The bestselling young-adult author James Dawson has hit out at “small-mindedness and hatred”, after parents attacked his guide to growing up LGBT, This Book Is Gay.
The book has been challenged in Wasilla, Alaska, after a 10-year-old boy picked it up from the juvenile non-fiction shelf of the public library, and his mother was “shocked to find it contained frank drawings and descriptions of gay sex acts inside”, according to local news service the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.
The mother launched an appeal after she was told by the local librarian KJ Martin-Albright that it was appropriately shelved, prompting dozens of locals to turn up at a council meeting on Monday to debate the issue. One, according to the Frontiersman, said: “I can’t imagine what kind of person would order that material and want to make it readily available for children. That is straight-up paedophile kind of behaviour.” Another, after children had been led from the room, read phrases he described as offensive from the book, including: “As with hand jobs and breakfast eggs, all men like their blowjobs differently.”
The 10-year-old boy’s father told the council that the library’s decision on a book he called “borderline paedophilia” had made parents anxious about taking their children to the library, according to Alaska Dispatch News, saying: “If anything, this experience has taught them that they can’t trust their library, that they can’t trust their public schools.”
Dawson said today that while he has “always thought it’d be quite rock’n’roll to be a ‘challenged book’, actually it’s just left a bitter taste”.
“In 2015, when you read of people comparing gay people to paedophiles you just despair,” said the novelist. “I always think, as a community, we’ve come so far and achieved so much, but then you read something like that and realise there is still such small-mindedness and hatred left to contend with.”
Dawson, who recently came out as transgender, pointed to the young LGBT people of Alaska “and the message they’re receiving from this furore: they must be so terrified to come out if this is the reaction they think they’ll get”.
“I believe we can turn that hate inwards as well, and this is why young LGBT people are still at increased risk of self-harm and suicidal thinking,” said the author.
But Dawson added that he was “so thrilled” that librarian Martin-Albright had “stood her ground”. “I’m very lucky in that librarians in both the UK and US have recognised the value of This Book Is Gay and diverse titles like it,” he said. “Libraries and librarians have always been the natural sanctuary of marginalised young people and long may they remain open.”
In the UK, The Bookseller has said This Book is Gay has “fill[ed] an important gap in non-fiction publishing”, describing it as “a frank, funny and very welcome exploration about gender and sexuality”, while Teach Secondary said “it could not only help teens become more at ease in their own skin as they work out the details of who they are, but could also change your entire school culture for the better”.
