(Image description; A book cover with the DC comics logo on the top left corner. The title reads “Midnighter and Apollo”. Authors and artists are Steve Orlando, Fernando Blanco, and Romulo Fajardo Jr. The cover background is yellow and orange, emanating outward in a circular pattern from the titular characters. Apollo, wearing a white superhero suit with a gold pattern on the front and gold wrist guards, stands above Midnighter, wearing black body armor with a batman-like cowl. Midnighter is hold two battle hammers. End description.)
Book Title; Midnighter and Apollo
Where you might find it; most likely in the adult comics section. It’s possible, technically, that an unwitting librarian may look at it and go “ah, comics, for youths” and shove it in YA. I’m not going to say that would be such a horrible thing, either. It’s definitely for mature audiences, however, and the Adult comics section of a bookstore would be where it could be found. To find in a library, either look in the comics section or, much more likely, Nonfiction under 741.5 (seriously, memorize that one. 741.5 is how some libraries handle ALL comics, which is deeply weird to me but makes sense when you acknowledge that many libraries only had tiny collections of comic books until quite recently.)
Where you might find it short version; In a bookstore, Adult comics. In a library, probably adult nonfiction, call number 741.5
Why I recommend this; In short because it’s technically-not-Batman punching his way through hell to save technically-not-Superman. (Don’t @ me comic book nerds, I barely go here but can see the parallels). A technically-not-Superman who messes with a demon for fun. It’s a comic book about gay lovers who go to bat for each other. It’s not subtle, it’s not deep, but the murder-husbands trope is one that one can enjoy as the fluff it is. (Also the first comic book with queer characters I ever read. I admit, wholeheartedly, to being biased.)
(Image Description; A book cover entitled “The Bravest Knight Who Ever Lived”, written by Daniel Errico, Illustrated by Shilon Penfield. The image on the cover is of a boy holding a wooden sword and wearing armor that is made out of a pumpkin (the chest armor being orange and the helmet being a pumpkin with a square cut out to show his face). In the background there is a red dragon holding two people, both wearing purple and crowns, one a man with a beard, one a woman with long braids. The background is a castle with a rainbow over it. End Description.)
Book Title; The Bravest Knight Who Ever Lived
Where you might find it; In a children’s section. In a public library, probably labeled “E” or “JE”. In a bookstore, with picture books.
Why I recommend; The Bravest Knight Who Ever Lived is a cute, short adventure story of a boy who went on adventures, and chose to be brave. It’s a children’s book, and as such has a pretty solid message about being true to oneself in the face of expectations. But also, it’s just very cute and wholesome.
So the latest of crackdowns on tumblr is unequal, clearly the iOS crowd is getting harder hit than anyone else. But there’s two points that are worth highlighting;
1. The BL tag is gone, not just on iOS, but gone
2. The list of terms being censored heavily hits the lgbtqia+ community, even if the terms aren’t specifically lgbtqia+ terms
Blocking language matters. From what I’ve tested, the thesaurus they’re using is partial at best (I can’t help but wonder whether that’s intentional to keep people around, or if it’s just incompetence and rushing). But this provides a moment of space to consider the language being blocked, and what terms can be used to get around it.
(To those laughing and saying “don’t pander to Apple users! Hell with them anyway!” OR “Lol why are you upset about bl being censored grow up.” Go away, this post isn’t for you. If I have to explain to you why censorship of some hurts all in the long run, then I think this might be a bit high level for you anyway. Come back when you understand queer history better.)
So for the moment, known blocks are mostly on things like boys love (specifically, the BL tag was nuked for all users, and Boys love/girls love appears to be blocked for iOS devices), as well as terms that are more activist oriented, usually around the trans community (terf, transmisogyny, etc.) So the censorship appears to be of 1. representation, and 2. hate that needs to be called out.
So, because this is 1. Only in the tags and 2. Piecemeal as all hell, I can only assume that they are trying to implement a thesaurus against specific banned terms. This is both very hard to do if you don’t have months to create a plan, and more importantly very specific. Which is why Boys Love is blocked and Boy Love is not.
While useful to be able to work around it for now, this isn’t a good thing long term. Thesauri are slow to be implemented, and gradual in how they develop. So while for the moment people are laughing at “girls” being censored, that’s only an issue because this site doesn’t have boolean searching. It has exact tag term search. Which is the only defense users have against censorship, unfortunately. The thesaurus will become more refined and practical as time goes on, that’s just how those work. More terms can be added to the thesaurus as tumblr decides is necessary.
They also may introduce booleans to their search process, making it possible for them to hit multiple things at once (e.g. *BL* OR Boy* Love), which would block all variations of Boy’s love, boy love, anything with bl in it, etc. I’m hoping they don’t do that. (Even if it WOULD fix the search system to be usable, there wouldn’t be anything left to search for after a while.)
