The Novel Under Trial: Obscenity Trials and School Boards

Note: This was originally written as my capstone paper for my English degree. The only modifications made to it include proofreading, fixing minor redundancies, changes related to adapting this to my blog, and formatting.

On August 19th, 1928, Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness was hit with a scathing review that ultimately led to its ruin. This review, written by James Douglass, read “I would rather put a phial of prussic acid in the hands of a healthy girl or boy than the book in question… What then is to be done? The book must be at once withdrawn.” (John-Stevas, 99). This led to the novel being subject to an obscenity trial, which resulted in it being withdrawn from its publisher, and all existing copies were ordered to be destroyed due to Lord Campbell’s Act (John-Stevas, 100). According to the Magistrate of the trial, the issue with the novel did not lie within the content, but rather the effect it would have on its readers, as he states “The test is whether it is likely to deprave or corrupt those into whose hands it is likely to fall.” (John-Stevas, 101). The power of a novel’s influence on its reader has been a concept of great controversy for a long time. To the bodies that enact censorship, this power has the ability to corrupt or change the reader’s beliefs, personality, and even sexuality. With this language, The Well of Loneliness becomes something akin to a cursed object, a piece of propaganda aiming to convert its readers to sexual inversion (this is the term Radclyffe Hall herself used at the time). It is almost akin to the unnamed book about a young Parisian that Dorian Gray reads in The Picture of Dorian Gray, where it is described as an object that he could not free himself from, an immoral book that exists in paradox to the introduction that Oscar Wilde wrote for the novel claiming that there is no such thing as an immoral book. Yet, The Picture of Dorian Gray was used to prove his homosexuality. Nearly a century later, many works of literature are being banned in local settings for this supposed ability of literature to transform the reader.

On the subject of book bans in the current day, there currently aren’t any examples quite as extreme as the banning of The Well of Loneliness, but there has been a massive influx in books being banned from schools and public libraries. According to the American Library Association, there were 470 removal requests in the year 2021 alone (Kim, 62). Many of these bans are focused on books that promote “critical race theory” (which less refers to the actual meaning of the term and generally is a catch all for any book that even mentions racism or includes characters of color) or that can potentially “groom” an assumed child reader into becoming queer. The most extreme example of book banning that can be seen in recent history is Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which at the time of writing prevents teachers from assigning books that cover LGBTQ+ topics in any way. Initially, this bill was more strict and outright banned teachers from stocking LGBTQ+ books in their classrooms or even discussing the subject with their students at all, which included circumstances such as a gay teacher offhandedly mentioning a same-sex partner or asking students for their pronouns (Assunção). It is impossible to find out how many books were impacted by this bill, both in its current and previous incarnations, but it is safe to say that the implications of its existence will have long-standing effects on how LGBTQ+ topics are discussed and taught in Florida. PEN America and Penguin Random House eventually took Florida’s school districts to court for banning books that these entities had published, and a notable author that was involved in the case was George M. Johnson, whose memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue was affected by these bans (Nguyen). This was not an outlier case for Johnson, as their book is among the most frequently banned books in America. The reasoning given for the banning was the inclusion of sexual content, which led to the book being labelled as pornography, despite the fact that the sexual content that is in this memoir is included both to explore sexual assault and give the intended audience of young teenagers the language to speak of it, but also a means to explore queer sexuality in college.

