The
Montana library commission’s rejection of the ALA isn’t limited to what it is saying about Drabinksi; it’s about sending a message of rejection to young
people in the state who are like her. In June, the month before the vote, the
Montana library commission fired a public relations firm after
rejecting the new commission logo it designed, simply because some members of
the commission thought the logo looked like a Pride flag, which
they claimed would
inevitably foster a “firestorm” of backlash. That the commission exited
the ALA as it did, Drabinski said, was “like an attack on queer people in the
state of Montana, with the library as a proxy in that fight.”
Though this movement was first shorthanded as an organized effort to ban books, the forces that
quickly arrayed themselves always intended to go substantially further, all the
way to an attack on the existence of public libraries themselves. What is now
evident is that it was always conceived as a witch hunt, one that is
blatantly reviving anti-Communist rhetoric—a Marxist,
in the library!—redolent of the anti-gay panic that was entwined within the twentieth century’s infamous Red Scare in the United States. The Lavender Scare,
also a product of the Cold War, revolved around associating homosexuality with
threats to national security, marking gay and lesbian members of the federal workforce in particular as vulnerable to
espionage. As Senator Joe McCarthy put the unified theory of vilification to reporters, “If
you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be either a Communist or a
cocksucker.”
One
lesson from that period stands out. So many people were tagged as a Marxist or
a Communist or an anarchist—or as queer or trans—that it didn’t require the
accuser to be accurate. Refuting such a charge didn’t matter; the point was to
create the conditions for the absolute suspicion of others, to force people
into the position of denouncing these “others” as those people, the
threat. What does it mean today to call a lesbian a lesbian, or a
Marxist a Marxist, when one might think those words just don’t carry the
same charge they did during the mid-twentieth century? Rest assured, it is the same
now as it ever was: to force people to distance themselves from those “others”
and to force these accused undesirables to live in a state of suspicion and
threat.
Perhaps what’s also behind this present revival of the Red and Lavender Scare
at the public library is that the truth is right in front of us. Libraries are
a place where queer and trans kids might feel freer. Libraries are like a kind of social collider: a space intended for people to freely cross
paths with ideas and others unlike themselves. Libraries are tools for
getting people the things they need and want for free. It’s
these truths that demand our defense.