[A twitter thread responding to the tweet, "NEW: The "Heartstopper" books have been restricted to the adult section of the Columbia-Marion County Public Library and now require parental permission."
"and this, kids, is why respectability politics doesn't work. you can make the fluffiest, most sanitized, "unproblematic" PG-13 queer content imaginable, and the right is still going to call it porn and a danger to children, because there is no level of queerness they'll accept
when you talk about how icky and gross and problematic that other queer content is, with the fucking and the swears and the moral ambiguity and the bad choices, not good and clean and Pure, all you're really doing is siding with the same leopards who'll later eat your face
when you start impugning the IRL morality and trustworthiness of real human beings because they're consuming The Bad Gay Fiction, all you're doing is buying into the conservative idea of Bad Stores As A Moral Contagion - you're just disagreeing very slightly on what "bad" means
reading fucky, morally ambiguous fiction no more makes you a bad person than reading fluffy, happy fiction makes you a good person, because fictional taste does not determine morality. the hateful book-banning evangelists are all reading "good" fiction, and look at them!
all queer people are in the same goddamned boat, but you sanctimonious little assholes are trying to drill holes in one end of it under the mistaken belief that you won't sink when we do. self-righteousness is not a fucking flotation device. PAY ATTENTION."
Replies read, "UK perspective, I wonder if the people who are afraid books may make kids gay, are the same who say guns don't kill people?
"Right? Heartstopper is so sweet it could give cavities."
"To study humanity requires being open to the wide range of different cultures & pol econ systems. If the US is going to do well in coming decades it will not be a good idea to keep kids ignorant of basics. Many YA books are valuable. A sanitized curriculum is not real education."
"Even calling it "PG-13" is a callback to MPAA bias that would give queer content a more "adult" rating than equivalent straight content."]
