The Power of Reading, or Why I do What I Do
It’s Banned Books Week and my thoughts turn to a different thread than my normal commentary. I do what I do because, fundamentally, I’m a book nerd. You don’t become an academic because you hated reading as a kid. Reading gave me a joy that I struggled to find in reality in my adolescence and I find myself thinking about what I read and why.
I don’t have strong recall of people, never have. But I have a strong episodic memory, recalling the smallest details of seemingly mundane events. When I think of my childhood reading, I think of fantasy novels. From middle through high school I read pretty much only sword and sorcery fantasy series. A while back, I found myself thinking about how that started. In fifth grade we had one of those awesome Scholastic book sales that nerdy kids lived for. I remember buying a book that I now understand to be a young adult (YA) novel. I don’t recall the title, author, or any of the plot beyond one scene where the 15-year-old girl took drivers ed lessons on a video game simulator device and used both feet to operate the gas and brake (I have no idea why this is the detail that I remember). I’m sure it was a basic YA romance, girl finds first crush and goes on a date kind of book. I remember that I loved it, I’m pretty sure I read it two or three times.
I also distinctly remember sitting in my class’s portable and having a girl see what I was reading and exclaim “why are you reading a girls’ book?!” I don’t remember having any specific reaction right away, I imagine it was a certain amount of shame and embarrassment. Looking back, I realize that it deeply affected my reading habits for a long time. Having had a gendered rule imposed upon me with the attendant social stigma that runs with such judgments, I turned to a genre that was “boy” enough for everyone. Like a lot of depressed and socially anxious teens, I wanted a world of escape and I found it in fantasy novels. A whole lot of my early reading were Dungeons and Dragons books published (then) by TSR. I think back and remember heteronormative stories about guys with big muscles/swords/spell books saving ladies from danger and having chaste relationships. This makes me laugh today as it is pretty much the polar opposite of what I like to consume now … ok, I do still have a weakness for really terrible action movies in this genre.
When I think of books that affected me, the first that comes to mind is the Valdemar series from Mercedes Lackey. I remember it was the summer I turned 14 and I was visiting my dad. He never knew what to do with me so at least once a visit he would find the nearest large bookstore and drop me off to browse for an hour or two and then buy me a ton of books. This is still my idea of heaven. I stumbled across Lackey’s books and probably bought them randomly, after all it wasn’t my money. What I discovered was an entirely different fantasy world, one where girls and women were often the heroes (gasp!) and gay characters appeared frequently. Not only did they appear, but they often stared in the book. And they had sex (double gasp!). Shortly after this the second big read of my childhood came with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Now Sandman has influenced me in a whole lot of ways—I often say that all of my knowledge of religion comes from it—but the element that stands out now is The Game of You volume. While the word “transgender” never appeared, Wanda was the first trans characters I ever read. The image of Barbie writing Wanda’s name over her deadname in hot pink lipstick on her gravestone is one of the most powerful comic panels I can remember.
I didn’t quite get why these things were so important back in the mid-1990s. Now I know that as a queer kid, one who’s queerness was wrapped up in complicated notions of gender that I didn’t have the words for yet, I was looking for a better world. I lived in an environment where kids felt that “gay” was the worst description possible and it was attached to everything that was socially unacceptable. More than 30 years ago, Dr. Ruth Sims Bishop argued that books served as windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. My reading gave me not only escapism but also the vision where my (unspoken) differences could be celebrated and accepted.
The hard thing, however, was this was all confined to a fantasy world, one of total make believe. I couldn’t quite treat them as sliding glass doors to step into because I knew that telepathic horses and dragons didn’t exist. This is why I often say I’m jealous of kids today because the representation they get is authentic and real in a way that I didn’t have. The world of queer YA is full of books about queer kids living their lives in the world of the now. Their lives are depicted as full of joy, hardship, friends, lovers, and a lot more. The crucial detail, however, is that they feel real. Largely because queer people are able to finally write the stories we wish we had. And this is all over the place as TV is slowly catching up to YA literature in some ways.
This is why I love the work I do, even when it is hard. Censorship is an act of political power meant to cut off any vision of an alternative world, especially worlds that censors don’t like. At base, anti-LGBTQ censors don’t want queer people to exist and banning depictions of our existence is about achieving that goal. The only acceptable existence is straightness, with a cisgender assumption. Anything that suggests we can live broader lives can’t be allowed because they fear kids, especially their kids, being queer. I get it, they hate us and hating their own kids would be hard. But I know from experience what that representation would have meant to me decades ago. I fight in my often small ways because I want kids today to have the knowledge we lacked, to see the stories that never existed for us.
