(Photo by Connor Barry)
Debut author Jillian Abby, who published her memoir “Perfectly Queer” in 2023, was excited to share her publishing journey with her son’s classmates at a Hillsborough County middle school during November’s Great American Teach-In last year.
“I wanted to speak about my fifth-grade dream to be an author and how I made that dream come true,” the Tampa-based writer says.
Aware of how book bans and challenges have ramped up in Florida schools and across the United States in recent years, as well as the Sunshine State’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” law, which limits how gender and sexuality can be discussed in public school classrooms, Abby decided to include the title of her book on her application to speak to her son’s class.
“As a courtesy to the school,” she explains, “only because you know how people are about the ‘gay agenda’ or having some nefarious plan to sneak LGBTQ+ content into schools. I wanted to be very forthright.”
The teacher’s response expressed excitement about having an author in the classroom but she was also very clear: Abby couldn’t share the title of her book during her presentation. She couldn’t even share the book’s topic, which follows her journey of self-discovery as she comes out as a lesbian later in life.
“The message back from the teacher was, ‘I’m excited you volunteered. I can’t wait to have you here, but because of state laws, we have to be careful about what is said. We’re kindly requesting you not say the title or what it’s about, and if students do ask what it’s about, you should just say it’s about inclusion,’” she says.
“The book isn’t about inclusion. It’s actually the opposite of that and my fear of coming out for being excluded in so many spaces and I think we’re seeing this still because of these laws,” Abby continues. “The title of my book is not against the law. Saying the word ‘queer’ is not against Florida law … My son has heard ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ used negatively in school and I thought it was important that kids hear it in a neutral light — not even a positive light, a neutral light.”
She mulled it over and decided to make the appearance in her son’s classroom despite this, promising to follow the rules laid out by his teacher.
“Part of me wanted to say, ‘Fine, go find another volunteer,’ but by doing that, I would have robbed the class of the opportunity to meet, know and love a queer person and to know we exist,” she says.
At the end of her session, Abby asked the students if anyone had questions.
One girl’s hand quickly went up and she asked the author, “Can we be friends?”
“So, I asked the class, ‘Does anybody else want to be friends?’ Every hand in the class went up. I made them all do the chicken dance with me because if we were going to be friends, we had to be weird together,” Abby recalls. “Maybe [LGBTQ+ people] can’t show up as loudly or as openly as we want to, but we can still always show up, which is scary these days.”
Times have changed in the schools in just a few years, retired Hillsborough County elementary school teacher and children’s author Rob Sanders says.
When he was still in the classroom, the writer had a tradition: he’d read his latest book to his students on the day of its release.
When his book “Pride,” a picture book about Harvey Milk and the origins of the rainbow Pride flag, came out in 2018, he let his school administrators know about his plan to read it to his class.
“It was different from any book I’d written before, so I asked some people higher up,” Sanders says. “They said, ‘Why don’t you just inform the parents that you’re going to read it, but not in a big dramatic way?’”
The reading was postponed three times after “one parent raised a ruckus,” which resulted in a meeting with district officials — including a deputy superintendent, and his union representative.
“That deputy superintendent said, ‘Wait, a second. Not only does she not want her child to read the book, she doesn’t want any child to read the book? Oh no, that can’t be. A parent can make a decision for their child, but they can’t make a decision for all students,’” Sanders says. “I took great comfort in that. Now, look how things have changed.”
“Pride” was tied for the No. 1 most-banned picture book in the U.S. for the 2021-22 school year, alongside “I Am Jazz” and “And Tango Makes Three.”
The 2022-23 school year saw an escalation of book bans and censorship in classrooms and school libraries, PEN America reports. There were 1,477 instances of book bans affecting 874 unique titles.
These book bans overwhelmingly targeted stories by and about LGBTQ+ people and people of color. During the first half of the school year, over a six-month period, 30% of the titles banned were about race or racism or featured characters of color. Another 26% of those titles featured LGBTQ+ characters and themes.
Florida led the charge with more than 1,000 challenges to books, resulting in more than 300 unique titles pulled from shelves across the state’s 67 school districts.
This flurry of challenges — most initiated by the self-referred “parental rights” group Moms for Liberty — was set into motion by the 2022 passage of House Bill 1467, which requires districts to be transparent about the selection of its instructional materials. Under this law, all school books must be reviewed by a certified media specialist before being allowed in classrooms and school media centers.
The state’s systemic book banning has only been bolstered since then by other laws, including Florida’s passage of Florida House Bill 1069, which prohibits sexual content and mentions of gender, pronouns and reproductive health in school library materials.
The law, which went into effect last July 1, further built on the environment of fear faced by educators, who could be handed steep fines or jail time if they violate these or other new laws.
Meanwhile, book banning continues across the state. In the Florida Panhandle, the Escambia County Public School District removed at least 1,600 books — including dictionaries and “The Guinness Book of World Records” — from its shelves in January to review whether they comply with state law.
