Taylor Lorenz somehow talked Chaya Raichik into sitting down for an hour's interview, during which she acted like David Frost, and Raichik acted like being a Valley Girl was still a thing. It wasn't an interview, it was a mortification. Lorenz just embalmed her. She was professional, she was efficient, and she was merciless.
Still, I watched the whole thing going, "And another thing! And another!" For every opportunity Lorenz took, there were three more openings the size of semi trucks to drive through and run Chaya Raichik’s ideas over again.
So here are some more things to say to anyone in your life who thinks it would have been cool to be the gas-can boy at the Nazi bonfire in front of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.
Then as now, the people who want to ban books, burn them, muzzle or threaten or fire or kill teachers and professors and journalists, and the people who hate queers and women and people of color are the same people. The books and teachers they want to burn are the ones that say it's okay to be your authentic, human, sexual self. Later, they will be very clear about their agenda, but for right now, they pretend to care about the sexual abuse of children. In service to that pretense, they like to claim that school librarians in this fair(ly puritanical) country of ours are sharing pornography with little kids. For example, Raichik tried to distract Lorenz from a discussion of sex ed in schools by showing her this graphic from the book Gender Queer, by Maia Kobabe. It got a starred review in the School Library Journal, so school librarians have sometimes purchased it for their shelves.
School Library Journal or not, this book is one of the most banned books in America. Raichik trotted out this picture as if it was irrefutably inappropriate to show a picture like this to middle schoolers. She kept calling it porn. “Librarians shouldn't be giving our children pornography!” is a thing book banners love to say, because it makes people who agree with the book banners hyperventilate with outrage and those who disagree find it hard to dispute.
But here's the thing. There isn't a public school library anywhere in America that has pornography on its shelves. Gender Queer isn't pornography. The above image isn't pornography. Pornography is explicit erotic material designed to cause sexual arousal. Raichik kept saying the image depicted gay oral sex porn, which for a gender essentialist like herself ought to be obviously, self-evidently false. The protagonist in Gender Queer is assigned female at birth. That's not a penis in anyone's mouth up there, it's a phallic-shaped hunk of rubber. Literally the whole point of this comic is that no sexual contact and no arousal is actually happening: “This was the visual I'd been picturing, but I can't feel anything.” That's not porn: No one in history has ever jerked off to “I can't feel anything.”
The book banners know perfectly good goddamn well that neither that book nor any other in American public school libraries is pornography. And you can tell them so. They know that if you pull over at a truckstop shop with a sign that says XXX Adults Only, you’re not going to find Gender Queer or Alison Bechdel comic books or Judy Blume novels from the 70s. Imagine going out to buy porn and all you can get is earnest YA novels with Kirkus starred reviews. Friends, the truckers would be furious. The police would be called.
They know. The book banners know that there’s oral sex in the Taming of the Shrew and plenty of sexytimes to clutch pearls about in the Song of Solomon, but the definitional creep of calling literary coming-of-age stories where the protagonist has all the normal awkward relational experiences involved in coming of age “porn” suits them. It forces you onto the defensive. Don't play. Whip out your bible and your Shakespeare and read the dirty bits back at them to filth. Don't let them pretend they actually think you can get a dusty copy of Playboy out of the card catalog at Happy Valley Elementary School.
Because here's the thing. None of those supposedly concerned parents even cares whether their children have access to porn in public school. They don't actually give two shits about protecting children from being exposed to porn. And you can tell them that, too.
Because every single kid in public school has a cell phone or a friend that has a cell phone, so even though there is zero, zilch, nada pornography on any damn public school library shelf anywhere in America, middle school boys can and do sneak behind the stacks and pull up Pornhub and watch “hot stepbrother fucks milf and creams in her hot pussy” until fifth period. If these parents actually cared about access to porn, they would be screen-free homeschooling, not sending their kids to public school and waving their smelling salts at school board meetings.
The problem they have with Gender Queer and books like it is precisely that they are not porn, but are sensitive, relatable, growing up stories that make queer kids feel less alone. They hate the School Library Journal pointing that out. What the book banners can't stand is the idea that their queer children might come across a caring authority in their lives who validates their feelings and experiences and says the obvious truth that they’re not shameful or pornographic, but normal and human. So you tell them: Don’t clutch your pearls and pretend you care about what books teachers choose to educate kids in a school library. You just don’t. It’s bad faith to pretend that you do.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Lorenz's interview is her reaction to Raichik's insistence that showing youth images of sex is “porn.” Lorenz reminds Raichik that she attended public schools in the 1990s, during the AIDS crisis. Those of us who came of age during the 80s and 90s absolutely received frank discussions about condoms, complete with pictures of them in use. It's hard to explain to children the risks of sexually transmitted disease if they can't picture sex. But Raichik was educated in Orthodox Jewish girls’ schools. She really didn't receive this kind of information in school growing up. She tells Lorenz that she is against all sex education in schools. Which leads me to the last question I wished Lorenz had asked, the question you can ask your book banner friends:
What do you think developmentally normal sexual development looks like? How should young people first encounter and learn about sex?
We know that comprehensive sex education (that is, the kind with pictures, the kind that promotes safer sex and pregnancy prevention) works, that is, increases safer sex behaviors and delays pregnancy, in adolescents in the U.S.
And back before cell phones were invented, the truth is, kids did use the public library to explore erotic arousal. Raise your hand if you're a middle-aged person who went to a library and huddled with your sixth-grade friends around three specific pages of Judy Blume's grown-up novel Forever, giggling the whole time. The Dykes to Watch Out For comics had a few strips where Lois, lesbian lothario, gets naked except for the dildo harness with a girlfriend. When my kid was about 12, somehow my DTWOF collections kind of disappeared from my bookcases for awhile. I don't know where they went, I didn't ask a lot of questions, but I always thought those black-and-white hand-drawn comic strips, with their consensual encounters between equal people who cared about each other and each other's feelings and experiences more than about what it might have looked like on a screen, were probably the best introduction my straight cismale kid could have to his own sexuality and what he might like from a lover. When I was that age, my friend and I sneaked looks at her dad's collection of Hustler, and the images there — misogynistic, sexist, often non-consensual and rich with humiliation and shame — altered my sexuality in ways I wouldn't have chosen, for many years.
How do the book banners want their children to learn about sex, their bodies, about sexuality and identity, about love? The feeling you get is that they think all sexuality is disgusting, that children shouldn't learn about it at all, ever. Raichik says she wants to “eradicate gender” because it “doesn't exist,” but Lorenz points out the absurdity: Then what? What is Raichik picturing? We all dress in skirts and wigs and sleep in twin beds unless forced to engage in heterosexual intercourse to make a baby? It's not just anti-queer, it's anti-love, anti-sex, anti-joy to an unrealistic degree. But it's also under-specified and under-articulated. So make them articulate it: What does a healthy emergence into sexual maturity look like? How do we want kids to learn about their bodies, about babies, about love? What do we want kids to learn given that they and their sexualities are not all the same? How do we want them to feel about their differences?
I’d love to hear your answers, too, so feel free to sound off in the comments. And, as always, like, subscribe, and share to keep this content coming.