Groomed Straight?!?!?!?
Banned Books Week has come and gone, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to stop worrying about people complaining about what’s on library shelves. If anything, the recent celebration of all things banned could actually boomerang, planting fresh seeds in the fallow fields of book-banners’ brains.
One of the big meta-banning themes this year has been the whole concept of “grooming.” It’s the idea that somehow, nefarious elites are using hallowed institutions like public schools and libraries to lure children into an increasingly normalized (yet apparently still deviant) acceptance of diversity. Programs and information resources that present anything but the narrowest version of white, Western, Christian, straight humanity are suspect, to be feared, and ultimately banned.
The whole grooming thing shares some parallels with the “satanic panic” of the 1980s, with a dose of QAnon fabulism thrown in for good measure. Proponents of the current frantic phase seem to fear that certain books, movies, or other materials are all it takes to set youngsters on the path to homosexuality. It made me wonder (with a heaping helping of irony) if seeing certain other books, movies, or other materials would make someone straight. I decided to do some introspection.
Let me say here that I am straight and have been as long as I can remember. I have also been a lifelong consumer of books and information. Thinking about what I’ve read and seen made me suddenly ask, “Was I groomed to be straight? Did some parent or teacher hand me a book that put me on the path to being straight? Was there another book that would have led me to become gay?” These are important questions, so I turned my mind back 50+ years to remember what I was exposed to as a kid.
The answer was startling.
I can remember five items from before I was five years old:
The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
In The Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
A Vargas pin-up from Playboy Magazine
I hope we can all agree that The Snowy Day, Where the Wild Things Are, and The Chronicles of Narnia probably don’t exert a big influence on someone’s sexuality - but those other two?!
Some have suggested that the drawings of Mickey’s penis could be the catalyst for a youngster eventually becoming gay. We’ll never know in my case because the Vargas illustration - torn from a copy of Playboy I found in a closet - probably provided a counterbalance to Mickey, and so, I’m straight, I guess?
Who knew books could exercise such power? I’ll bet if I’d seen a book about horses, I might have turned into a centaur. And Thomas the Tank Engine? I am so glad that my attraction to trains is strictly platonic. Ditto for Speed Racer - those cars? So hot, but not for me! I will say that books with words taught me to love language, so there’s that. I think the lesson here is obvious, don't you?
If you need a little help, here’s a clue: all of this is absurd! Why are we having conversations about things that aren’t real? Why are we listening to clueless bigots? When someone starts going on and on about groomer this or that or banning books or limiting access to information, ask them this simple question: what book made you straight?
For those wishing for more than juvenile reminiscences and retorts, there are inspirational stories of libraries and communities standing up for intellectual freedom and against this nonsense. One of our recent favorites comes from Wellington, Colorado, where the library trustees banned book banning earlier this month. They passed a resolution stating that the board cannot “censor, suppress, remove, monitor or place age restrictions on ideas or information in our public library.”
May others soon follow!