On the state’s East Coast, after being pressed by the Moms for Liberty, the School District of Indian River County recently had shorts drawn onto the bare bottom of the main character of “In the Night Kitchen,” a picture book by celebrated author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, best known for his 1963 book “Where the Wild Things Are.” This title has also been historically banned for its depiction of witchcraft and supernatural themes. “In the Night Kitchen,” published in 1970, was named a Caldecott Honor Book.
Sanders isn’t shocked by the book-banning movement.
“Knowing who runs our state, I’m not surprised because they’re making these culture wars,” he says.
“They’re creating culture wars so people will be scared. It’s the agenda to make people frightened to make an ‘us and them’ kind of state and country, rather than a country or state where we appreciate one another. As an educator, I thought we were making progress. Progress means taking steps forward instead of trying to turn the blocks back.”
Bookstores across Central Florida and Tampa Bay are also responding, a testament to how they’ve always been integral to the communities they serve. These spaces offer so much more than simply selling the written word to shoppers by creating a space to connect people and ideas.
“My goal was to be a place of civilized discourse, to be a welcoming space for all kinds of ideas, because it’s about education and being a fun place to work and a great place to come into, a welcoming place with happy people,” Alsace Walentine, co-owner of St. Petersburg’s Tombolo Books says.
The storefront opened in 2019 and “is committed to carrying books by emerging and marginalized voices, books in translation, and books from small independent presses; as well as classics and outstanding popular titles,” its website reads. Walentine owns it with her partner Candice Anderson.
With so many books pulled from school shelves, Florida booksellers are stepping up and providing access to these challenged titles, taking on an even more vital role in the Sunshine State.
While Walentine, who has long been concerned about book banning and censorship, doesn’t automatically equate bookselling with activism, it’s inadvertently happening in the current political climate.
“Personally, I see my job and my pursuit in life to do something that matters, not to just make a whole lot of money; that’s not why I have this job,” she explains. “In context, you could compare my work to someone else’s and say it’s more activist than [other jobs] but I’m not here to be an activist. That’s not the main point; but in the context that we’re currently in, how can one not be? I’m not looking for a conflict; I’m looking to sell books and the conflict comes to us.”
Joan Hepsworth, owner of The Paperback Exchange in Port Richey, has seen a resurgence of indie bookstores since the COVID-19 pandemic and it’s driven, at least somewhat, by public school book bans.
“It’s kind of making my job easy because I sell books and whenever you ban something, some people go above and beyond and seek it out,” she says. “Because so many people are seeking them out, so many bookstores are successful. And I would definitely say there are more diverse types of people coming in and looking for books, all kinds of titles, including banned books.”
The state has seen a flurry of new bookstores popping up or planning to open their doors in a direct response to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration and censorship in schools. Author Lauren Groff is launching The Lynx, specializing in titles by Florida authors and banned books, later this year in downtown Gainesville.
“I love bookstores because I think they, and libraries, are at the forefront of democracy in some very real ways,” she recently told the LA Times.
Meanwhile, Tallahassee’s LGBTQ+ and feminist Common Ground Books opened in Aug. 2022. Shelf Indulgence, which has a brick-and-mortar location in Sarasota, bought a banned book bus to bring to community events last year. Rohi’s Bakery, with a focus on ensuring historically marginalized communities feel seen and heard, opened in West Palm Beach in 2021.
In Kissimmee, queer-owned White Rose Books opened in November as a direct challenge to school book banning in the state and as a nod to a youth resistance group of the same name in 1940s Germany.
“With book bans in Florida rising at an unprecedented number, we are honored to borrow this name for our store and carry books that have been banned in school districts throughout the state,” a statement on its website reads.
Erin Decker, a librarian for Osceola County Schools until the day the shop launched, had long planned to own a bookstore later in life.
“Maybe in my 50s,” she says. “That was my long-term plan. I’m 32 now and I saw everything happening in the schools and decided now was the time. It’s definitely a response to what’s going on. I’m really tired of politicians and Moms for Liberty telling us how to do our jobs and taking away the rights of students and making libraries not feel safe for everyone.”
When she and her business partner Tania Galinanes, also a former school librarian, started talking about potential names for the shop, they briefly considered calling it the Banned Books Bookstore.
“But I thought that was a little on the nose; I thought we needed something a little more subtle,” Decker notes. That’s when she recalled the student-led efforts against censorship in Nazi Germany.
“I thought, let’s come up with another time in history when people were going against what was happening in censorship. I was looking into Nazi book burnings, the whole movement of Nazis going into bookstores and libraries and censoring people,” she says. “That’s when I came across the White Rose movement, which I had read about before.
“These students would print fliers about what the Nazis were doing at a time when newspapers were censored and no one was allowed to print the truth,” she continues. “They’d stick them under doors and in mailboxes and deliver them in the dead of night.”
