FREE FLAMER!

How book banning fever is hurting students.

When I started writing Sweet Tea three years ago, I decided this newsletter was going to be a politics-free zone. I get enough of politics in my work on other projects and wanted to make this a safe space for me away from the fussing and fighting. But I have some things on my heart about the recent spate of book banning in my school system, so friends, we are going to take a little spin through the politics of censorship in this edition of Sweet Tea. If you prefer to consume your Sweet Tea politics-free, you will not hurt my feelings if you stop reading right now. Next time, we’ll get back to talking about fun—and delicious—things like the peanut butter pie recipe I want to share with you in time for Thanksgiving. It’s slap your mama good!

For the rest of us going on this journey together, buckle up! It’s bound to get a little bumpy.

First things first, we need to get our definitions straight. What is a book ban? What is a book challenge?

According to PEN America, a 100 year old organization of poets, essayists, novelists, journalists, and other writers:

PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a previously accessible book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished. Diminished access is a form of censorship and has educational implications that extend beyond a title’s removal.

The American Library Association defines the distinction between a book challenge and a book ban thusly:

A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group.  A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.

Book banning is on the rise across the United States as activists target public schools to restrict student access to books they don’t agree with. During the last full school year, 2022-2023, PEN America recorded 3,352 instances of books banned. This was a 33 percent increase over the year before. They also found that banned books overwhelmingly featured minority characters, topics on racism, and LGBTQ+ characters. Challenges were made under the guise of “sexually explicit,” “harmful,” and/or “age inappropriate.”

The current book banning moral panic is not an organic grassroots effort led by local concerned parents. It is being pushed by national organizations, like Moms for Liberty (irony is dead, LOL), intent on overriding parental choice and restricting student access to books they don’t want them to read. Both PEN America and the ALA have been gathering information on the trends in censorship across the country. You can read more about what they’ve found here.

Now after all that literary throat clearing, we can get to the meat of what I want to talk about today, and that’s one of the most banned books of the past couple of years: Flamer by Mike Curato. A graphic novel—as in, it has drawings like a comic book—Flamer is a coming of age story with a 14 year-old protagonist named Aiden Navarro who is spending the summer before high school at a summer camp. Curato doesn’t come right out and say it’s a Boy Scout camp, but he is an Eagle Scout, like my husband and my son, and I think it’s pretty clear it’s a Boy Scout camp. Aiden and his friends are typical 14 year-old boys. They are crude. They talk about their weiners. They get in fights when a bully pushes them too far, and they sometimes use foul language. They are also charming and oh so funny.

(Seriously, if you don’t have a 14 year-old boy in your life, you need to get one. They will always keep you off-kilter and entertained.)

Critics of Flamer claim the book has sexually explicit material in it. (By any rational reading it doesn’t.) That’s why it was pulled in the Marietta City Schools system. A handful of parents, who clearly haven’t read the book, challenged it (see definition above) and demanded its removal. The Marietta City Schools Board of Education removed Flamer along with another oft challenged book Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Currently, parents and community members in our school system are challenging the removal of Flamer and asking that it be returned to the high school library. As a result of finding these two books in the Marietta High School Media Center, the school board passed a directive to the superintendent requiring all materials with any sexually explicit content be removed from district libraries. You can read the directive here. (A challenge to the removal of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl was filed by a parent this week.)

This next bit is full of spoilers, but that can’t be helped because so many people challenging Flamer haven’t actually read it. This is an important book, and I want to set the record straight.

At it’s heart, the book is about Aiden and his struggle to understand himself. It’s the classic coming of age story full of self-doubt and anxiety over the physical changes of puberty. Like Flamer’s author—the book is based on his own story—Aiden is a chubby Filipino Irish Catholic kid who loves summer camp and is anxious about what awaits him at his new high school in the fall. He’s embarrassed in the community showers, he’s bullied for his appearance and race, and he’s drawn to a friend in a way that is uncomfortable and confusing for him. He also finds acceptance and support from his friends and the adult leaders at camp.

Aiden finds joy at camp, in the songs around the campfire, in learning new skills in archery, orienteering and basket weaving, and in the camaraderie of friends. He’s also bullied and called some really nasty names. The filthy language critics note in the book comes from bullies and is aimed at Aiden. This language is condemned and not celebrated.

