The only queer content Casey McQuiston had as a teen was a Brokeback Mountain DVD they stole from Blockbuster in 2007 and hid in the bottom drawer of their desk. “That was what was available in the early 2000s,” they said.

McQuiston, the bestselling author of queer novels like Red, White, and Royal Blue and One Last Stop, grew up in Southern Louisiana and attended a Southern Baptist school from kindergarten through 12^th grade. “Queer books, well, that was not part of my world,” they explained. “It was not even something that occurred to me could exist.”

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Sexual reproduction and evolution were also not taught. “Imagine getting to bio 101 freshman year of college and being like, what does any of this mean?”

“I feel so protective of the world we have now,” they added, “where you can literally go to Barnes and Noble, and there’s a queer table, and then there’s more books that are queer that are in the other sections, and you don’t have to shoplift Brokeback Mountain from Blockbuster Video when you’re 17.”

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But that world, of course, is in jeopardy.

A 2025 report from PEN America called the current state of book bans “unprecedented and undeniable.”

“Never before in the life of any living American have so many books been systematically removed from school libraries across the country,” the organization stated. “Never before have so many states passed laws or regulations to facilitate the banning of books, including bans on specific titles statewide. Never before have so many politicians sought to bully school leaders into censoring according to their ideological preferences, even threatening public funding to exact compliance. Never before has access to so many stories been stolen from so many children.”

McQuiston joined American Library Association President Sam Helmick and PFLAG National CEO Brian K. Bond in a chat with LGBTQ Nation about preserving youth access to LGBTQ+ stories.

Fresh from speaking together on a panel at South By Southwest EDU, the trio spoke about the life-changing magic of LGBTQ+ books, both for LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ kids alike, as well as what we can do to challenge the figures who are working to shield minors from knowing that LGBTQ+ people exist at all.

Lazy governance

The modern parents’ rights movement exists as a blatant backlash to the fact that there is more queer literature available than ever before. While it arose during the pandemic to combat school mask mandates, the movement has made a sharp and hateful pivot.

Parents’ rights activists – led by groups like Moms for Liberty and propped up by hate machines like Libs of TikTok – have transformed the movement into a right-wing crusade against marginalized identities. Despite its name, it does not fight to empower all parents – just conservative ones who claim they have a right to control what their children (and the rest of the students) are exposed to at school.

Viral speeches at school board meetings and book excerpts taken out of context have caused national outcry over LGBTQ+ books in schools to continue reaching new highs across the country over the past six or so years.

Pen America found at least 6,870 instances of book bans during the 2024-2025 school year, compared to 2,532 in the 2021-2022 school year. Each year since, the number of bans has grown.

The frenzy has also reached GOP lawmakers, many of whom have passed state book-banning laws or policies across the country.

Most concerning to Helmick right now is a book-banning bill proposed at the federal level. “We no longer just have states overreach into the reading habits of our local communities and our neighbors. Now the federal government has taken up the mantle. And this new House Bill 7661 is as murky as most of the bills that we find in places like Florida or Iowa or Texas that usually end up in lawsuits. So, we have to assume that this is just a chilling effect taking shape intentionally at the federal level.”

You don’t need a research study to know that children who lack access to diverse stories suffer.

“When we don’t support literacy, when we don’t support civic engagement and community building, that is when ignorance festers,” Helmick said, “and with ignorance comes fear and with fear comes intolerance.”

“We’re trying to reconcile whether we’re teaching our children what to think versus how to think,” they added, “and we’re not willing to open the doors to information like gender or love expression, and what that’s teaching our next generation is that we are not a people willing to openly discuss ideas. We are not willing to live in discomfort and lean into difficult conversations, and we’re not a people willing to fully allow everybody to have a seat at the table.”

“Protecting kids from information is not actually protecting them,” McQuiston added. “It’s making them more vulnerable.”

Bond also pointed out that those fighting to ban books are merely a very well-organized minority. “It’s a small, narrow-minded, nasty group that is trying to deny the realities of who we all are collectively,” he said.

Indeed, ALA found that in 2025, a whopping 92% of all book challenges came from government officials, pressure groups, and decision-makers, while less than 3 percent came from individual parents. The book ban craze, the organization explained, is “part of a well-funded, politically-driven campaign to suppress the stories and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals and communities.”

So, how has this coalition gained so much power and influence?

“I think it’s lazy governance,” Helmick said. “It’s so much easier to remove books on shelves and make folks feel smaller than it is to solve clean water or losing jobs or brain drain. I’ll be honest with you, I think folks have… taken liberty for granted.”

