Banning Books Is a Badge of Shame for Censors | Opinion

Many people—authors and otherwise—consider the banning of a book a badge of honor. After all, a title has to reach a certain level of notoriety to “earn” its banning, and challenging a book boosts sales, right? After all, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus wound up back on the bestseller lists after it was banned by a Tennessee school district in 2022.
This might be true for a handful of authors—especially those who are already well-known and whose books are aimed at adults—but for most children’s book authors and illustrators who have been caught up in the cynical snare of groups like Moms for Liberty, book bans are career-wrecking, psychically exhausting, and a threat to any American who values freedom and self-determination.
Book challenges have existed since the Puritan times and have ebbed and flowed through our country’s history. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was widely banned when it came out in 1852 (it still is) and the backlash to the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s led to a rise of bans during the Reagan years of the 1980s.
When I first learned my earlier titles had been challenged, for reasons that now seem quaint (vulgar language and PG-13 sex scenes) I felt a mix of accomplishment (akin to seeing one of my books in an airport bookstore) and compassion. It seemed like parents were engaging in a sort of magical thinking that by keeping their children from reading about abuse or suicide in books like Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of Part-Time Indian and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, they would protect them from such catastrophes. The logic may have been misguided, and riddled with all kinds of internalized biases, but it seemed to come from a place of care and love.
The bans that we have seen recently cropping up all over the country have nothing to do with care and love. They are specious, strategic, and deeply nefarious attempts to erase the progress of marginalized groups and to erode trust in public education.
Groups like Moms for Liberty—which sprung up in the aftermath of Covid, when parental frustration was at its zenith, and successfully channeled that anger into a so-called parental rights movement—has quickly flooded school boards with candidates who have taken over, ignoring decades-old protocols of trusted librarians, and banning books with any whiff of—well, anything that diverges from a white, cis-gendered, Christian sexually conservative prototype. It’s a wide net that catches everything from the Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers, illustrated by Marla Frazee (the book’s depiction of characters who can be read as same-sex parents makes it…pornography?) to Lisa Moore Ramée’s heartfelt and lively middle-grade novel, A Good Kind of Trouble, where a character attending a Black Lives Matter march apparently… supports terrorists.
The minute you enter a debate about these truly weird assertions, you lose, putting authors in a ridiculous bind that has allowed this movement to metastasize on both the micro level—according to the American Library Association, 4,240 books faced censorship in schools and libraries in 2023; almost half of those titles had queer and BIPOC characters—and the macro: We are now seeing a proliferation of legislation such as Idaho’s recent statewide ban on “obscene material,” defining any material that has nudity or homosexuality as obscene.
Lacking any kind of clear guidance, this could include a picture book like David Shannon’s antic No David, which has a child’s bottom, or a book like David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy, a pioneering queer young adult novel that not only let a generation of young people see themselves in books, but according to Levithan, has been a tool for helping young people come out to their parents. Libraries in Idaho are now age-restricted, which cuts off a crucial resource that disproportionately affects poorer families and limits the ability of children—and their parents—to see their complexity reflected in books. How is this a badge for anyone?
And while authors like David Shannon, David Levithan and I are well-established enough in our careers to weather the book challenges, for many authors, particularly emerging BIPOC and queer authors who have only just seen the publishing world open up, these bans are career-wrecking. For children’s book authors, the school and library market is often where most sales come from. When libraries ban books, they don’t order these authors’ books. They cancel school visits, which is a major source of income for middle-grade authors. Author Phil Bildner, who runs Author Village, a speaking bureau that books school visits, says revenue is down around 25 percent from last year. Author Ellen Oh, who is Korean, has seen her visits cut by half. Bildner, himself, who is gay, routinely scheduled up to 50 school visits a year. This year, he has one.
These cancellations kick off a negative spiral: Schools don’t order books, sales go down, publisher support subsides, and the opportunity of a career is cut short. Authors who augment book sales with speaking fees can’t make a living. Other authors may never get their books published in the first place as publishers start to acquire defensively.
More insidiously, librarians in areas where there are no bans, may not order these books or invite these authors—or, really any queer or BIPOC author, or any author writing about queer or BIPOC characters—for fear of igniting the ire and attention of the book banners. And I don’t fault them for this soft censorship: librarians, teachers and school board members have been doxxed, threatened, fired, and arrested for doing their job, a job that until recently, most Americans rightfully trusted them to do. And meanwhile, children are denied books that celebrate all the different ways there are to be a person. Where is the badge in that?
Though Banned Book Week began in 1982, when challenges were resurging, up until recently the week felt more like a celebration of the freedom to read overcoming a small but persistent minority of threats to it. But today, even though 71 percent of Americans support the freedom to read, the threats are taking hold and are ominous. It takes only five pages into the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 for calls for “imprisonment” of educators and librarians to show up. There is no badge in this. Only a threat to the fundamental freedoms of authors, readers, and Americans.
Books are something to celebrate. Banning books is something to fight against, not just during banned book week but every day.
Bestselling author Gayle Forman is on the national board of Authors Against Book Bans. At least four of her 12 books for children and young adults have been challenged or banned. Her most recent novel, Not Nothing, was published in August and has yet to be banned.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.