In one scene he, and some of the other boys, do reference masturbation. That scene takes up a microscopically tiny portion of the book—literally 4 graphic novel pages (think 3-5 comic strip frames per page and speech balloons) out of 365 total pages—and it’s implied not described and presented as an extremely uncomfortable topic for Aiden. It’s the only marginally sexually explicit passage unless your definition of sexually explicit includes a peck on the cheek. High school students know about masturbation already, so this will not be a new concept for them.

There is a scene with a group of boys talking trash at each other in the communal shower—OMG, do you remember how awful communal showers were!—but in the drawings nudity is only hinted at. Nobody’s junk is showing, but someone does fart loudly on purpose. (These are teenage boys after all.) There’s a tiny bit of butt crack in one frame, but we can all agree butt cracks are funny, not obscene. If you have ever taken your child to an art museum, you have exposed them to more nudity than is in this book.

Aiden misunderstands a situation with a friend, and in his exuberance, kisses him on the cheek. That freaks his friend out, and Aiden comes back the next day to find his friend, who was also his tent mate, has moved out of their tent.

Feeling desperately alone, Aiden goes to the chapel with the plan to take his own life. He leaves a goodbye letter on his friend’s pillow fully intending not to come back. In the chapel, knife out and wrist exposed, Aiden is visited by a boy made of flames, “the fire of life within [him],” who reminds him of all the people who love him and who would miss him. He leads Aiden see his value and choose to live. “Even if ALL of them [family and friends] were to forsake you…YOU ARE ENOUGH,” he tells him. Aiden leaves his knife at the alter and joins his friends, including the one he kissed on the cheek, who were worried about him and looking everywhere to find him. He later burns the letter.

Honestly, I cried at the end. I won’t tell you the last line—you’ll have to read it for yourself—but it hits me solidly in the feels.

I was talking to a colleague on the human trafficking task force about the power of Flamer for kids who feel different and desperately alone. I told her I would lay down on the train tracks for this book, and here’s why. You can trade out Aiden, a gay kid who hasn’t quite figured that part out yet, for a black kid, a Jewish kid, a Wonder Bread white kid, male, female, gay, or straight and the central themes of this book hold true. Growing up is hard. Learning to accept a maturing body is hard. Navigating relationships is hard. Discovering who you are and learning to be comfortable in your own skin is hard. Kids of all stripes need characters like Aiden to show them they will find their way too in time.

Literature teaches us to see the world through different lenses, and that’s why books like Flamer belong in our school libraries. Book bans, like the ones currently sweeping the nation and Marietta City Schools, are harmful to students.

Parents should be the final arbiter of what reading materials are age appropriate for their own children. Our media center specialists (the new fancy name for librarians) are professionals trained in evaluating reading material across grade levels, and it’s their job to stock our school libraries with high quality books. It’s up to the parents to decide what they will allow their kids to read. When school boards allow the complaints of a small number of parents to dictate what books every family in the school district has access to, they override the desires of the majority of parents for their children to have access to a wide range of books, and students miss out on being able to read those books. Parents know their kids best, and public schools must keep their libraries stocked with diverse texts and tomes for families to choose from.

We often forget that we are not just raising children; we are training future adults. The end goal for schools everywhere, not just public schools, is developing graduates who are ready for the next challenge whether that be career or college. College students must be able to engage with a wide variety of ideas to be successful in school. They need to be able to read critically and deeply and learn to think about concepts and ideas through their own unique lens and experiences. When high schools remove controversial books from their shelves, they put their students at a disadvantage. Reading books about hard topics or confronting opinions different than one’s own teaches students to think critically for themselves.

In their New York Times best selling book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt sound the alarm about how a culture of safetyism is teaching our children to be fragile and unable to confront anything—including people and ideas—outside of their comfort zones. “What is new today is the premise that students are fragile,” the authors tell us. “Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe others are in danger and need protection. There is no expectation that students will grow stronger from their encounters with speech or text they label ‘triggering.’”

