Leave the kids alone: the censorship of children’s books with LGBTIQ+ themes
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Abstract
On October 19, 2019, Paul Dorr broadcast live on Facebook a protest action in which he burned four books for children with LGBTIQ+ themes, which he had ordered from the public library in Orange City, Iowa. Some of these books are frequently featured in the annual lists of the ten most censored books in US public libraries, which include almost exclusively books for children and youth, and most contain LGBTIQ+ themes and/or characters. Thus, this article starts from an analysis of the themes and characteristics of the most censored books in the US, through lists compiled since 2001 by the American Library Association, to contextualize the issue of censorship of books for children with LGBTIQ+ themes, highlighting how they became predominant on these lists over the past few years. Starting from the classic question of the dual addressee that indelibly influences the literary subsystem of literature for children (Shavit, 2004), the characteristics that, on the one hand, show the importance of the presence of these themes in literature for children are discussed (Bartholomaeus and Riggs, 2019; Madalena and Ramos, 2021), but which, on the other hand, make it an ideological battleground (Stephens, 2018).
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