My daughter’s photo accompanied a BlogHer post this week, that same image of our old living room bookshelves that the New Yorker online featured awhile back. 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.” I mean, these shelves were in the living room of a heterosexual married couple with two children. Suburban, middle-class normal, not-gay. Kind of.*
The author of the post used the photo of our living room to illustrate her discussion of why she doesn’t encourage (or allow? 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.
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. 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. 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. Books allowed me to either escape my own world, or to help me understand it better. 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. 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. 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. I wondered about that a lot–I’d never seen anyone kiss like that and it sounded pretty gross. But the girl in the book liked it. Liked it so much that she then let him put his hands inside of her clothes. Again, confusing. I wondered why she let him do that. Why it felt good to her. And more than anything, why that was so scandalous that I shouldn’t be reading about it. 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.
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. Ever. I went to the library with them and we talked a lot about the books they chose. 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). There was always a mix of all kinds of stuff–nothing forbidden. Occasionally I’d find my kids reading something that I thought warranted a conversation that went something like:
“I saw you were reading Such and Such. What did you think about that? Were there any parts that you found confusing or that you’d like to talk about?”
Interestingly, the only books that I remember causing me some alarm as my daughter read them, was the Twilight series. 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.
Was it “gay” of me to let my teenagers read anything that they wanted off of our rainbow-colored family bookshelves? I don’t think so. Are my teenagers “gay” now because they read books with gay characters? Well, they’re no more or less gay than they were before, I’d say. Just like they’re no more or less heterosexual than they were before they read books with heterosexual characters. But I’m also not invested in any particular outcome for my kids’ sexual expression. They can be gay or not-gay or gay-ish or whatever suits their desires. 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. Maybe realizing that one is not right and putting it back and reaching for another. Sometimes choosing a favorite genre and sometimes something in a new vein.
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. 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. 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. 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. Instead, I simply have to trust that they’ll be wise about the decisions that lie ahead as they select their relationships.
*Maybe we were gay–we did like rainbows and a bit of cross-dressing and were strongly engaged in the fight against Prop 8. :)
7 comments
Jana, can I just say how much I love you? In a not-gay (or possibly gaiy-ish) way? Brilliant response. Just brilliant.
The thought of limiting what my daughter reads is pretty foreign to me. Currently, the house copy of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves’ is in her room, since she had some questions that I thought it best she read about before we discuss.
Melissa:
Thanks for the gay-ish love! :) It’s nice to know that we’re both doing something right with our daughters–it’s a tough world that they’re facing and they need mothers who’ve got their back…
Unfortunately, there is some fiction in this blogpost. Jana was never censored in her reading at all, but was encouraged to read any and all books. I’m sorry that to make this point that she had to represent her upbringing as something than it really was.
Mom:
First of all, I’m quite flattered that you took the time to read this post and make a comment. I often wonder what you think about things, and have often hoped that you would start a blog yourself…
I think it’s quite possible that my memory of my childhood experiences differs from yours. Does that make it fiction? I don’t think so.
As a historian I often come across moments in oral histories where informants tell a story in such a way that I know they have veered from a ‘true’ accounting of events. Does that mean that I discount the informant’s story as a lie or as a fiction? No, not at all. Memory is a tricky thing, and perhaps the memory of an experience can give insights that a factual re-telling of it cannot.
In this case, I do have some very specific memories of being told at home not to read certain books. It was not my intention to misrepresent my childhood, but to tell it as I remember it. If, in fact, that’s not the case and those memories are not based in actual happenings, I wonder why it is that I remember them so clearly? And does that say something significant about the tensions that I felt between my family experience, the strictures of my LDS community, and the desires that I had to learn more about the world? I’ll have to think some more about this–perhaps it will make good fodder for a future blogpost :)
Jana, you write so beautifully, but, more than that, I like your thoughtful, intelligent, autonomy-supportive approach to parenting. Hurrah for literature that represents the full spectrum of human experience! My Mormon mother gently suggested that some books might be inappropriate for our age, but my sister and I were such fast readers that by the time we were 13 and 14 we were saying things such as, “I don’t think we should let Mom see that one; there are some inappropriate parts.”
Hi Jana,
Thank you for reading my post on BlogHer.
My blog post had nothing to do with censoring gay books; in fact I encourage my daughter to read all books. I was writing about MY thoughts on gays and lesbians and how I deal with my feelings.
Your picture was selected by BlogHer I guess because of the rainbow colors. It is a beautiful picture, but was not something I selected.
-r
I just love this post! So thoughtful. I’ll be keeping it in mind as we continue to navigate the terrain of what we consider “age-appropriate.” We’ve put no restrictions on reading other than to put down Harry Potter books for a year or so as of Azkaban, because the dementors were too scary for our little one at that age.
I remember my dad once throwing away a book I’d picked up at a garage sale. It was a singular event that made quite an impression on me. I found it in the trash and asked about it, and he said he found the content very disturbing for a kid my age. I wish he’d talked with me about it first, but he was up front when I asked, and I didn’t question it because it was so unusual that I trusted him on it, and I still do. It probably helped that I hadn’t thought much of the book anyway. The book was about drug use and pregnancy among teeneagers, and I was probably about 11, by the way.
Otherwise I was much encouraged to look to books to explore all kinds of things. I was encouraged to look to art as well: my mother encouraged us on more than one occasion to “take a good look!” and routine, I am sure quite intentionally, took us through the classical sculpture sections of museums so we could get a good look at male anatomy.