HomeNews UpdateWoman fights LGBTQ+ book bans by sending queer books to red states
Woman fights LGBTQ+ book bans by sending queer books to red states
July 5, 2024
In San Francisco’s Castro District, a one-woman army is fighting against book bans – with books.
In May 2023, Becka Robbins decided that the best way to fight back against the unprecedented wave of book bans was to put the banned books into the hands of the people who were denied access.
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She set up a small space behind Fabulosa Books in the Castro and started her Books Not Bans program, which sends banned books to community centers, schools and individuals across the country. The program has been successful thanks to donations from customers.
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“The book bans are terrible, an attempt at erasure,” Robbins told the Associated Press.
Robbins has so far shipped 740 books to states including Florida, Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama. Enthusiastic supporters include thank-you notes with their donations, she said.
More than 40% of all book bans in the 2022-23 school year occurred in Florida, followed by Texas and Missouri, according to free speech and anti-censorship organization PEN America.
About 86% of book bans were instigated by groups like Moms for Liberty, which provided their chapter members across the country with book lists that repeatedly singled out the same titles.
These include Maia Kobabes Gender QueerGeorge Johnson’s Not all boys are sadand Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison Very blue eyesamong others.
According to PEN America, 30% of all book bans affected titles with LGBTQ+ characters or themes, while 30% targeted books with characters of color or discussions of race and racism.
Nearly 40% of the bans called for by Moms for Liberty targeted LGBTQ+ identity, according to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.
Jason DeShazo, a drag queen known as Momma Ashley Rose, runs the LGBTQ+ community center in Lakeland, Florida, and is one of the most recent Books Not Bans honorees. He said Robbins’ books are already on shelves.
“I don’t think a person of color has to search that long to find a great book about the history that our black community has gone through,” DeShazo said. “Or that someone who is queer has to find a book that represents them.”
For Robbins, this includes queer young adult romance novels, which she believes is a rapidly growing genre in the face of Moms for Liberty and other anti-LGBTQ+ forces seeking to erase queer identity.
“The characters are like normal kids – normal people who are also queer, but who also fall in love and are happy,” Robbins said.
“Fiction teaches us how to dream,” Robbins added. “It teaches us how to connect with people who are not like us. It teaches us how to listen and empathize.”
