Trouble With Gay Characters

"There are well-organized community groups, not to mention parents, who simply don't want these kind of books available to kids," said Penny Kastanis, executive director of the California School Library Assn. "You have parents who will say, 'Never mind what our kids are seeing on television at night or at the movies.' They're going to make sure their children never read a book at school that they don't like."

Some children's authors withstand the heat better than others. Leslea Newman, who wrote "Heather Has Two Mommies" in 1989, got valuable publicity from the controversy over her book. It is now a fixture in many bookstores. But Freeman and other writers whose books sell modestly and rarely make headlines rely heavily on librarians' goodwill and word of mouth to keep their books in circulation.

There is no precise way to measure how many gay-themed books have been taken off library shelves for political reasons. Yet the American Library Assn.'s Office of Intellectual Freedom reports that from 1990 to 2000 there were 515 reported cases in school and public libraries in which critics sought to remove books with alleged homosexual themes. Many more cases were never reported, the group noted.

Host of Legal Fights

In recent years, there have been legal battles over gay-themed library books in Maine, Wisconsin, Texas, Virginia, California, Florida, Maryland and other states. Freeman's book has now inadvertently become part of this cross-fire, but the continuing irony for her is that "The Trouble With Babies" is not about gay issues.

"She faces a classic problem here," Sutton said. "On the one hand, I'd say, this was an outrage, an overreaction by both the parents and the librarians, and she should keep writing those characters into her future books.

"But that's easy for me to say in my ivory tower," he added. "I'm not a librarian who has to make these decisions in the real world and fight these battles every day."

Connie Cauvel, the Pittsburgh-area librarian who took Freeman's book off the shelf, said she believed "The Trouble With Babies" was well-written. Librarians need to speak out for freedom of speech, she added, especially when critics attack "Huckleberry Finn," "The Color Purple," "Of Mice and Men" and other literary classics.

But after 38 years of battles with parents and other critics over library books, she added: "You get to the point where you can't win every confrontation. The reality is, the parents who objected to this book would have taken this to our school board, and I would have been overridden. I only have so much energy for these fights."