The conflation of sexual content within a work of fiction and pornography is an old, long-lasting accusation. Porn is often very vaguely defined, and fraught with value judgements. It is often understood as sexual content intended to titillate the viewer, and the most serious criticisms of it portray the viewer as a sexually deviant male, with accusations of appealing to pedophiles being a common rhetoric. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was infamously labelled as pornography due to including a graphic scene of child sexual assault, a judgment made ignoring the disturbing context of that moment. It is not, however, a conflation made solely by conservative parties. Books depicting lesbian content certainly were more judicially targeted than other books having sexual or romantic content, but the numerous court cases set a precedent for lesbian books to be targeted during the feminist anti-pornography movement (Trub). Lesbian publications such as Sinister Wisdom, Tribad, and Amazon Quarterly faced criticism from groups such as Women Against Pornography (WAP) and Women Against Violence in Pornography in Media (WAVPM) despite the fact that in all of these publications, queer women were most likely the target audience (Trub). The reactionary language and rhetoric against pornography by groups like WAP and WAVPM arguably has echoes in language used by Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) against transgender people. All three of these groups often claim to speak for “all women” despite frequently facing criticism from women of color and the LGBTQ+ community, especially queer women, and therefore aid conservative parties in furthering censorship onto works by these minorities. The way TERFs speak of transgender women in particular is disturbingly similar to the rhetoric that WAP and WAVPM used against lesbians. Masculinity, in a vague sense, is framed as degenerate and dangerous, while a distinctly white femininity is upheld as ideal and in need of protection. When facing criticism from an exasperated lesbian calling her a ‘cocksucker,’ WAP member Susan Brownmiller retorted “see, she even dresses like a man,” and later defended her comment by stating “fashion is very political… I was trying to make a political statement” (Stub). The implication here is that pornography is a corruptive form of media that influences the viewer to be more likely to enact violence upon women, and that this violence can also be perpetuated by women, bringing them closer to masculinity. Masculinity as violence perpetuates a form of gender essentialism that has repeatedly disallowed transgender women from women’s spaces and demonized transgender men as traitors to the cause of feminism. This rhetoric can be seen in the backlash to Maia Kobabe’s memoir Gender Queer. The memoir even acknowledges this very argument in a brief scene where Kobabe’s aunt harshly questions eir identity. On the spread on pages 194-195, Aunt Shari, who is noted to be a lesbian feminist, refers to identifying as non-binary as a ‘trend’ and states that she feels it comes from a “deeply internalized hatred of women.” With the use of paneling and color, Kobabe clearly and starkly depicts the anxiety e felt when being accused of these things. E uses reds and close ups of facial expressions that portray a great deal of emotion even with the cartoonish art style in a way that stands out given the more muted and calm coloring that eir graphic novel normally uses. Even though Aunt Shari’s comments seem to come from a place of misplaced concern rather than outright transphobia, she still is perpetuating the same harmful rhetoric that groups such as WAP and TERFs have been developing over the last few decades.

During the years 2021 and 2022, Kobabe’s memoir was the most frequently challenged book across the country of the United States. Similarly to All Boys Aren’t Blue, it was deemed pornographic due to two sexually explicit panels which were often taken out of context, with one panel even being accused of being pedophilic simply for depicting an ancient Grecian urn of a younger man having sex with an older man. Extremist groups have accused Kobabe of LGBT indoctrination or using the book as a means to groom minors into undergoing sex reassignment surgery. The content of the memoir does touch on sexuality quite frequently, but mainly in the context of Kobabe trying to figure out eir identity in an honest, straightforward way, and the moments where there is sexually explicit content are few and far in between. Similarly to how the Magistrate of the trial for The Well of Loneliness, Gender Queer was banned not because of the content within its pages, but because of the belief that it could dramatically influence its readers, with the brief sexual content being used as evidence to prove this belief. This is not to say that these accusations would have been correct if Kobabe’s memoir contained more sexually explicit imagery. Eir depiction of sexuality is one of the most important aspects of the work. E explores eir struggle to understand eir sexuality along with eir gender, and how those two concepts interacted in eir own self-actualization. To ignore this context brushes aside the fact that, if not anything else, Gender Queer is a coming of age story. It covers much of the same content that a cisgender, heterosexual coming of age story might take on: early feelings of attraction, development of identity, etc. What makes Gender Queer threatening to the people who attempt to censor it is that it specifically depicts the coming of age of a queer, transgender teenager and eir journey into adulthood. Depiction, in this case, is indoctrination. The coming of age story is of course an evolution of the bildungsroman, a genre that was often used as a guide for younger people to learn how to behave as adults, often reinforcing cisgender, heterosexual modes of being as requirements for living in society. Kobabe’s memoir is deemed too different and non-normative to serve as a guide for queer teenagers, so much so that even the program I am writing this essay on (and have now adapted for this blog!) renders eir pronouns as grammatically incorrect, the autocorrect attempting to change these pronouns to “they,” ironically also a gender neutral pronoun.

Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue thus falls into the same perceived problem, but is compounded with the issue of race. Their memoir also faces similar accusations of pornography and LGBTQ+ indoctrination as Kobabe’s memoir, but it also is haunted by the discourse around critical race theory, and the ways in which the term has been bastardized. Johnson themself is very aware of this, even writing the following author’s note placed at the beginning of the novel:

The subjects that Johnson is alluding to here are racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexual assault, and suicide. All Boys Aren’t Blue, somewhat unlike Gender Queer, explicitly states its target audience as teenagers within the text and is written with this in mind. Johnson does write about extremely heavy topics, but they use relatively casual, easy to read prose throughout the novel to prevent its meaning from being obfuscated from its teenage reader base, sometimes even forgoing subtlety to spell out what they want the reader to take away from specific stories and memories. At the end of the chapter titled “Identity,” where they talk about choosing between the name Matthew and George, due to the former being the name they were mostly called as a child and the latter being their legal name, they spell out plainly why that choice was so important to them, a move that would have been unusual for an adult audience. This practice is likely why All Boys Aren’t Blue was also one of the most frequently challenged books in recent years, because Johnson so plainly wanted to speak to teenage readers, to the conservative eye this was yet another attempt at indoctrination. The book more dangerous than prussic acid in the hands of a child, born again.

The concept of children being in some way especially infallible in their innocence and that they must be protected from anything that may tarnish that purity is nothing new. In the opening chapter of No Future, Lee Edelman writes about the figure of the Child (using his capitalization) as futurity, and posits that queerness is a rejection of bringing futurity to life via reproduction, or literally, a rejection of the Child. He uses this framework to deconstruct conservative and liberal views of reproduction as futurity, and demonstrates the ways that the figure of the Child is used as a thought-terminating cliche for a wide variety of political movements, such as anti-abortion. He writes “In its coercive universalization, however, the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children, serves to regulate political discourse—to prescribe what will count as political discourse—by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never permitted to acknowledge or address.” (Edelman, 11). Acknowledgment of the Child in an argument as a figure rather than a truth is framed as an attack on the Child itself, or as taking the political side against children, whatever that may entail. Edelman notes somewhat sarcastically that the image of the Child must not be confused with the lived experiences of actual children, and this distinction is key to his argument. The universal coercion is that of white heteronormativity and the insistence of the nuclear family unit as a concept worth preservation at all costs.

The claims that I have gone over so far that the discussed texts have been written to convert the readers to queerness obviously have no ground to stand on. The main problem, therefore, is the idea that books hold the power to sway the identity of the reader. When one identifies with a main character, they do not literally become them, but in the state of reading it is difficult not to emphasize with a character that one has full access to the thoughts and feelings of. Taking this experience to an extreme is the only way that the texts I have discussed thus far could be seen as vehicles for conversion, outside of deliberate and malicious misreadings, such as the case of The Picture of Dorian Gray. But the issue is not that these claims are false. What censors have invented to justify book bans are what could be called transformative empathy, or what I would like to call trans-empathy. I am very deliberately using the trans- prefix in reference to a number of terms that it can be applied to. The result of censorship of queer and nonwhite literature is the othering of these groups, an attempt to prevent readers, particularly children, from empathizing with queer characters or people. Censors are afraid of the idea that the Child could be transformed, but also that the Child could emphasize with or understand transgender people, transnational people, etc. Yet, at the same time, the discussed texts do try to generate empathy, perhaps some forms of trans-empathy itself, as part of their goals as works of literature. Reading these books may inspire people to reconsider their sexuality or gender identity, their place in the world, arguably transforming them. Exposing the Child to trans-empathy is perhaps the least violent way to destroy the concept. If one does experience trans-empathy, is that truly a bad thing? Conversion therapy aims to convert queer people to cisheteronormativity through violence, so perhaps one way to escape erasure is to allow the possibility of trans-empathy in the first place.

It is with the rejection of this universal Child figure that the perceived threat of queerness upon children comes into play. The Child, as an assumed white, heterosexual figure, has not faced racism, abuse, or homophobia, the things that Johnson writes of in their memoir, and must not be exposed to such concepts. Children who do face these systematic issues, who are implicitly nonwhite, queer, and victimized, are not the Child, and therefore they do not exist or matter. Edelman uses this basis to note the ways that conservatives are much more responsive to these perceived threats, and therefore retaliate more dramatically.

With the Child as futurity and queerness as a lack of futurity (as it falls outside the heteronormative nuclear family mode of survival), any disturbance to the concept of the Child, meaning discussion of the lived realities of children, is a threat to society as a whole. Any work that seeks to complicate or allow for children to exist outside of the specter of the Child becomes a threat itself, and enacting censorship is not an act of suppression, but rather one of protection from evil. I am using the word ‘evil’ here very particularly, as to side against the Child is framed as an unthinkably immoral act, which when considering the plights of marginalized children has the disturbing implication of non whiteness (blackness in particular considering how many texts have been banned for promoting the vilified version of critical race theory) and queerness being evil. The ultimate end goal of the conservative is to destroy all of which lies outside of the concept of the Child, while the end goal of liberalism is to expand the Child as a concept to encompass diverse children. Both of these end goals ultimately are in worship of this concept, and failure to destroy the Child leaves room for further censorship and erasure. The Child must be corrupted, and that must happen through trans-empathy.