We do our students—and our colleges—a disservice when we teach them there are mainstream concepts and ideas that are so “harmful” to them that they must be removed from high school libraries for their “welfare, safety, and education.” MCS students are bright and mature enough to handle more than our school board is giving them credit for, and besides that, as a parent of two MHS graduates, I wanted them to be exposed to new concepts and ideas while they lived under my roof where we could discuss them at the dinner table.

Finally, representation matters. Reading fiction gives us an opportunity to “try on” someone else’s life for a while. Encountering a character that is very different from us teaches us empathy and helps us better understand a different point of view. For a kid who feels ostracized or alone, finding a character that is much like them can provide a sense of acceptance and help them feel less alone. Flamer is just this sort of book.

Banning books robs libraries of the diverse points of view many kids are desperately searching for, and it robs students of the joy of experiencing a story through a character they deeply relate to. Women of a certain age (mine) have a deep attachment to books like Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret because we felt seen by Judy Blume during a time of our lives that was disconcerting and confusing. The “We must increase our bust!” exercises the characters did were silly—and we knew at the time they were silly—but the central angst of growing up and becoming our new adolescent selves spoke to us and our experiences. Book banners tried to take that book away from us back in the day, and had they all been successful, we would have lost a cast of characters just like us whom we loved. Let’s not rob this generation of those connections to characters who are just like them.

At the end of the day, Flamer is a story about overcoming. It’s a story about facing a hard thing and finding the strength within to overcome it. Nobody saved Aiden; he saved himself. It’s detractors see the book as a story about sexual identity, but in fact, it’s a story about suicide prevention and about tending your own flame. It is a major disservice, particularly to marginalized and bullied students, to remove it from our high school library.

Mike Curato, the author/illustrator of Flamer, wrote a letter to our students at Marietta High School and sent it through PEN America, and I’m going to give him the last word on the subject of banning his book. Before that, though, I want to say a few things about the Marietta City Schools Board of Education for those of you who do not live in our community. MCS is a small school system where everybody knows everybody, so school board members are our friends and neighbors. We run into them at the grocery store, and we sit in the pews with them on Sunday mornings. We are having a very public dispute both inside the board—the vote to approve the book banning directive was not unanimous—and in the wider community, but we all still say hello when we meet in the Publix aisles and shake hands when we pass the peace at church. There is room for disagreement among friends and neighbors. Please be respectful to them.

If you want to help our efforts, fight book bans in your own communities and school systems. Every victory against censorship is a victory for all of us. Also, vote in your local elections. Everyone gets all fired up about what’s going on in Washington when in reality it’s the elected officials on your local city council and school board who make the decisions that most closely affect you and your family.

And now I’ll close out this very long newsletter with a word to the students of Marietta High School from Mike Curato.

From: Mike Curato, author/illustrator of Flamer

To the Students of Marietta High,

I originally wrote this letter for the students at a different school earlier this year. Sadly, I am sending these words out again. I hope they will be a source of strength for you.

Regardless of the outcome of this book challenge, and the other challenges that will come, there are things I need you to know.

Remember you have agency. I understand how hard it is to have others making decisions for so many parts of your life. But your life is in your hands. You have a voice. Use it. You may not have the power to vote yet, but you can still speak your mind. Don’t let anyone silence you. Don’t let them forget that you too are a human being with rights and feelings. Let it out. Speak it, sing it, write it, paint it, dance it. Censorship is fought with expression. That is your first amendment right, no matter your age or station.

Remember you are the future. Remember this moment. Remember how you feel. Remember what everyone said. One day, very soon, you will be an adult member of the community. What rights will you uphold? What injustices will you fight to repair? Who else in your community has been relegated to the margins? How can you help them? Lead with facts and compassion.

And above all else, know this: You deserve to be here. No matter who you are, what you believe, or who you love. I need you to know this because when I was young, it was implied that there was no room in this world for someone like me. Not unless I followed their rules. I tried to be the person I thought everyone wanted me to be, and it broke me. Don’t do that. Don’t let anyone use shame to dictate how you should live your life. I almost lost my life to that lie. But I survived, and in living my truth, I have found the greatest joy. Flamer is my truth and my joy. It may make some people uncomfortable, but their comfort is NOTHING compared to your safety and happiness.

Remember that. They can ban my book, but no one has the right to ban YOU.

Until next time,
Karla