A small-town library is at risk of closing after residents of Jamestown, Michigan voted to defund it rather than tolerate some LGBTQ+-themed books.
Residents voted Tuesday to block the renewal of funds tied to property taxes, Bridge Michigan reported.
The vote leaves the library with funds in the first quarter of next year. Once the reserve fund is used up, it will be forced to close, Larry Walton, president of the library board, told Bridge Michigan — hurting not only readers, but the community as a whole. Besides the books, residents visit the library for its wifi, he said, and it houses the very room where the vote was held.
“Our libraries are places to read, places to gather, places to socialize, places to study, places to learn. I mean, they’re the heart of any community,” Deborah Mikula, executive director of the Michigan Library Association, told the Guardian. “And how can you lose it?”
“We champion access,” she added, including material that may appeal to some in the community but not others. “We want to make sure libraries protect the right to read.”
The controversy in Jamestown began with a complaint about a memoir by a non-binary writer, but soon escalated into a campaign against the library of Patmos itself. After a parent complained about Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maya Kobabe, a graphic novel about the author’s experience coming out as nonbinary, dozens showed up at library board meetings demanding the institution drop the book. (The book, which included images of sex, was in the adult section of the library.) Complaints began to be directed at other books with LGBTQ+ themes.
One library director resigned, telling Bridge that she had been harassed and accused of indoctrinating children; her successor also left office. Although the library placed Kobabe’s book behind the counter rather than on the shelves, the volumes remained available.
“We, the board, are not going to ban the books,” Walton told The Associated Press on Thursday.
The library’s refusal to comply led to a campaign urging residents to vote against renewing funding for the library. A group calling itself the Jamestown Conservatives handed out fliers condemning a library director who “promotes LGBTQ ideology” and calling for the library to become a “safe and neutral place for our children.” On Facebook, the group says it exists to “keep our children safe and protect their purity, and to keep the nuclear family intact as God designed it.”
In the end, residents voted 62 percent to 37 percent against a measure that would have raised property taxes by roughly $24 to fund the library, although they approved similar measures to fund the fire department and road work. The library was one of only a few in the state to suffer such a loss, Mikula said: “Most passed with honors, sometimes as high as 80 percent.”
The vote comes as US libraries face a surge in calls to ban books. The American Library Association identified 729 challenges against “library, school and university materials and services” last year, resulting in about 1,600 challenges or removals of individual books. That’s up from 273 books the previous year and represents “the largest number of attempts to ban books since we began compiling these lists 20 years ago,” ALA President Patricia Wong said in a press release.
Not sure what’s fueled the culture wars we’re seeing, but libraries are on the front lines Deborah Mikula
“We’re seeing what appears to be a campaign to remove books, particularly books dealing with LGBTQIA topics and books dealing with racism,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, head of the ALA’s office of intellectual freedom, told the Guardian last year . Famous books by Toni Morrison, Alison Bechdel and Abram H Candy are among the banned.
“I’m not quite sure what’s fueled the culture wars we’re seeing, but libraries are certainly at the forefront,” Mikula said. Indeed, as states across the US attempt to deny LGBTQ+ rights, the ALA’s #1 “most challenging” book last year was Gender Queer.
“When you take those books off the shelf or challenge them publicly in a community, what you’re saying to any young person who identifies with that narrative is, ‘We don’t want your story here,'” Kobabe told the New York Times in May.
Each library curates its own collection, Mikula noted, an intensive process that involves keeping up with what’s new, listening to what’s in demand and “weeding out” selections that are rarely taken.
“Our librarians are qualified. They have advanced degrees,” she said. “We want to make sure that the people who have been hired to do this work are trusted and that they ensure that the whole community is represented in their library.” And that means having LGBTQ books.”
If community members object to the inclusion of certain books, there are formal means of requesting their removal, including a review committee and verification that the person making the complaint has actually read the book in question. But lately, she said, people “go to board meetings, whether it’s a library board meeting or a school board meeting, and they say, ‘Here’s a list of 300 books.’ We want them all removed from your library. And it’s not the right channel, but they are strong and their voices carry.
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