Disappearing Books
RSSWhy did school administrators in Anaheim, CA, confiscate a gay and lesbian series?
Staff -- School Library Journal, 02/01/2001
Last spring, Christine Enterline was focused on biographies. She'd just weeded her school library's biography section and had thrown out dozens of 30-year-old titles. To replace them, Enterline, the library teacher at Orangeview (CA) Middle School in Anaheim, placed a big order with Chelsea House, some 330 books in total, including series on Black Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and African-American women. And oh, yes, Enterline ordered the 10 titles in a series called Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians. No big deal, thought Enterline. After all, the books were serious biographies about such notable figures as the economist John Maynard Keynes, the writer Willa Cather, and the tennis player Martina Navratilova. And over the last couple of years, Enterline has spoken to top administrators about doing more to help gay and lesbian students, including adding books to the library. By last month, however, the gay and lesbian biographies were still not on the library shelves. Instead, they were being shuttled from one administrator to another for review. The administrators asked Enterline lots of questions: Had she ordered the books because the subjects were famous or because they were gay? Wasn't the reading level too difficult for seventh and eighth graders? How did the books fit into the curriculum? Yet no one ever explained why the books were confiscated and when and how Enterline could get them back. "I think they were just hoping I would forget about it and it would just fade away, and the books would be lost on somebody's shelf and forgotten," Enterline says. But neither Enterline nor her assistant, Library Technician Tommy Kovac, forgot the matter. Frustrated by the impasse, Kovac called various civil rights groups. On December 21, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California filed suit against the district for violating the First Amendment rights of students by practicing "viewpoint-based censorship." "What you can't do--and the federal courts have been clear on this--is take books out of the school library because of some officials' discomfort about the ideas in them," says Martha Matthews, an attorney with the ACLU. Two senior administrators from the district did not return calls requesting comment about the lawsuit. What's strange about the Anaheim controversy is that the district actually has a formal procedure for challenging books, but no one ever made such a challenge. The problem stemmed from an incident in September, when Kovac was processing the Chelsea House order and put some books on the circulation desk for Enterline to review. A teacher walked into the library, saw the gay and lesbian books and, according to Enterline, said: "You're not going to put these on the shelves, are you?" Enterline and Kovacs said they intended to and proceeded to argue with the teacher about the books. Enterline and Kovacs decided to warn their principal about the encounter. They showed her the books, and she said they seemed all right, Enterline recalls. But the next week, the principal asked to take the books home over the weekend, to review them again. This time, she said the reading level was too high for the school's students (Chelsea House markets them for ages 14 and up). Enterline replied that the library collection included things such as Shakespeare and the Bible. The principal then passed the books to an administrator in the district office, who in turn passed them to other administrators. Enterline and Kovac haven't seen the books since.--A. G.
