Banning Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology

Censoship is a slippery slope.

The book Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology was banned from a New Jersey public library after Beverly Marinelli complained saying it was pornography.  According to Amazon.com the book is and anthology by many gay writers:

…all of it speaks to the isolation and fear of being queer and young. A boy lies awake at night practicing to be more masculine. An intersexed gay boy comes out to his high school. A butch girl tells of years of daily bashing. Fear, though, is not the overriding emotional tone to this collection. The contributors exhibit a belief in themselves, a well-placed youthful confidence that speaks as loudly as the most poignant writing. Their determination to survive and thrive despite a homophobic society comes through loud and clear.

Read an excerpt here.

The book does contain strong content, particularly for those who are younger.  Although I am not gay I would imagine for those who are and in high school it must surely be a trying experience and depending upon your family situation, difficult to find someone with whom to discuss your concerns.  The idea behind this book, apparently, was to allow people to learn that there’s nothing wrong with the way they are.

Should the book have been banned?  The problem with censorship is that with the Internet the information will get out one way or another and real pornography may be found online easily.  It seems like every child today has a cell phone and an Internet connection, not to mention what is available on cable or satellite TV.  Also, the book would have simply sat on the shelf until someone decided to read it.  This book was not being mandated for students to read in class… if nobody wanted to read the book it would never get read.

It use to be that when Clark Gable said: “Frankly my dear I don’t give a damn” there was talk about how scandalous this was.  Nowadays even things from 15 years ago on TV like Married with Children wouldn’t even register as objectionable.  I would argue that with all the smut on the Internet a simple book with stories in it, though some are lewd, is not going to destroy society, either.

Again, this book was not compulsory reading, which I would find objectionable.

If the argument is that 14 year olds shouldn’t be reading books like this then the simple course of action would be to give it a rating, much like a film which requires the accompaniment of an adult.  This would somewhat defeat the purpose of allowing minors who think they might be gay the ability to find some answers in privacy but they are minors and this is but one of the many restrictions one faces being under 18.

I never heard of someone “turning gay” because they read something or saw something and I never heard of someone committing a crime because of those reasons, either.

Banning or censoring something also gives it more power because if the “authorities” say you can’t read/watch/listen to it then it must be good.  Had nobody said anything about this book it is likely few would have heard of it or read it.  Germany has long banned Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf (though he likely didn’t write it) and why?  The book is horribly written and, if anything, shows how foolish it was for his contemporaries to have ignored it and how foolish it is for it to be verboten today.

We live in a free market economy… if people find Mein Kampf or Revolutionary Voices (or some other book) objectionable then nobody will buy it and nobody will publish it.  I feel it is best to let the ideas out there and  allow them to be discussed.  It’s not like banning Revolutionary Voices will prevent people from “turning gay” or censoring Mein Kampf will prevent anybody from being anti-Semitic.  On the contrary, when I read Mein Kampf in high school I was totally disgusted by the blatant plan Hitler laid out and wondered why nobody back then did anything about it.

Who knows what people would think after reading Revolutionary Voices… perhaps grossed out, perhaps sympathetic towards people struggling with their sexuality… perhaps they won’t care.

But if the material isn’t readily available then the discussion can’t take place and knowledge cannot be advanced.

Lastly, did you know that for much of its history, if you were Catholic you were forbidden to own a copy of the Holy Bible?

Pope Innocent III stated in 1199:

… to be reproved are those who translate into French the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the psalter, etc. They are moved by a certain love of Scripture in order to explain them clandestinely and to preach them to one another. The mysteries of the faith are not to explained rashly to anyone. Usually in fact, they cannot be understood by everyone but only by those who are qualified to understand them with informed intelligence. The depth of the divine Scriptures is such that not only the illiterate and uninitiated have difficulty understanding them, but also the educated and the gifted (Denzinger-Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum 770-771)

I am not attempting to compare Revolutionary Voices to the Catholic Bible, however but keep in mind that the restriction of knowledge serves no real positive purpose.