The Picture of Dorian Gray portrays Dorian Gray himself as the Child in Edelman’s words. He begins the novel with a bounty of innocence and youth, and via Henry’s influence he falls into immorality that literally stains his soul. Part of this corruption is even brought on by a book within the story, which “seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.” (Wilde, 137). Henry critically lends this book after the first instance of Dorian noticing that his expression in his portrait had changed to be that of an evil smile, reflective of the uncompassionate way that he broke Sibyl’s heart and drove her to suicide after shallowly rejecting her when she dropped her acting persona and tried to be a real person. Much of The Picture of Dorian Gray is about the intersection between fiction and reality, and how superficiality poisons the way people interact with each other. Henry plants values of hedonism and the value of appearances into Dorian’s head and allows him to indulge himself in his new vices, all with the cold, clinical observation of a scientist studying a disease. Henry, when reading Dorian as the Child being corrupted, is the evil influence outside of the Child. He takes advantage of the ways that fiction can change someone’s perspective and inflicts his worldviews, arguably queer ones in this context, onto Dorian to destroy his futurity, causing the portrait to change and warp as the possibility of Dorian’s ability to continue to the myth of the Child fades away. Here is perhaps a destructive depiction of trans-empathy. As the novel continues, Dorian becomes more and more obsessed with the way his portrait reflects his morality, transforming him more and more into a monstrous figure than the innocent boy he was at the beginning. When trying to destroy the portrait at the end, it results in suicide. Dorian’s transformation then is not trans-empathy, but instead is trans-apathy. He becomes enamored with the idea of beauty and superficiality, taking on the aesthetics of non-normative sexuality without leaving room for the community needed to survive. When he kills Basil, the creator of the portrait, he destroys the person who not only spurred his initial obsession with beauty, but also the only person who refused to link his own queerness with violence. He had been obsessed with Dorian’s beauty, and the fact that Dorian begins the book as a sitter (a word referring to a person who models for portraits or paintings, usually for money) is illustrative of the potential homoerotic bond the two of them had. Being a sitter for a portrait or photograph was at the time of Wilde’s writing very different for men and women. Men often were depicted with the attempt to romanticize or exaggerate their intellect or accomplishments, while women were usually depicted as feminine ideals or virtues (Hager, 204). Basil’s portrait of Dorian itself is unconventional, even subversive, in the way that by having the focus being Dorian’s beauty and youthful innocence, it places him in a feminine, often sexualized mode of depiction. Dorian thus identifies with Basil’s image of him, and the trans-empathy he develops when engaging with the portrait turns him into that very depiction, he sees himself through the homoerotic viewpoint of Basil. It is only when the portrait begins to change that this trans-empathy is destroyed. Dorian states this to Basil directly, saying “You met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks. One day you introduced me to a friend of yours [Henry], who explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished a portrait of me that revealed to me the wonder of beauty.”

When reading this novel as a cautionary tale, its role within the discourse of book bans and queer lives becomes complicated. It becomes a mirror of conservative ideology, yet at the same time it is often recognized as an iconic early example of queer literature. This paradox certainly did not save The Picture of Dorian Gray from controversy at the time of its publication, as it was ultimately deemed an example of Oscar Wilde’s immorality and it has faced bans in the modern day along with the other discussed texts within this essay. Yet, Wilde himself considers the novel to be an autobiographical work, famously stating that each of the major characters represent an aspect of himself. Through this work, he is asking the reader to emphasize with him, not as the person he is believed to be (who he says is Henry) but as the two personas that are presented by Dorian and Basil. Through a strange sense of trans-empathy, he aims to deconstruct a number of the personas he uses throughout his life to ask the reader to look beyond their preconceived notions of homosexuality or sexual deviancy to portray the pain of alienation and how that leads to superficiality as a defense mechanism. But it is an ironic parallel to the ways that queer literature is discussed by censors and the content of its story perhaps foreshadows the reception of The Well of Loneliness. The Child becomes its reader base, Hall becomes Henry, and the novel transforms into that aimless Parisian that Dorian becomes so attached to. Though The Well of Loneliness was not intended to have a younger audience, the possibility of the Child encountering it is what led to the fear-mongering that led to the destruction of the novel’s initial print run.

