Former President Barack Obama attracted controversy after he penned a letter criticizing books “being challenged by people who disagree with certain ideas or perspectives,” citing books “often written by or featur[ing] people of color, indigenous people, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.”
Several conservative Twitter accounts immediately took the former president to task with examples of LGBTQ+ books frequently challenged for their “pornographic content.”
These accounts highlighted books like Doing It!: Let’s Talk About Sex, Flamer, This Book Is Gay, and Gender Queer: A Memoir, three of which appear on the American Library Association’s list of 2022’s most challenged books because they are “claimed to be sexually explicit.”
According to the PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans, these books have been banned a combined 65 times. PEN America claims Gender Queer is “[t]he most frequently banned book” and “has been called ‘obscene and pornographic’ by the groups who lobby for its removal.”
Conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza offered some insight into why these LGBTQ+ books have so frequently faced challenges:
D’Souza asked the former president whether any of these books “shaped how [he] experience[d] the world:
Conservative account Libs of TikTok, retweeting the letter, asked why the former president would “want your kids to read porn like this in school?”
Conservative commentator Matt Walsh offered a tongue-in-cheek take on the former president’s letter, proclaiming that “Barack Obama has finally come out as gay”:
The conservative Canadian news magazine The Post Millennial also ridiculed the former president’s statement, retweeting his letter with graphic, albeit censored, pictures from Gender Queer:
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