“You can't ban a person from coming out as gay or lesbian. But what you can do is challenge a book,” says Juno Dawson, as she explains how her guide for LGBT young people became one of the most banned books in the USA. Dawson’s work, This Book Is Gay, has been restricted in many schools and libraries across different states in the past two years.
Book banning might feel like something out of dystopian fiction from the last century. But in the last two years it has spiked, particularly in America, in a debate that has become so heated that it has even led to threats of violence against schools and libraries. It's come as a surprise to Dawson — when she wrote the book just over a decade ago, it was meant as an uncontroversial (or “PG13”) helping hand for LGBT people to understand their lives.
