From The State newspaper (Columbia SC)
Friday, 20 September 2002
"Commentary," page A9
Banning Books Reinforces Ignorance
by Ed Madden
As Banned Books Week begins, I'm re-reading a novel by Bette Greene, an award-winning writer of adolescent fiction. Though not a great novel, it is moving and important. And it has been banned from some school libraries in South Carolina.
For more than 20 years, the American Library Association has sponsored Banned Books Week, observed this year on Sept. 21-28, to draw attention to censorship.
Bette Greene's The Drowning of Stephan Jones was removed from Horry County public school libraries in June, after months of public debate. Based on the murder of a gay man by three high school students in Maine, the novel explores the roots of anti-gay hatred. It was the subject of homosexuality that prompted the book's banning.
As a writer and educator, I value intellectual freedom and worry about challenges to that freedom. As an uncle, I think about age-appropriateness of books and films. But as a gay man in South Carolina, I remain concerned that when books are challenged, especially in public schools, the focus often is on sexual — especially homosexual — content.
Political and religious objections inevitably prompt book challenges in this state. Only a couple of years ago, some Columbia parents claimed the Harry Potter books promote witchcraft and asked state officials to ban them from school libraries statewide. But the most frequent challenges nationwide are those based on sexual content.
Information about homosexuality is especially at risk in public schools. Charges of "promoting homosexuality" will be used to keep all but the most condemnatory views out of the classroom. In 1995, a health educator in Union County was put on probation for showing the film "Philadelphia" to her class. She thought the film would help her students develop empathy for people suffering from AIDS or other serious illnesses. Local ministers accused her of "promoting homosexuality."
Similarly, the parent leading the campaign against Greene's novel in Horry County said the book promotes homosexuality.
Actually, what the novel promotes is human understanding. Greene calls it a "passionate plea against violence," which she wrote in response to hate crimes.
On a summer night in 1984, 23-year-old Charlie Howard was attacked by three high school kids as he walked home from a church potluck. They trapped Howard on a bridge, beating him and kicking him. Then, despite his repeated screams that he could not swim, they threw him over the bridge railing.
Howard drowned on July 7, 1984. Killed for being gay.
Disturbed by this incident, Greene conducted almost 500 interviews nationwide, trying to understand how three "good" boys could commit such a crime.
What she found, as she wrote in an essay in 1994, was that "with amazing uniformity, the young felons who had done violence to gays and lesbians" justified their crimes by citing religious and social condemnation. One typical adolescent quoted his local preacher quoting Leviticus.
Like most of Greene's fiction, the novel was written for adolescent readers — appropriate, given the age of the murderers.
Horry County parents said the novel is inappropriate for adolescents because of inappropriate language. Rereading the novel, I find very little foul language, most spoken by the young men during their attacks on gay men.
Tellingly, the loudest complaints weren't about the brutal beating and murder in the novel. Instead parents objected to the portrayal of an openly gay middle- class male couple. This, they said, romanticized and promoted homosexuality.
One parent compared the book to "a rattlesnake (that) needed to be killed right then and right there." Nice metaphor.
If demonstrating that it's wrong to harass and kill gay men is equivalent to "promoting homosexuality," then "promoting homosexuality" is just a catch- all for anything that treats gays and lesbians as human beings.
As I pull my own copy of the novel down from the shelf, I recall that I bought it a few years ago at a flea market, where it ended up after a school library dumped it. It still has the library stickers on the covers.
Dr. Madden is an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He is a member of the South Carolina Equality Coalition and a volunteer at the SC Gay and Lesbian Community Center.