Administrators at a Tennessee high school recently ordered the removal of a student’s LGBTQ-themed artwork from a classroom display case after other students complained about it. Principal Bobby Wines of Volunteer High School in Church Hill cited the complaints as…
Tag: lgbt
Round Rock Schools Issue Statement on Author Disinvitation
The school district in Round Rock, Texas has issued an evasive response to author Phil Bildner’s allegation that his disinvitation from eight schools he had been slated to visit there this fall was due to his previous recommendation that students…
Lesbian Flirtation Edited Out of Steven Universe in Sweden
Over 1,300 Swedish fans of the Cartoon Network show Steven Universe have signed a petition objecting to dialogue changes in the Swedish-language version of a recent episode that effaced a same-sex flirtation between the characters Ruby and Sapphire. The network acknowledges…
LGBT Comics Publisher Protests Apple Censorship
Zan Christensen, the founder of LGBT comics publisher Northwest Press, is no stranger to corporate censorship of the books he submits to digital publishing platforms. But after Apple’s iBookstore rejected all three of Northwest’s most recent offerings due “prohibited explicit…
Texas School District Cancels Author’s Visit After Transgender Book Recommendation
The Round Rock Independent School District in Texas has uninvited author Phil Bildner from all eight schools he was scheduled to visit there this fall, apparently because he recommended a book featuring a transgender protagonist when he visited the district…
The Advocate Lists 21 LGBT Picture Books Every Child Should Read
From schools and libraries in the United States to the countries of Italy and Singapore, LGBT children’s books are a frequent target of challenges and bans. The Advocate has pulled together a list of LGBT picture books that every child should…
Wasilla Library Challenge Highlights Importance of Age-Appropriate Shelving
Back in September, a 10-year-old boy in Wasilla, Alaska pulled a young adult book called This Book is Gay off a shelf in the juvenile nonfiction section of the local public library. His mother, believing the book “too sexually explicit…
Public Libraries Are for Everyone: A Response to the Illinois Family Institute
Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute thinks that librarians who celebrate Banned Books Week are hypocrites. In an article on the organization’s website last week, she argued that the real banned books are not the oft-targeted ones like And…
The Sims Prove That LGBT Characters Are Family-Friendly
For a long time, the common wisdom among publishers, movie studios, and other gatekeepers of content has held that LGBT characters are verboten in mainstream all-ages material. LGBT content is a frequent target of censors, and as we saw in…
Why Is LGBT Romance “Too Adult” For All-Ages Comics?
There is a common refrain that we often hear when children’s books with age-appropriate LGBT themes are challenged in schools and libraries. While there are still plenty of detractors, who bluntly declare same-sex relationships to be “unnatural,” these days there…