Not all people make me despair

Heather Has Two Mommies

It’s been a long time since I was really surprised at how idiotic, ignorant and boorish some people can be, minus occasional moments of pure disgust. Every now and then, though, someone rises up and says or does something that rekindles my hope for humankind, of only fleetingly. This is one of those times: here’s an old (but still valid!) account from the Homosecular Gaytheist^[1] himself detailing his reaction to the desecration of a children’s book about gay parents, and his subsequent confrontation with a less-than-helpful librarian.

I went to the public library today to register for a library card. While I was there, I looked through the card catalogue. (No, not a real card catalogue… it’s computerised and not nearly as cool as a drawer full of index cards.)

Out of curiosity, I searched through the catalogue for children’s books about homosexual parents. There are a lot of gay couples in the Roanoke area and some of them have children. It’s important that the children have access to materials that can reinforce their self-esteem, especially with the level of intolerance that many (if not most) heterosexual couples teach their children in the Southeast United States.

The books Daddy’s Roommate, King And King and And Tango Makes Three were nowhere to be found. Even young adult books with gay themes like Geography Club, Rainbow High and The Outsiders were conspicuously absent.

The one homosexual-themed book for young audiences they had was Heather Has Two Mommies. I went to the children’s section to look at the book and was shocked (Yes, it’s naïve that I didn’t expect it.) when I found half of the pages ripped out and the other half covered in graffiti along the lines of, “FAGGOTS RUIN CHILDEN [sic],” “HEATHERS MOMMIES ARE GOING 2 HELL [sic],” and “DYKE!”

I was about to set the book back on the shelf and leave, defeated, but I thought about what a daughter of two lesbians would feel if she found the book like that, and I returned to the shelf and brought the book to the counter.

Here’s that exchange as best as I can remember it, and since I just got back from the library, I’ll make it all authory and stuff.

“Hi, I just went to find this book in the children’s section and it’s been vandalised.”

“Oh dear. Let me see it.” She took the book, read the cover and threw it in a bin below the counter without opening it. “Well, that’s to be expected,” came the curt reply.

I paused to find words through my incredulity, “No. No it’s not. What I expect is a library that can take care of its own books.”

“We can’t possibly check every shelf for destroyed books.”

“Don’t give me that. This is one of the smallest, worst-stocked libraries I’ve ever been in. It would take all of an hour to open every single book in this place. Not only that, but the trash cans in the children’s section are tiny. You would have seen the pages wadded up in the bins and you should have investigated what book they were torn from. Are you even going to replace that book?” By then, I’d gathered an angry crowd of hippies who thought I was insulting their library, which I guess I was.

“Sir, if we replace the book, the same thing will happen to the new one. It’s just too offensive for this library.”

“What good is a library when its patrons are allowed to ban the library’s books through acts of vandalism?” She made a noise that was probably the beginning of the word please, as in, Please get out of the library, but I kept going.

“When rednecks in flannel with Sharpie markers get to decide what I’m not allowed to read, the entire library system fails. This is not a church library where books are filtered through the morality police, this is a public library where ideas are supposed to merge. If this happened to a Bible, I bet you would replace it immediately and run back the video cameras to find out who did it.”

She opened her mouth and gestured with her hand to say something, but I cut her off again. “Furthermore,*” I pretentiously said from my high-horse, “you can keep this fucking card because I won’t be coming back. And I will be encouraging my friends to trade books among each other and buy them from bookstores rather than coming to this pitiful fucking library.”

I turned around and headed toward the door when she said, “If your friends are anything like you, we don’t want them here, sir,” with a smug little smile that was begging–pleading–to be wiped off of her face. I stopped in mid-step, calculated what I was going to reply with, thought better of it and left the building.

I must admit, I’m a wee bit skeptical that he worded his rant (for lack of a better term; my brain’s too hazy to think of appropriate synonyms) quite that well; but then again, who am I to judge? Kudos to him for standing up like he did … even though, sadly, it’s a safe bet his indignation fell upon deaf ears.

I do know, however, that he should’ve said something to the likes of “don’t worry, they wouldn’t dream of coming to such a mediocre excuse for a library” in response to the haughty librarian’s parting words. Nothing better than a triumphant exit, eh?

Note – right as I finish this post, I check the date and realize the post I’m quoting is a few months over a year old. I don’t even recall how I came across it; regardless, it still merits a post.

^[1] If I were gay, I would totally be aching with jealousy at that nom de blog.