“The people who make these claims aren’t interested in engaging with the meaning or purpose of art; they’re only interested in excluding and erasing queer people.”
A number of prominent U.S. publishers, including the “Big 5”—Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers and Simon & Schuster—along with Sourcebooks and several best-selling young adult authors, parents, teens and a library district, filed a lawsuit last week against an Idaho bill that restricts access to books accused of inappropriate “sexual content.”
The lawsuit is the latest in an ongoing battle against right-wing book bans, which often target LGBTQ+ content under the guise of “protecting children.” It comes in response to an Idaho bill, HB 710, which became law in 2024, and stipulates that it is illegal for schools and public libraries to make “harmful” books accessible to minors.
HB 710 put libraries in an impossible situation, forcing librarians to guess which books might offend someone and remove them from the young adult section. Sherry Scheline, director of the Donnelly Public Library, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said during last week’s news conference that the law “caused a crisis in our community.” Scheline said the ruling had turned the community’s library into an “adults only” library.
Evidence of the misleading and toxic rhetoric surrounding book bans can be seen in a new press release posted by the Trump administration’s far-right agenda—”U.S. Department of Education Ends Biden’s Book Ban Hoax”—which announces its dismissal of 11 complaints against book bans and claiming to begin the process of “restoring the fundamental rights of parents to direct their children’s education.”
But book bans are no hoax.
According to a PEN report, there have been nearly six thousand instances of book bans between 2021 and 2023 in the U.S., and of these, 83 percent represent books written for young adults or younger audiences. The bans predominantly come from three far right advocacy groups—Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom and Parents’ Rights in Education—who have pushed for book bans in 81 percent of the school districts in the U.S. that have enacted restrictions.
But the truth is, most people in the country are opposed to book bans. According to PEN, 92 percent of parents, grandparents and guardians trust librarians to curate appropriate books and materials, including making recommendations for their children.
Despite the unpopularity of book bans, the U.S. is seeing new trends in the efforts to remove books from shelves. According to the American Library Association, right-wing actors are now trying to ban books at public libraries, not just school libraries. Many of the bans are specifically targeting stories by and about LGBTQ+ people and people of color. According to PEN, banned books overwhelmingly include stories with people and characters of color (44 percent) as well as LGBTQ+ characters (39 percent).
States have moved from going after school libraries to going after public ones, and from simply removing books to criminalizing the work of librarians.
Dashka Slater
The lawsuit against the Idaho book ban aims to push back against these recent trends.
Ms. spoke with two best-selling authors who joined the lawsuit against the state of Idaho—Dashka Slater, author of a number of books for young readers including The 57 Bus, and Malinda Lo, author of Last Night at the Telegraph Club, as well as seven other novels for young readers.
“The climate, overall, has gotten worse, unfortunately,” Slater said, when asked if she thinks the book banning climate has changed. “States have moved from going after school libraries to going after public ones, and from simply removing books to criminalizing the work of librarians. In Utah, students are now not allowed to even bring their personal copies of banned books onto school campuses.”
Despite this, Slater points to positive developments. “Publishers are fighting back. They have the resources and the lawyers to do so. At the same time, we know that book bans are incredibly unpopular even among conservatives. I’ve seen attempts to ban my book turned back in district after district when teachers, parents, students and librarians spoke up.”
In her public newsletter on Substack, Slater says she is “delighted to be fighting back.”
“Right now is a particularly dark time for our country—the darkest I’ve ever witnessed. We’re losing so many hard-fought rights and freedoms, and it can feel like we’re boxing with shadows, with immensely well-funded and invisible enemies, many of them unelected and unaccountable. So it’s gratifying to be able to stand up against something so clearly wrong, and to put my name down as someone who won’t sit quietly by, who still believes in the Constitution.
Malinda Lo, author of Last Night at The Telegraph Club, a National Book Award-winning coming of age story about a young queer Chinese American girl growing up in 1950s San Francisco, tracks how many times her books have been banned on her website—thus far, she’s counted 96 cases of banned or censored books across 20 states. “It’s not a badge of honor to have my creative work denigrated as obscene, especially when that work is about queer people and people of color,” she says. “It’s offensive to have my work mischaracterized this way.”
“The claim that ‘queer content’ is ‘inappropriate’ for young readers is homophobic and transphobic,” Lo adds. “The people who make these claims aren’t interested in engaging with the meaning or purpose of art; they’re only interested in excluding and erasing queer people. It’s impossible to have a good-faith discussion about appropriate books for young readers with these people.”
Students are also joining authors in pushing against bans. In 2023, middle school students walked out of the Hempfield School District in Pennsylvania to protest the district’s library policies. One student painted a dark picture of what would happen if book bans are not overturned: “The children of the future will know very little about what the real world is like.”
Last year, a major victory was scored in Florida, the state with the highest number of book banning instances in the U.S., when Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson—authors of the frequently banned And Tango Makes Three, a picture book about a pair of male penguins at a New York City zoo who incubate and raise an egg—settled a lawsuit and successfully returned 36 books that had been pulled from the shelves.
Lauren Zimmerman of Selendy Gay PLLC, the firm representing the authors, described the importance of fighting against censorship and the outcome of reversing the Florida ban. “Students will once again have access to books from well-known and highly-lauded authors representing a broad range of viewpoints and ideas.”
Let’s hope we see similar victories in the months and years to come.
