Continuing my posts in honor of Banned Books Week. This is a slightly updated version of a piece I wrote for Bay Windows during last year’s Banned Books Week. If you haven’t yet read it, try to guess which children’s book featuring rabbits was challenged in 1959 for promoting (gasp!) interracial marriage. And come back […]
The guinea pigs have had the spotlight this year, as picture book Uncle Bobby’s Wedding has faced several attempted challenges from library patrons who wanted to remove or reshelve it. The penguins of And Tango Makes Three are not out of danger yet, however, as a school board meeting in Ankeny, Iowa made clear. Cindy
(Here’s a longer piece on Banned Books Week I wrote for Bay Windows, October 1, 2008. Seemed a good way to end the week.) This week marks the 27th annual Banned Books Week, the American Library Association’s celebration of the freedom to read. LGBT-inclusive children’s books have long been on the ALA’s list of works
Helen and I celebrate a Banned Books Week full of fur and feathers. We discuss several LGBT-inclusive children’s books as well as an earlier work that was banned for supposedly promoting interracial marriage. We also point out the opportunity parents are missing by avoiding difficult topics with their children, and explain how we are helping
It’s Banned Books Week once again, the American Library Association’s annual celebration of the freedom to read. Each year, the ALA tracks the books that have received an official challenge, “a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.” Judith F. Krug, director of
Because the financial bailout isn’t the only thing happening this week: Ten-year-old Kira Findling of Sebastopol, California, wrote “Please Let My Moms Be Married,” a moving plea to vote no on Prop. 8, for the Press Democrat newspaper. A new report by the nonpartisan Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York concludes that gay
[Update: Sunday, 9/14, 11:30 a.m. Eastern: Michael Willhoite, author of Daddy’s Roommate (discussed below), has responded in the Huffington Post to Palin’s actions.] I’ve been quiet so far on the issue of Sarah Palin and the possibility that she tried to censor books in the Wasilla, Alaska Public Library. As far as I can tell,
Maurice Sendak, author of beloved children’s classics such as Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, has just come out. He revealed this in an interview with the New York Times in honor of his 80th birthday, which will be celebrated Monday by a benefit in Manhattan. Sendak has kept his sexuality
A few weeks ago I reported on the first challenge to Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, a children’s book featuring two gay guinea pigs who marry. Today, library director James LaRue, who wrote a sensitive, balanced response to the initial challenge, reports that a second patron has challenged the book and asked for its removal from the
Sometimes, I hate being right. It wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to foresee that the new storybook Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, by Sarah Brannen, would be a target for the right. I didn’t imagine they’d quote me while doing so, however. The conservative publication Town Hall just published the article “Librarians Against Censorship,” by Brent
