{"id":4189,"date":"2011-11-11T23:36:42","date_gmt":"2011-11-12T07:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janaremy.com\/?p=4189"},"modified":"2011-11-11T23:36:42","modified_gmt":"2011-11-12T07:36:42","slug":"them-gay-books-a-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.janaremy.com\/pilgrimsteps\/2011\/11\/11\/them-gay-books-a-response\/","title":{"rendered":"Them “gay” books: a response"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>My daughter’s photo accompanied a BlogHer post<\/a> this week, that same image of our old living room bookshelves that the\u00a0 New Yorker online<\/a> featured awhile back.\u00a0 As I read the BlogHer post and looked at the photo, I suppose it was really the first time I thought about our bookshelves as “gay.”\u00a0 I mean, these shelves were in the living room of a heterosexual married couple with two children.\u00a0 Suburban, middle-class normal, not-gay.\u00a0 Kind of.*<\/p>\n

The author of the post used the photo of our living room to illustrate her discussion of why she doesn’t encourage (or allow?\u00a0 it’s a bit unclear) her child to read “gay” books because she doesn’t want her to be “exposed to alternative lifestyles,” especially books that might depict intimate interactions between same-sex couples.<\/p>\n

I grew up in a home with “traditional” values where I was often told not to read certain books because they had ‘inappropriate’ sexual content.\u00a0 True confession: whenever I was told not to read something, I went right out and got my hands on a copy of that book and read it to try to figure out why it was forbidden. Perhaps this was because I found the world that I was growing up in to be awfully confusing.\u00a0 My family belonged to the LDS church and we lived in the Bible Belt–there were so many arbitrary rules and restrictions in my home and in my Christian friends’ homes that it was hard to make sense of it all.\u00a0 Books allowed me to either escape my own world, or to help me understand it better.\u00a0 The school librarian was a close friend and she would let me read books on my lunch hour instead of going out to the playground with the other kids.\u00a0 Sure, I read a lot of stuff that I didn’t understand–much of it about sex, which was a complete mystery to me having had to piece together a bit of schoolbus crudeness with some rudimentary biology lessons and nothing of that connecting well at all to the romantic scenes that played out on the pages of the novels that I read.\u00a0 For example, I remember reading a scene in one of those ‘forbidden’ books where a girl and a boy started kissing at a party, and it mentioned him putting his tongue in her mouth.\u00a0 I wondered about that a lot–I’d never seen anyone kiss like that and it sounded pretty gross.\u00a0 But the girl in the book liked it.\u00a0 Liked it so much that she then let him put his hands inside of her clothes.\u00a0 Again, confusing.\u00a0 I wondered why she let him do that.\u00a0 Why it felt good to her.\u00a0 And more than anything, why that was so scandalous that I shouldn’t be reading about it.\u00a0 I probably thought a lot more about that scene (and others like it) than I would have otherwise–simply because I knew I wasn’t supposed be reading it.<\/p>\n

So because the whole censorship thing didn’t work all that well on me, I decided that when my own kids started reading, I simply wouldn’t censor them.\u00a0 Ever.\u00a0 I went to the library with them and we talked a lot about the books they chose.\u00a0 And on the shelves in our living room were books with explicit sexual content right next to books written by Mormon General Authorities (ok, truth: I did that on purpose sometimes–BoydK could really benefit from some time next to Nabokov, IMO).\u00a0 There was always a mix of all kinds of stuff–nothing forbidden.\u00a0 Occasionally I’d find my kids reading something that I thought warranted a conversation that went something like:<\/p>\n

“I saw you were reading Such and Such<\/em>.\u00a0 What did you think about that?\u00a0 Were there any parts that you found confusing or that you’d like to talk about?”<\/p>\n

Interestingly, the only books that I remember causing me some alarm as my daughter read them, was the Twilight series.\u00a0 I didn’t forbid it, but instead I did read along with her and then had a conversation about why it’s not okay for a dating partner to stalk you in your bedroom or to treat you violently during a sexual encounter.<\/em><\/p>\n

Was it “gay” of me to let my teenagers read anything that they wanted off of our rainbow-colored family bookshelves?\u00a0 I don’t think so.\u00a0 Are my teenagers “gay” now because they read books with gay characters?\u00a0 Well, they’re no more or less gay than they were before, I’d say.\u00a0 Just like they’re no more or less heterosexual than they were before they read books with heterosexual characters.\u00a0 But I’m also not invested in any particular outcome for my kids’ sexual expression.\u00a0 They can be gay or not-gay or gay-ish or whatever suits their desires.\u00a0 I suspect that they might approach their future relationships a bit like they have their reading material–pulling various items off the shelf and reading for awhile to see if it’s compelling enough to continue.\u00a0 Maybe realizing that one is not right and putting it back and reaching for another.\u00a0 Sometimes choosing a favorite genre and sometimes something in a new vein.<\/p>\n

But the bookshelf analogy breaks down pretty quickly when you compare texts to people–humans can’t be as easily ‘read’ or ‘shelved’ as books can.\u00a0 And maybe that’s the most important lesson that I want my kids to learn from those rainbow shelves: there’s a big colorful world out there and as they move out on their own they’ll come across all kinds of ‘content’ that challenges and provokes their point of view.\u00a0 It’ll soon be their job to filter through all of that and choose the path that makes the most sense for their inclinations and passions.\u00a0 And just like I can’t control the use of Creative-Commons-licensed photos of my daughter like the one above, I also can’t control my kids’ future choices.\u00a0 Instead, I simply have to trust that they’ll be wise about the decisions that lie ahead as they select their relationships.<\/p>\n

*Maybe we were gay–we did like rainbows and a bit of cross-dressing and were strongly engaged in the fight against Prop 8.<\/em>\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My daughter’s photo accompanied a BlogHer post this week, that same image of our old living room bookshelves that the\u00a0 New Yorker online featured awhile back.\u00a0 As I read the BlogHer post and looked at the photo, I suppose it was really the first time I thought about our bookshelves as “gay.”\u00a0 I mean, these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4190,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-family"],"yoast_head":"\nThem "gay" books: a response - PilgrimSteps<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.janaremy.com\/pilgrimsteps\/2011\/11\/11\/them-gay-books-a-response\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Them "gay" books: a response - 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