LGBT manga are being banned from US schools and libraries
3 years ago
Posts: 24
A conservative politician in Texas is trying to ban 850 books from schools and libraries in his state, and among the targets are LGBT manga. So far I've identified these two from the letter he sent last November:
"Wandering Son" (Hourou Musuko) by Takako Shimura.
https://www.mangaupdates.com/series.html?id=4802
"The Bride Was a Boy" (Hanayome wa Motodanshi) by Chii.
https://www.mangaupdates.com/series.html?id=114958
(And some OEL graphic novels.)
The full list of book bans is below:
https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/94fee7ff93eff9609f141433e41f8ae1/krausebooklist.pdf
This blog gives more context:
https://bookriot.com/texas-book-ban-list/
He would be able to get away with this because Texas already signed a purposefully vague anti-CRT bill. Conservatives are now using "the Woke Scare" as a pretense to ban manga with LGBT characters so that gay and trans kids won't have any representation when they're growing up, (except if they stumble onto it on the internet.) It is a strategy of delaying a looming cultural change. I've read both manga series (they're just okay), but the new backlash to LGBT manga that is forming is disturbing and more bans will happen.
Tennessee is currently busy whitewashing the Holocaust. You can´t make this up. I wonder what they think teen-friendly libraries should look like. Wall-to-wall Disney adaptations with biographies on Roland Reagan and the like front and center as the history section? I wonder how they would feel if they actually read the bible from cover to cover.
Did you know that Maus glorifies German war crimes and that the author is a self-hating Jew? Its... Nazi "indoctrination"? Wow wow wow.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/31/holocaust-novel-maus-bestseller-after-tennessee-school-ban
Another goodie. Get down Mrs. Obama. Literally:
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/02/parent-tries-ban-michelle-obama-book-texas-school-district-promoting-reverse-racism/
I also read EU/US comics and am a librarian.
Manga-Masters, My ANN-Lists + Imdb

3 years ago
Posts: 11
Yeah, this shit about crt and book banning is just stupid... Republicans are just trying to scare people in order to stay in power
I find your lack of anime disturbing.

3 years ago
Posts: 662
Wow, this is a wild list. Dude is even against basic sex education (I notice that he wants to ban a book about whether abstinence programs are effective - no surprise there). Very interesting article analyzing the list.
Anyway, I was already grateful that I don’t live in Texas but it seems like Texas has the ability to always make me feel yet more grateful.

3 years ago
Posts: 11
true very true
I find your lack of anime disturbing.
3 years ago
Posts: 6
OMG, of course it had to be Texas.
I feel so sorry for that wonderful state, the rules are changing for the worse in the past decade and this is just getting more and more horrible with time, first they give rights of guns inside college campuses and now they prohibit content in order to repress a minority... ugh...

3 years ago
Posts: 23
And on another front, Barefoot Gen was challenged (still is being challenged?) within Japan. In other words, nothing new in the literary front.
http://cbldf.org/banned-challenged-comics/case-study-barefoot-gen
http://cbldf.org/criminal-prosecutions-of-manga/
https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
https://www.thoughtco.com/controversial-and-banned-books-738746
https://epl.bibliocommons.com/list/share/69128707/70680896
https://www.picturingbooks.com/miscellany/banned?start=0
https://lithub.com/the-history-and-present-of-banning-books-in-america/
3 years ago
Posts: 125
My hope for the future grows dimmer every time I hear about this stuff.
This is what leads to civil unrest.

3 years ago
Posts: 43
Very wise move, school is not a place to read such filth.
2 years ago
Posts: 70
I agree they should not be is schools, but it is wrong to ban them from libraries.
2 years ago
Posts: 20
Well, I'm certainly far from Texas, but it seems to me that it's a strange law, but I still think that the school is not a very good place for such books 🙂

2 years ago
Posts: 585
The way I see it, they can try banning whatever they want, if kids want to see it, they will.
It’s not like my high school carried BL, but my classmate brought in a copy of the manga Fake.
And in forums, you’ll see posts from users admitting to be like 12-13 on some of the more graphic BLs.
So, they can try, but ultimately, they won’t remain unseen.
2 years ago
Posts: 20
Yes it's true. If the children want, they will find these books on their own. Here the question is different, the presence of such books at school is like an encouragement. I don't think it should be like this

2 years ago
Posts: 17
That's incredibly unfortunate. I still haven't read either of those manga, but as long as they don't have explicit sexual content, they absolutely need to be in schools, and especially in secondary-level schools, while students are in a crucial period for developing critical thinking skills and should be exposed to a variety of ideas in order to facilitate that growth.
For those who feel that the presence of books like these 'encourages' people to be LGBT, imagine making the same argument about other kinds of books based simply on the characters and the events within each text. Are we 'encouraging' slavery or racism when we include canonical American literature--for example, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn or Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird in our schools? Are we 'encouraging' incest, suicide, or tyrannical rule when we include Shakespeare's Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard III in our school libraries? Are we encouraging murder through Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, vampirism through Dracula, or the reanimation of corpses through Frankenstein? And what about the numerous terrible things that occur in the Bible's Old Testament? I certainly don't think that reading a book is tantamount to becoming its characters or acting out its events irl.
Should young people not be given the opportunity to read such things in order to engage in creative, critical thinking?
But that's just my two cents.
2 years ago
Posts: 1
There's manga in school libraries? My county library barely has any.