We’re not afraid

McQuiston’s debut novel, the runaway bestseller Red, White & Royal Blue, is one of the most commonly banned romance novels in U.S. public schools. Their Young Adult novel, I Kissed Shara Wheeler, was one of 500 titles banned from Department of Defense-run schools after the current president took office.

They said having their books challenged certainly hits at a “core wound” of lifelong ostracization as a queer person, but it also is not going to stop them from telling the stories they want to tell.

But the safety factor is a big one.

“Once your book becomes a banned book or a targeted book or a threatened book, there is the discourse cycle that gets picked up… Right-wing media is kind of an outrage chamber that really strips everything of context and creates a lot of targets on authors who are not institutionally protected. We don’t have an employer. We’re essentially glorified freelancers.”

“We don’t have security teams, we don’t have a lot of resources with which to protect ourselves, and it can be scary.”

Beyond that, they said the majority of authors depend on sales to schools and libraries to make their living, so book bans directly put them in financial jeopardy.

That said, they haven’t met any targeted authors who have changed their approach to storytelling. They may have shifted their social media presence or their willingness to attend public events, but creatively, they have stayed strong.

“If anything, it has shown me that young readers really need us to demonstrate that we’re not afraid and that we can’t be pushed out,” McQuiston said, “because we are the adults that they’re looking up to.”

“Writers are very stubborn people,” they added, “and we wouldn’t get into this job if we didn’t feel really strongly that we had something we wanted to say.”

But what about the sex scene!?

Helmick knows conservatives don’t trust them.

As the first nonbinary president of the ALA, they say that right-wing parents and activists questioning the appropriateness of LGBTQ+ books for children have basically counted them out as a reliable resource.

But Helmick says it doesn’t matter. They don’t need to be trusted because the books speak for themselves.

“Don’t take my word for it,” Helmick said, emphasizing that the best way to combat book bans is to encourage folks to visit libraries and actually read the books they’re so worried about.

Libraries, Helmick explained, “are the easiest, safest place to connect with others and change your mind. So, it’s okay if folks don’t want to trust a national figure for librarianship. I don’t want you to. I want you to read the book for yourself.”

Helmick said the trend of judging a book by an excerpt reflects America’s current “inability to have a deeper dive into a longer, comprehensive conversation.”

Viral videos of activists reading queer sex scenes aloud seem to dominate the discourse around LGBTQ+ books. But many times, folks horrified by these moments have not read the rest of the book or perhaps have not considered that teens are thinking about all of this whether it’s present in a book they read or not.

“Books that have more content that veers towards sexual, often it is being depicted in a very safe, consensual, sane, and often educational way,” McQuiston said. “Teens are always thinking about that stuff anyway… We’re not introducing them to new concepts as much as we are just reflecting back or exploring things that they’re already thinking about.”

McQuiston thinks it is far more responsible to allow kids to explore and learn about sexuality in a controlled environment rather than from the Internet, where they will inevitably go if their access is cut off elsewhere.

“They should prefer that their kids learn about queerness from books that have been vetted and thoughtfully written by adults and gone through a series of edits and are accurate as possible and empathetic and thoughtful and carefully worded rather than whatever their algorithm on YouTube shows them. Everybody should take all of their concerns about book banning and go look at what your kid is watching on their iPad.”

McQuiston points out that most challenged books – even ones with sex scenes – are merely stories “of existing happily and experiencing and living out their identity in a very joyful way.”

“There’s a certain level of bemusement of, what is inappropriate about this?” they said. “And how could you possibly find something inappropriate about it unless you think [queer] existence itself is inappropriate?”

And in the end, it’s pretty clear that’s exactly what book banners think. If it was really about the sex, after all, And Tango Makes Three – a picture book about two male penguins raising a chick together – would not be one of the most challenged books in the country.

Why we’re here

As a recent college graduate, Bond was working for a conservative congressman in rural Missouri. He drove to St. Louis and bought a queer book, The Best Little Boy in the World by Andy Tobias. He hid it under the tire in the trunk of his car, and when he was done reading it, burned it so no one would ever find it.

“That’s the era that I grew up in,” he said. “There are some kids that still feel that way today of having to hide.”

That, he said, is why he’s fighting.

“That’s why we are all collectively here. That’s why Casey’s books matter so much. That’s why Sam’s work matters so much. That’s why PFLAG parents matter so much to ensure that every kid has the ability to see themselves and to thrive.”

“I am old enough that I was told I could not dream,” he added. “I don’t want any kid to have to go through what I did.”

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