Many of the titles that have been challenged or banned recently are by or about Black and LGBTQ people, both groups said.
#GAY MEN MAKING OUT NAKED TUMBLR FREE#
And in 2021, when book banning efforts soared, “Gender Queer” became the most challenged book in the United States, according to the American Library Association and free speech organization PEN.
The debate, raging in school board meetings and town halls, is dividing communities around the country and pushing libraries to the front lines of a simmering culture war. Suddenly, Kobabe was at the center of a nationwide battle over which books belong in schools - and who gets to make that decision.
Republican officials in North and South Carolina, Texas and Virginia called for the book’s removal, sometimes labeling it “pornographic.” Dozens of schools pulled it from library shelves. Then, last year, the book’s frank grappling with gender identity and sexuality began generating headlines around the country. The print run was small - 5,000 copies - and Kobabe worried that the book wouldn’t find much readership. Kobabe expanded the material into a graphic memoir, “Gender Queer,” which was released in 2019 by a comic book and graphic novel publisher. “People started responding with things like, ‘I had no idea anyone else felt this way I didn’t even know that there were words for this’,” Kobabe said. So Kobabe, an illustrator who still lives in the Bay Area, started drawing black-and-white comics about wrestling with gender identity and posting them on Instagram.