The Well of Loneliness is a work of fiction, but it is so closely tied to Radclyffe Hall’s life that perhaps it could be a memoir-manifesto in the same way that All Boys Aren’t Blue is. Hall’s goal with her novel was ultimately to challenge its readers to sympathize with the plights of queer women. She establishes Stephen, the main character of the novel, as a lesbian due to the circumstances of her birth, not due to being influenced to be one in some way. She is given a boy’s name due to her parents expecting her to be a boy while her mother was pregnant, and develops a precocious crush on Ms. Collins, the house maiden, at the age of seven. The latter of which is depicted with an almost humorous childish innocence, whereupon discovering that Collins has a knee injury, Stephan begins to pray to Jesus for the ability to take on the pain herself. Collins finds the entire situation to be hilarious, frequently remarking that Stephan is a “queer fish” of a child. The word queer was often used differently at the time that Hall was writing, usually being used to mean “strange” but it did at the same time carry the connotations that it does today as a signifier of being within the LGBTQ+ community, so Hall is employing a clever double meaning with this moment in the text. Sir Phillips, Stephen’s father, is also supportive of her early development of a queer identity, as he comforts her after she witnesses Collins hit a man with a chair after receiving an unwanted kiss by saying “I think I understand Stephen—this thing seems more dreadful than anything else that has ever happened, more utterly dreadful—but you’ll find that it will pass and be completely forgotten—you must try to believe me, Stephen. And now I’m going to treat you like a boy, and a boy must always be brave, remember. I’m not going to treat you as though you were a coward; why should I when I know you’re brave?” (Hall, 24). He then sends Collins away along with the man, and Stephen enters a brief period of grieving. Masculinity here is courage and femininity, or perhaps more accurately for Stephen, conformity, is cowardice. Most importantly, for later in the novel, is that the courage that Stephen needs to cultivate to maintain this gender nonconformity is incredibly painful and isolating. For most of her childhood, adults come in and out of her life, all of them providing support in some way. While Stephen does consider herself a girl, she rejects femininity, wanting to emulate the male role models she has in her life more than the female ones. The fluidity of the people influencing her in her early childhood allows her to expand her mind and live beyond the realm of possibility for women in her time. Stephen’s mother, Anna, is more apprehensive about Stephen’s early gender nonconformity as she cannot relate to her daughter as she reaches adulthood, and when Stephen is outed as a lesbian when her affair with Angela is exposed by Ralph via letter, she casts her out of the family home. It is in adulthood that her gender nonconformity is seen as a threat rather than bravery. Stephen is told that she is unnatural by her Mother, and there are numerous instances of the idea of homosexuality being natural or unnatural throughout the text. Stephen associates herself with Cain, as a person who was cursed by God, while Puddle, an older woman who was one of her teachers as a child, supports her due to being a closeted lesbian and tells her that she is a natural human being. Puddle teaches Stephen trans-empathy by being vulnerable enough to discuss her own homosexuality, allowing Stephen to emphasize with her as a basis of her own identity.

