Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts)

Thanks to a lucky encounter on Twitter I recently learned of a currently on-going challenge against Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts) by Lev A.C. Rosen. As a person who loved this book (and even more so Rosen’s Camp) I can’t say I’m totally surprised to see it challenged. After all, it hits two hot buttons for censors at the same time: representation of queer identity and accurate sex ed. Few things rile up Christian Right activists like queer folk trying to provide sex ed to queer kids. They’ve spent decades trying to present no usable sex ed to straight kids and no sex ed at all to queer kids because they shouldn’t exist. In Jack of Hearts, Rosen tries to correct for this. A number of queer young adult authors clearly seek to provide the sex ed that they never had but Jack goes further than most in celebrating gay sexuality through both Jack’s fight against slut shaming and his advice to other students. Well one challenger in Irving, Texas, has been fighting to have the book removed for nearly a year.

The first email complaint (that I received) back in September 2019, reads as an almost unhinged mess. Interestingly, it included complaints about five books, one author (for daring to be associated with Drag Queen Story Hours), and Teen Vogue. But Jack received pride of place and became the focus pretty quickly. The original email bounces around from “facts” about sexually transmitted infections (I use quotes because no links come through to support it; though it is possible links were originally embedded in the emails) to complaints about Drag Queen Story Times (I’ve written about these complaints before), to attacks on trans people and false statements about the danger of trans affirming care for trans kids. I say this is almost unhinged because on the surface the materials complained about have little connection to these issues but the Christian Right has been using transphobic rhetoric as a way of rehashing their old hatred of gays that is less popular with the general public. So this challenger seems to be pulling from one or more of the common Christian Right hate groups out there.

The core of the complaint against Jack of Hearts is that it depicts sex openly, especially gay sex. In one email, the challenger provided six pages of references and/or quotes to the book to the scandalous material in it. For example here is one entry: “Pg 17 anal sex how to; clean up beforehand, use lots of lube, use a condom.” I single this one out because the challenger repeatedly referenced HIV infections as a reason to ban this book - and they clearly treat HIV as a gay only disease as if this was still the 1980s discourse. What is fascinating to me is that advice itself is oriented towards avoiding STIs and responsible sex. In fact the whole book is full of accurate, sex-positive advice but that is the exact problem. The challenger, however, doesn’t believe that teens should ever have access to sex-positive material. This would be the complaint partially raised when they finally submitted a formal request to remove the book: “The [Irving Public Library] has few to no materials on STDs, HIV, sexual abstinence, waiting to date, saying ‘NO’, dangers of Transgender Industry, faithful life-long marriage, healthy relations, [unclear] the children are a result of Sexual Relationships.” First, I seriously doubt that the library has few of these but the challenger noted no entries under “homosexual diseases” for example which I would fucking hope would be the case as there is no such thing as a “homosexual disease.” Second, the entire list of complaints is representative of the belief that the only thing that the library should present to folks is a cisgender, heterosexual world dominated by Christian Right moral ethics. The library should, of course, reject this. Especially as the challenger and their few supporters can simply not let their kids read the book. Problem solved … except that they don’t want any kid to read the books, their judgment is obviously correct and should control access for everyone else.

The challenger attempts to justify this with a reference to legal principles. The challenger cites to a few different laws all of which amount to the same point: this is legally obscene. The challenger does get one legal statement correct: “The 1st amendment does not protect obscene material displayed, distributed or sold to minors.” This is true but there is a big problem: Jack of Hearts is not legally obscene. The question is so easy it barely requires any consideration. Rather than repeat myself I will note I have addressed questions of obscenity in challenges more than once: such as here, here, and here. As with all of these instances, the challenger here never actually attempts to engage with the statute at issue. Texas’s Harmful to Minors statute is fairly standard, and actually a little tougher than First Amendment obscenity law, and requires the proof of three things for material to be obscene as to minors: that it appeals to the prurient interest in sex, that it is patently offensive to the adult community as a whole, and that it is utterly without redeeming social value for minors. While I could easily argue the first two aren’t met - they really aren’t - the challenger’s case fails on the third element. Jack clearly has social importance in that it provides important, scientifically based, sex educational advice to kids, in addition to being an important story about sex-positivity generally. It’s been about fifty years since obscenity law reached fictional prose stories at all and this is not going to break the trend.

But to challengers that cannot be important. To them, any deviation from their world view is promoting dangerous information and must be purged. At one point, the challenger suggests organizing volunteers to remove these dangerous books from the library. This, of course, the library should not do ethically and legally. It is precisely why obscenity law does not turn on the most easily offended segments of the community because allowing them to control the access of the rest of us is an abuse of governmental power. The Irving Public Library is still following its collection policies and the resolution is due by the end of the month. I certainly hope it sticks to the ethical standards of libraries by refusing to allowing this one challenger to control the collection for the community.

As this is an on-going case of public interest I am releasing the records disclosed to me under Texas’s open records law: part 1, part 2, part 3.