The founders were caught and executed by the Nazi party in 1944, but Decker still notes “it’s such an inspiring story, this act of resistance that was happening because of the rights of free speech and press and print being taken away. It’s hard not to think about what’s happening here in Florida today.”
While the shop sells a range of titles, there’s a large banned books section that focuses on titles removed from Florida schools, as well as books representing LGBTQ+ and minority voices.
In Tampa, Councilwoman Gwendolyn Henderson, who also teaches entrepreneurship for Hillsborough County Public Schools, launched a bookstore dedicated to Black voices at the end of last year.
She says that Black English Bookstore, based in Tampa Heights, was needed in the community.
“There was a need and an opportunity, especially during this peak period where our state governor and Moms for Liberty have taken it upon themselves to be very organized to ban books that I have decided to liberate,” Henderson notes. “That’s right — liberate.”
Though the focus is on elevating Black voices, the shop offers a range of titles, including those by white authors who Henderson calls “white allies.”
“They’re invited to the cookout,” she says. “If you’re in this store, you definitely are a supporter of Blackness or Black culture, and you have a level of empathy where you are able to come to the table and share the space with us.”
She’s gotten creative in designing the store and creating various book sections, everything from “I’m Speaking” — a nod to the 2020 vice presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence — featuring political viewpoints and opinions of Black women, Bruhs and Books and HBCU.
That last one is “the most important section in the store,” Henderson stresses. “It has books all by historically Black college graduates; and I’m one too. I try to curate books to represent our population in a way that another bookstore would not.”
“This is my way of pushing back against everything going on and it’s coming at the right time,” the educator notes. “It’s important to me. I’m giving my finger to the governor without losing my job. And I hope he comes for me.”
While booksellers are important, there’s more that needs to be done as right-wing groups make concerted efforts to push new book bans in school districts across the state, Matthew Maichuk with the Florida Freedom to Read Project says.
He nods to groups like the Moms for Liberty, “who make sure they show up in force” at school board meetings.
“They’re always a loud minority,” Maichuk explains. A favorite tactic of the group is reading sections of books out of context, such as rape scenes, during these meetings in an attempt to press school officials to remove books.
“They read this tiny snippet of a book and then that book gets removed and challenged and off the shelves for several weeks or however long it takes to allow it back in after people come to their senses,” Walentine says. “Taking things out of context like that is a trick; it’s a nasty trick. If you were to judge a painting, you wouldn’t take a little, tiny square inch and say, ‘I’m gonna make a call here about this piece of work,’ right? It’s ignorant.”
Maichuk says the answer is for families and individuals concerned about censorship creeping into Florida schools to organize and come out en masse as well. “But these meetings are hard for many parents to attend,” he notes.
The Florida Freedom to Read Project galvanizes and educates those who want to protect students’ access to information and books. With chapters in each county, the organization tracks book challenges and bans in every district.
By putting banned books front and center, booksellers are an important part of the anti-censorship movement in the state.
“But these bans aren’t meant to impact the people who can afford the books, who can get them in an alternative way,” Maichuk says.
In 2021, 32% of Florida households were below the ALICE income level — an acronym for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed — but above the federal poverty level. Those who fall within this level struggle with the high cost of living and affording basic needs.
“If you remove a book from school shelves, they’re not going to Barnes & Noble to buy it,” Maichuk says. “Books need to be accessible to everyone. It’s great that bookstore owners are outraged. There will always be a demographic who will just go out and buy more banned books and bookshop owners are rightfully concerned, but not everyone can go to a bookstore.”
Public libraries are one answer, but not everyone lives near one. “If you live close to the library and can walk there, great,” the Palm Harbor resident says. “But someone living on the other side of Tampa Road might not be able to easily walk to their library or ride a bike.”
There’s also the possibility that book bans could move into public libraries.
“They aren’t impacted — yet,” Maichuk cautions. “Once they find a way to subject government entities to government speech, they’ll see how far they can go. I know I’m gloom and doom, but post legislative session, there’s a lot coming down the pike. We all need to be aware.”
Hepsworth is eager to see how the upcoming election season could affect the direction of book banning and censorship in the state.
“What it comes down to is who is in control and who actually gets to decide what books are there in schools and what books are not,” she says. “We are really in a transition here. We need to get good leaders in positions on the school board. With all the people screaming and yelling and threats, it’s difficult. You need to be able and active and on the ball. We need people willing to step up into these roles and we all need to vote.”
To learn more about and support these authors and bookstores, visit QueerAbby.com, RobSandersWrites.com, TomboloBooks.com, PaperbackExchangeBookstore.com, WhiteRoseBooksAndMore.com and Facebook.com/BlackEnglishBooks. For more information about the Florida Freedom to Read Project, visit FFTRP.org.
