By Malinda Lo
Last week, the State Board of Education voted to ban 10 more books from all South Carolina public schools, including my National Book Award-winning young adult novel “Last Night at the Telegraph Club.”
That means South Carolina has now banned 21 books statewide, making it the national leader in state-sanctioned book bans, a dubious distinction.
“Last Night at the Telegraph Club” is a historical coming-of-age novel about a 17-year-old Chinese American girl discovering her identity as a lesbian in 1950s San Francisco.
In addition to the National Book Award, it won the Stonewall Book Award, the Asian Pacific American Literature Award, a Printz Honor, a Walter Dean Myers Honor, and dozens more accolades.
And yet South Carolina’s Board of Education has reduced it to a few paragraphs about sex. This is a fundamental misreading of the novel and a gross misunderstanding of the purpose of fiction.
In its decision to ban my novel, the board is following Regulation 43-170, which prohibits any books in schools that include “descriptions or visual depictions of ‘sexual conduct,’” as defined by the state criminal code.
This regulation deliberately sidesteps literary merit and the work as a whole in favor of focusing only on “sexual conduct.”
So, let’s talk about sex. Why is it so bad — so “inappropriate,” in the words of the regulation — for a book to include descriptions of “sexual conduct”?
The main character in “Telegraph Club” is a teen named Lily who is coming to understand her sexual identity during the 1950s, a time in which sexuality was highly repressed.
The scenes in the novel that focus on sexuality are about Lily testing her own freedoms — both emotional and physical. They are about Lily claiming the freedom to be who she is.
Sexuality is a natural part of being human. As a writer, writing about sex and sexuality enables me to engage with questions about what makes us the people we become. It is an essential tool in a writer’s creative toolbox, and it’s one of the best ways we can get up and close and personal with a character and their emotions, desires, and fears.
Reading about sex and sexuality is just about the safest way possible for a young adult to gain insight into what sex means. It is such a complex and important part of life. We cannot become who we are without the freedom to explore our choices in the privacy of our own minds.
That is what reading gives us: the freedom to imagine different possibilities.
I believe it’s that freedom to imagine that is so frightening to those who seek to ban books. Banning books that include descriptions of “sexual conduct” is an attempt to curtail individual freedom in our own bodies and minds.
The 21 books that have been banned in South Carolina all approach sexuality from different perspectives.
Some of them explore sexual freedom and pleasure; others explore more difficult issues such as sexual assault and misogyny. Some, like “Telegraph Club,” are about identity and its connection with sexuality.
None of them are right for every reader, but that doesn’t mean they should be banned from all schools, from kindergarten through high school.
There are plenty of legal arguments for why this regulation is unconstitutional. There are plenty of reasons South Carolina parents should be angry that one parent has been behind most of these book bans.
Why does that one parent get to speak for all of you?
But I’m not a South Carolinian, and I’m not a lawyer. I’m a writer.
I believe these book bans are wrong because they attempt to limit our freedom to imagine different possibilities. We can’t be fully human without that freedom.
Malinda Lo is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, including most recently “A Scatter of Light.” Her novel “Last Night at the Telegraph Club” won the National Book Award, the Stonewall Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Printz Honor, and was an LA Times Book Prize finalist. Her books have received 15 starred reviews and have been finalists for multiple awards, including the Andre Norton Award and the Lambda Literary Award. She lives in Massachusetts with her partner and their dog.