The idea of homosexuality being natural rather than perverse is the main criticism that The Well of Loneliness received from censors. A passage from a letter from the Director of Public Prosecutions written to the Home Office (whose name is not included in the document) reads “The book has been widely and favourably reviewed in the Press (see the numerous reviews forwarded to the Home Office by the publishers). It is described (see “Times” Literary Supplement) as sincere, courageous, high-minded, and beautifully expressed. The fact however remains that it is in effect, as described in another review, a plea not only for toleration but for the recognition of sexual perversion amongst women.” (The National Archives). Though the word used by this letter is perversion rather than unnatural, the use of both of these words has historically been similar, in some contexts they can be interchangeable. Both of them have been defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as being contrary to moral standards of goodness within the time period of the early 1900’s, and it is Hall’s plea that being an invert (using her language) is not a moral slight. Though the use of the word invert to refer to queer people is certainly outdated today, it is not inconsequential that she chose to use invert over the term that the letter uses, which is homo-sexualist. “Homo-sexualist” was often used in a derogatory manner, and had a close correlation with the concept of sexual perversion or degeneracy, while invert, at the time, was a much more neutral term. Invert can be defined in a number of different ways, especially at the time that The Well of Loneliness was written, but it is possible that Hall used it due to its meaning within psychology being “a person with sexual feelings or other psychological characteristics regarded as contrary to those considered normal or typical for their sex, or as characteristic of a person of the opposite sex” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The term is deeply steeped in the pathologization of homosexuality, but Hall likely found comfort in it due to it validating her argument that being queer was a natural concept. Within this framework, there is no possibility of conversion or ‘indoctrination’ into being queer. The definition does use words such as ‘contrary’ to denote that homosexuality isn’t deemed normal or common, but it is certainly less harsh than other terms used to define queerness. The Well of Loneliness does not shy away from the painful aspects of queer life. Societal homophobia breaks down Stephen’s self-worth, prevents her from forming connections and friendships, and drives her to separate herself from her second lover, Mary, in an attempt to spare her from the harshness of homophobia. Homophobia, time and time again, is compared to God’s mark on Cain within The Well of Loneliness. When Jamie commits suicide after her lover’s death, Stephen’s psyche is permanently altered into rage and despair over her identity. “Stephen would again and again go over those last heart-rending days with Barbara and Jamie, railing against the outrageous injustice that had led to their tragic and miserable ending. She would clench her hands in a kind of fury. How long was this persecution to continue? How long would God sit still and endure this insult offered to His creation? How long tolerate the preposterous statement that inversion was not a part of nature? For since it existed what else could it be? All things that existed were part of nature!” (Hall, 468-469).

Radclyffe Hall, Oscar Wilde, George M. Johnson, and Maia Kobabe are all authors that utilize trans-empathy to combat queerphobic rhetoric that places them as the enemies of the Child. The push back against literature written by and about queer people has continued to face censorship fueled by the rhetoric of protecting children from danger, and this practice will likely continue. However, by embracing the potential of trans-empathy, discussions of the ways that readers engage with these works of literature can evolve beyond the narratives that censors have placed upon them. The belief that books can transform the reader is true in ways that lead to self discovery via empathy and understanding, but not in the poisonous way that censors imply. This understanding is needed in order to resist the language and arguments that perpetuate queerphobia and racism towards marginalized authors.

Bibliography

- Assunção, Muri. “Florida Rolls Back Key Provisions of ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Law.” Daily News. 2024. https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/03/12/florida-dont-say-gay-settlement/

- Edelman, Lee. “No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.” Duke University Press. 2004.

- Hager, Tamar. “The Quest for the Lost Story: Feminist Reading of Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Mountain Nymph Sweet Liberty.’” Women’s History Review, vol. 27 no. 2. 2018. pp 199-220

- Hall, Radclyffe. “The Well of Loneliness.” Covici Friede Publishers. 1928.

- Johnson, George M. “All Boys Aren’t Blue.” Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2020.

- John-Stevas, Norman St. “Obscenity and the Law.” Secker & Warburg. 1956.

- Kim, Robert. “Banning Books: Unlawful Censorship, or within a School’s Discretion?” The Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 103, no. 7, 2022, pp. 62–64. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27158570. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.

- Knox, Emily J. M. “Silencing Stories: Challenges to Diverse Books.” The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, vol. 3, no. 2, 2019, pp. 24–39. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48645178. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.

- Kobabe, Maia. “Gender Queer: A Memoir.” Oni Press: Lion Forge Comics. 2019.

- McCleery, Alistair. “Banned Books and Publishers’ Ploys: The Well of Loneliness as Exemplar.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 43, no. 1, 2019, pp. 34–52. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.43.1.03. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.

- Nguyen, Sophia. “PEN America and Penguin Random House Sue Florida School District Over Book Bans.” The Washington Post. 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/05/17/pen-america-penguin-random-house-lawsuit/

- Salzman, Dylan. “The Constitutionality of Orthodoxy: First Amendment Implications of Laws Restricting Critical Race Theory in Public Schools.” The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 89, no. 4, 2022, pp. 1069–112. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27221576. Accessed 20 Feb. 2024.

-Wilde, Oscar. “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Project Gutenberg. 1891. Accessed 20. Feb. 2024.

- “Re: Well of Loneliness.” The National Archives (The United Kingdom). 1928. Accessed 28. Feb. 2024.

- Trub, Whitney. "Lavender, Menaced: Lesbianism, Obscenity Law, and the Feminist Antipornography Movement." Journal of Women's History, vol. 22 no. 2, 2010, p. 83-107. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.0.0143.