Destroying homophobic books

Archive: Richard Evans Lee

Booksellers - despite what some folks think - aren't librarians. We can trash any book we want.

I've destroyed or tossed books into the trash rarely. Most of the unwanted books go on the porch, you can give us a quarter or steal them. As long as you make them go away we don't care.

A few bad books on Nietzsche I've ended the life of. Before he became a postmodern superhero I greatly grudged the old nonsense that had been written of him and the bad translations.

I'll sell the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is more likely to be bought by a student of anti-Semitism than an anti-Semite.

We'll buy and sell almost any Christian book: scholarly simple-minded. As an atheist I get a sardonic giggle out of selling Fundamentalist trash. Even though I know they are conservative and probably hateful and nasty I assume it is so widely directed that I don't worry about it. But.

Big but.

When I find I've bought a book by something like Focus on the Family I throw the book in the garbage can. Happily pansexual queer that I am I won't sell anything that I know is tainted with homophobia. Nobody would ever think I'm gay so nobody has ever called me faggot! My daddy aside I've never had a personal encounter with homophobia. Not in over thirty years as an openly gay man.

But many gay men that I've cared for or know have. It is my personal Unpardonable Sin.

When I noticed I'd unknowingly bought a Focus on the Family book it was instantly routed to the Durham County Dump.

I don't give a damn about family - mine anyway. But some of you probably think it is sad how Family has become a codeword for homophobia.