Saundra Mitchell, a queer children’s author who has written 18 books and edited 8 anthologies, fled her lifelong home state of Indiana in 2023 after its legislature passed a bill banning “obscene” and “harmful” books in public schools. But even though she relocated to Maryland, a blue state with a law against book banning, her work was still targeted by a local anti-LGBTQ+ parents’ rights group.

Mitchell, her adult daughter, and Mitchell’s transgender wife of 30 years all moved to Maryland, thinking that its Freedom to Read law would help protect her work from anti-LGBTQ+ book bans, The Baltimore Banner reported. But shortly after moving, she learned that her 2019 book, All the Things We Do in the Dark (which covers a young female rape survivor) had been included on a list of “sexually explicit” books by the Carroll County chapter of Moms for Liberty. The national so-called “parents’ rights” group has been called an anti-LGBTQ+ extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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It wasn’t the first time anti-queer political forces had targeted Mitchell’s work. In 2021, Texas State Rep. Matt Krause (R) included one of her anthologies, All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages, on his list of 850 books that he said “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.”

Some pundits have claimed that book bans help distinguish and draw attention to an author’s work, but Mitchell wasn’t honored.

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“People think, ‘Oh, it must be fun to get your book banned,’” she said. “It is not fun. It is humiliating and frustrating, and you feel powerless because there’s only so much that you can do when it happens.”

Mitchell said she feels frustrated that people often consider books “sexual” when “a queer character exists on the page,” noting, “There’s a difference between writing about sex and writing about queer people.”

Shortly after she sold her first book, the 2007 young adult novel Shadowed Summer (about a girl who contacts the ghost of a gay boy who died by suicide), her editor told her to remove the gay content, warning that she would be excluded from book talks and school book fairs if she didn’t. When she refused, the editor accused her of being problematic, and her agent fired her. The book went on to win a 2010 award, and when her agent came calling back afterward, she turned them away.

But shaken by the incident, she “straightwashed” the main characters of her subsequent book, Looking for Group (which she wrote under the pen name Rory Harrison). The original draft was about a gay boy and trans girl who go on a cross-country trip to find treaure bureid in California’s Mojave Desert. But she turned the characters into a heterosexual boy and a cisgender girl, and admitted to her agent what she had done.

Her agent said, “Look, your job is to write the book that you mean. My job is to sell it.” Mitchell then restored her characters’ queer identities and, in 2017, Teen Vogue included the book in its list of 10 Best Queer Books to Check Out.

But other authors aren’t so lucky. Alex London, whose work appears in Mitchell’s anthology Out There: Into the Queer New Yonder, saw the sales of his queer-inclusive 2013 novel Proxy plummet after it appeared on Krause’s list of ban-worthy books. He also saw his paid requests to have him speak to local schools shrink from around 20 to 30 per year to just one.

“People think, ‘Oh, you’re an author. You have so much money,’” Mitchell said. “I don’t have retirement savings because I have been dedicated to writing books about queer characters for the entire length of my career. I don’t get books that they give you tons of money for.”

Mitchell had been kicked out of the Army in the early 1990s for her queer identity. Now that she’s older with a long-running writing career, she said she’s “full steam ahead” on unapologetically writing queer characters into her work. She has also taken an active role in fighting book bans that predominantly target queer authors and writers of color.

She uses her social media to highlight biased book reviews and recently attended the recent Supreme Court hearings on whether parents should be allowed to opt-out students from reading books with LGBTQ+ characters. Now that the court ruled that parents should be allowed to do so, she worries the ruling will be used to justify other anti-LGBTQ+ book bans nationwide.

“They’re trying to erase whole groups of people from the public eye, because if they can make us disappear, then they can subjugate us,” Mitchell said.

“All of this is dark and hard and frustrating, but there is hope,” she added. “There is hope in community. There is hope in these books. Just because things are hard doesn’t mean that we can’t get better.”

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