A Hawaii high school library had a graphic novel available until recently that includes pornographic illustrations of gay sex.
“Gender Queer: A Memoir,” by nonbinary author Maia Kobabe, has been the subject of outrage among parents at schools across the country for months.
Even now, some school libraries house the book, including until recently Waianae High School in Honolulu, which only pulled the book last month after parents complained. Before that, the book was available for checkout by Waianae High’s more than 1,700 students.
“Gender Queer” includes illustrations of sex between two males with a sex toy, oral sex, masturbation, and other sexually explicit content.
Hawaii’s education department said the book was pulled in December on the same day school administrators became aware of the issue.
“There was only one copy in inventory. The school is reviewing other visual books for inappropriate content, along with its library book selection process. The school appreciates the patience and support shown by its parent community,” the Hawaii Department of Education said in a statement to The Daily Wire.
However, one mom whose daughter attends Waianae High said that when the issue was brought to the attention of school officials, they initially responded with “apathy.”
“It feels like I’m standing in a crowded room yelling, FIRE, and no one looks up,” the mom told The Daily Wire in December.
“This has made the scales fall from my eyes. In my own naïveté I assumed that Hawaii was somehow insulated from issues that I see occurring on the mainland. Never had I imagined that such insidious agendas were being co-opted and put into effect by our largest and most trusted institutions,” she said.
“Ultimately what I would like to see happen is accountability; specifically detailing how these books are chosen, by whom, and why. I need to understand how this type of literature made its way from being hailed by public interest groups to subsequently being paid for and stocked in a public high school,” she said.
The local schools often repeat slogans like “learning starts at home,” “you are your child’s first teacher,” or “you are your child’s best advocate,” but meanwhile they are “actively circumventing parents,” she said.
The mom added that if she could find an attorney who would represent her, she would sue immediately.
Meanwhile, nearly 20% of Hawaii’s high school students are not on track to graduate after remote learning during the pandemic took its toll on their academic performance.
“We’re seeing a deficit in, not just skills, but even them being able to socialize with each other. Them coming back to school, our first quarter, there was a lot of just social-emotional learning,” said Waianae High School Principal Ray Pikelny-Cook last month.
Waianae High is not the first public school where “Gender Queer” has appeared suddenly.
On the mainland, the book has popped up in other schools across the U.S., outraging parents who have demanded it be removed, sometimes successfully.
In Texas, Keller Independent School District near Fort Worth removed the book after a parent’s tweet calling it “legitimate visual porn” garnered attention. However, parents failed to get the book removed from the library at Canutillo High School in El Paso. The book was pulled but later returned to the library after an official review.
In South Carolina, the presence of “Gender Queer” at a high school caused such an outcry that the Republican governor directed the state’s education department to pull the title from schools last year, calling it “obscene and pornographic.”
Gov. Henry McMaster also told the department to “investigate” how the book ended up at a South Carolina high school and referred the matter to law enforcement, saying its presence in schools was “likely illegal” under state law.
Supporters of the book argue that the obscenity bans hurt LGBT readers and students of color. One advocate wrote that “Gender Queer” is “far from pornographic” even though it includes a “momentary depiction of strap-on oral sex.”
Other books with LGBT themes have also been denounced by parents for pornographic content, including “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison. That title sparked a contentious school board meeting in Leander Independent School District north of Austin during which a mother pulled out a pink dildo to make her point.
In North Carolina, “Lawn Boy” was allowed to remain on the shelves at Wake County Public Libraries after the county received complaints about it. “Gender Queer” was also the subject of a complaint and was removed from the library system last year, but the book was returned to shelves earlier this month.