A small town library is at risk of closing after Jamestown, Michigan residents voted to defund it rather than tolerate certain LGBTQ+-themed books.
Residents voted Tuesday to block a renewal of funds tied to property taxes, Bridge Michigan reported.
The vote leaves the library with funds through the first quarter of next year. Once a reserve fund is depleted, it would be forced to close, said Larry Walton, president of the library’s board, Bridge Michigan, hurting not only readers but the community at large. Beyond the books, residents visit the library for its Wi-Fi, he said, and it houses the same room where the vote took place.
“Our libraries are places to read, places to meet, places to socialize, places to study, places to learn. I mean, they’re the heart of every community,” Deborah Mikula, executive director of the Michigan Library Association, told the Guardian. “So how can you lose that?”
“We are advocates for access,” he added, including materials that may appeal to some in the community and not to others. “We want to make sure libraries protect the right to read.”
The controversy in Jamestown began with a complaint about a memoir by a non-binary writer, but soon turned into a campaign against the Patmos library itself. After a parent complained about Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir, a graphic novel about the author’s experience as non-binary, dozens showed up at library board meetings, demanding the institution that abandoned the book. (The book, which includes depictions of sex, was in the adult section of the library.) Complaints began to be directed at other books with LGBTQ+ themes.
A library director resigned and told Bridge that she had been harassed and accused of indoctrinating children; his successor, Matt Lawrence, also left the job. Although the library put Kobabe’s book behind the counter and not on the shelves, the volumes remained available.
“We, the board, are not going to ban the books,” Walton told the Associated Press on Thursday.
A few months later, in March, an anonymous letter arrived at homes in the area. He criticized the “pornographic” memoirs and the addition of “transgender” and “gay” books to the library, according to Lawrence. “That fired a lot of people and caused them to start coming to our board meetings to complain,” he said. “The public’s concern was that it’s going to confuse children.”
The library’s refusal to submit to the demands sparked a campaign urging residents to vote against renewing the library’s funding. A group called the Jamestown Conservators handed out flyers condemning Gender Queer for showing “extremely graphic sexual illustrations of two people of the same gender,” criticizing a library director who “promotes LGBTQ ideology” and calling for the library to be “a safe and neutral place”. place for our children”. On Facebook, the group says it exists to “keep our children safe and protect their purity, as well as to keep the nuclear family intact as God designed it.”
Ultimately, residents voted 62% to 37% against a measure that would have raised property taxes by about $24 to fund the library, although they approved similar measures to fund the fire department and road works. The library was one of the few in the state to suffer such a loss, Mikula said: “Most passed with flying colors, sometimes up to 80 percent.”
The vote came as a “shock” to Lawrence, who left his job in part because of criticism from city officials of the Patmos library and U.S. libraries.
“I knew there were people who were upset about the material in the library, but I thought enough people would realize that what they’re trying to do by removing these books is against our constitution, especially the First Amendment “. he said
The vote comes as US libraries face a surge in demands to ban the books. The American Library Association identified 729 challenges to “library, school and college materials and services” last year, resulting in about 1,600 challenges or withdrawals of individual books. That was up from 273 books the previous year and represents “the highest number of attempted book bans since we started compiling these lists 20 years ago,” said ALA President Patricia Wong , in a press release.
“We’re seeing what appears to be a campaign to remove books, particularly books that deal with LGBTQIA issues and books that deal with racism,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, head of the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. in the Guardian last year. Famous books by Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel and Ibram X Kendi are among those facing the ban.
“I’m not entirely sure what caused the culture wars we’re seeing, but libraries are definitely at the forefront,” Mikula said. Indeed, as US states move to deny LGBTQ+ rights, the ALA’s “most challenged” book last year was Gender Queer.
“When you take those books off the shelf or publicly challenge them in a community, what you’re saying to any young person who identifies with that narrative is, ‘We don’t want your story here,'” Kobabe told the New York Times at may
Each library selects its own collection, Mikula noted, an intensive process that involves keeping up with what’s new, listening to what’s in demand and “weeding out” selections that are rarely borrowed.
“Our librarians are qualified. They are highly educated,” he said. “We want to make sure that the people who have been hired to do this work are trustworthy and credible, and that they make sure that the whole community is represented in their library. And that means having LGBTQ books.”
If members of the community object to the inclusion of certain books, there are formal means to request their removal, involving a review committee and a finding that the person making the appeal has actually read the book in question. But recently, he said, people have been going “to board meetings, whether it’s a library board meeting or a school board meeting and saying, ‘Here’s a list of 300 books.’ We want them all removed from your library.’ And this is not the right channel, but they are strong and their voices carry.”
