librarians. The complaints about 40 books were the most Dayna Williams-Capone, the director of library services there, has seen in 13 years. When she did not respond by taking the books off the shelves, residents elevated about half the complaints to the advisory board, which ultimately voted to keep the books on the shelves.

“It’s nothing that I have against anybody in any community,” said Cindy Herndon, one of the people who complained about books. “I don’t have any resentment or lack of respect for them. It’s just about protecting the children and exposing them to things that they really don’t need to see right now.” 

“Things that they really don’t need to see right now,” for Herndon and most of those making complaints, boil down to books about people of color and LGBTQ books. You do not have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that pattern.

Herndon’s specific objection was to Dean Atta’s The Black Flamingo, a Stonewall Book Award winner, a Time magazine best YA book of all time, and a recipient of starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal. It’s a coming-of-age story about a mixed-race gay teen in London who joins the Drag Society, and Herndon’s problem was that it might “sexualize children, especially into alternate lifestyles, and make them want to be someone else than who they were born to be.” Or, you know, be the person they were born to be, only Cindy Herndon doesn’t like that.

In Irving, Texas, Mayor Rick Stopfer helped turn back an attempt to remove L.C. Rosen’s LGBTQ novel Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts) from the library. “If you read the full book, it tells you that you can have a loving relationship with a person of your same gender,” he said at a meeting. “Everybody’s not going to like everything. It’s not something that I enjoyed reading, but I understood what the purpose of it was, and what the outcome was supposed to be.” A full-throated defense of LGBTQ people it’s not, but it’s at least a principled stand for libraries being able to have content that makes some people uncomfortable.

The wave of efforts to take books out of town libraries follows a series of attacks on books in school libraries. A state legislator released a 16-page list of books he wanted school libraries to search out and “report” on, which ultimately led to a San Antonio-area school district pulling 400 books from its school libraries for further review. Not to be outdone, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered a series of state agencies “to immediately develop statewide standards to prevent the presence of pornography and other obscene content in Texas public schools, including in school libraries.” Abbott offered two examples of problem books, both of which had LGBTQ content, neither of which were pornography.

Similar attacks on representative content in school libraries have flared up in school districts in Kansas and Virginia. It’s all part of a widespread right-wing assault on the idea that it’s acceptable or legitimate to be or to write about being Black or Latino or LGBTQ, or to have to deal with trauma. The opponents of these books say they want to protect kids—but the kids they want to protect are the kids they already value, and what they want to protect those kids from is exposure to ideas that make the adults uncomfortable. They don’t want to protect kids who don’t look like theirs from actual real-life abuse and trauma.