The Last Gay Word: The Gay Teen Book Author's Tale

Twelve years ago, I had an argument with my partner Michael (the editor of this website) about the Margaret Atwood book, A Handmaid's Tale. The novel is a grim look into a totalitarian future where fundamentalist Christian theocrats have taken control of the government, turning women back into reproductive slaves and censoring information from the public.

Michael found the book to be a chilling cautionary tale that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance -- a reminder that the wall between church and state must be inviolate, and that fascism and fanaticism can never truly be vanquished.

I thought A Handmaid's Tale was hysterical, far-left, liberal paranoia.

Theocracy? In the United States? Ha! And blatant censorship? That couldn't happen here! America has too strong a tradition of pluralism, too much of a love for freedom and open debate. And while we definitely have our Puritanistic streak, the religious extremists could never really take control, because the “reasonable” majority wouldn't let them.

I'd majored in political science in college, and I'd read de Tocqueville, so I knew this to be true.

Flash forward ten years, and into Republican-Land 2006. “Christian” extremists like Robertson, Falwell, and Dobson have full access to the president, who himself claims to be on a “mission from God”, and all three branches of government are controlled by people who openly advocate some degree of a Christian theocracy. Government secrecy and cronyism are way, way up, and government agencies and corporate news media have been harassed, bullied, or bribed into creating blatant propaganda in support of the Republican theocrats.

And don't get me started on the lies one-third of our schools now tell our nations teenagers – that “condoms don't work,” for example -- in the name of “sex education.”

In other words, Michael was right, and I was really, really, really wrong.

Censorship can happen here. In fact, it is happening here, even though you'd never know from the truly pathetic excuse for “news” piped into our homes on the cable channels.

Why bring this up now? Partly because it's Banned Books Week, a national celebration of “the freedom to read” and an effort to call attention to efforts at censorship and intellectual suppression.

But partly because I see censorship first-hand. In my day job, I write gay teen novels like Geography Club and its sequel The Order of the Poison Oak (and, in fact, Geography Club, was just voted number two on this year's Banned Books Book Sense Top Ten Picks, to coincide with Banned Books Week).

And my books, and other gay teen books written by my friends Alex Sanchez (the Rainbow Boys series), David Levithan (Boy Meets Boy, and the daring new Wide Awake), and David LaRochelle (Absolutely Positively Not), are frequently challenged and, yes, censored at libraries and schools all across America.

Oh, please! you might be thinking. Censorship is the government suppression of ideas it deems “dangerous”; just because a public library or classroom pulls your book from the shelf or reading list, that doesn't mean it's censorship! Am I saying that schools and libraries can never remove any book from its shelves? What about editorial judgment? And why shouldn't parents have some say in the books their kids are studying and reading?

But the fact is, my books and these other books are frequently among the most popular in a classroom or library. Most library and educational professionals agree they're age-appropriate.

In short, teenagers desperately want this information, and many of their parents want them to have it. But Christian conservatives – and I'm sorry to say that today's would-be book censors are almost all Christian conservatives – have taken it upon themselves to try to restrict this information. They've created a whole, interconnected network of activists who comb the country's libraries and classrooms, determined to remove or restrict any hint of anything that portrays homosexuality in an accurate – they say “positive” – light.