So what can be done? Language usage is key to beating a thesaurus. Thesauri are expensive and complicated. I hate to say go back to the FF.net “lemon” days, but that’s essentially it. In group terms that don’t go mainstream have the best chance of getting past censorship. (Think “Friends of Dorothy”, a term that is long enough to be hard to censor, and innocuous enough to not be immediately noticed by tumblr staff.) The thesaurus will catch up eventually, but it’s not impossible to keep ahead of it. Just, a pain to try and do so. (Normally I would suggest using innocuous terms like lemon, but they banned “girls” so, they clearly don’t care about breaking the site usability in order to comply with apple’s nonsense.)
So, it’s not worth much but have a theory as to how this nonsense is going down. Thesauri are powerful tools. They’re also very expensive to maintain and hard to update, so go forth and fight against censorship by coming up with ever more interesting tags.
(Image Description; A superhero domino mask on a white background. In the eye holes are the authors name, Perry Moore. Under it reads “Hero, A Novel”. End Description.)
Book Title; Hero
Where you might find it; This one is a little hard to find, as the author died shortly after writing it. In some libraries it may be in the YA section, but it’s likely to not be in many library systems. There is an ebook, and it can be ordered online or in bookstores.
Why I recommend;
Hero is the story of Thom, a boy whose parents were both superheroes. He discovers he has powers, and on his own seeks to become a hero as well (though he knows his dad wouldn’t want him to). The story focuses on how he learns to understand people, and learns what happened to his family that brought him to that day. There’s a side of him falling in love with a boy he keeps running into. It’s a well written coming of age story, and a queer superhero story that was written a good ten years before mainstream comics caught up with the concept.
(Image description; A book cover that reads “Lynn Flewelling, Luck In the Shadows Book One of the Nightrunner Series. Beneath is a picture of a young man wearing a cloak and holding a dagger while clinging to a roof at night. Behind him there are men on horseback, one in armor, one not. Beneath is a review; “A new star is rising in the fantasy firmament... teems with magic and spine-chilling amounts of skulduggery.” - Dave Duncan, author of the great game. End Description)
Title of book; Luck in the Shadows
Where you can find it; This series is an older one. It’s hard to find paper copies in libraries or in bookstores. However, it’s an item that can be ordered from bookstores easily, and the ebook version is readily available on Overdrive as well as any online book retailer. This book would be in the adult section, usually fiction or fantasy. While aimed at adults, teens probably could read it without issue, though some of the later books get quite a bit darker.
Why I recommend this book;
Luck in the Shadows is the first in a series, and while it’s not terribly queer-focused in the first one, it’s a world where queerness is built into the structure of the world. The incidental nature of queerness compared to the stakes; political intrigues, war, necromancers and other magic, all of which Seregil and Alec must balance as thieves and spies. It’s a fun, well paced adventure story that happens to acknowledge people can be queer (something that becomes must more relevant in later books).
(Image Description; A book cover with an orange background and a grouping of purple hearts forming an even larger purple heart with a black heart in the center. A woman with brown hair and a confused and concerned look on her face, wearing a blue shirt, holds a purple heart. The title reads, “How to be Ace, a memoir of growing up Asexual”. The author is Rebecca Burgess. End description.)
The title of this book; How to be Ace
Where you might find this; A variety of places! It may be in YA, or in a graphic novel section, or in the nonfiction section either under 741.5 (graphic novels) or 306.762 (memoirs).
Why I recommend this book;
Asexuality is an invisible existence. A lack of sexual attraction is hard for people to understand, and this memoir encapsulates the way that knowledge gap can feel when you’re ace better than anything I’ve encountered before.
(Image Description; A book with a green background and a Roman helmet on the cover. The title reads “The Song of Achilles, a novel”. The author is Madeline Miller. A sticker on the cover says “WINNER of the 2021 Orange Prize for fiction. At the top it reads, “New York Times Bestseller”, “Fast, true and incredibly rewarding... a remarkable achievement.” -USA Today, “Mary Renault lives again, ravishingly vivid.” -Emma Donoghue, bestselling author of Ream.” End Description.)
Title of book; The Song of Achilles
Where you can find it in a library or bookstore; Probably in the Adult section in Fiction. Occasionally it will be shelved with young adult novels, but usually not.
Why I recommend this book;
The Song of Achilles is a book that readers go into with their eyes wide open and it still rips your heart out. (Spoilers for the Illiad and the Odyssey) but even knowing that no one but Odysseus makes it home, and that Achilles (who is best known for the fact that he died) did not survive, was not enough to keep me from caring about the characters and their love.
Searching for queer materials in library catalogs can be a bit difficult. As much as I love libraries, I’ll be the first to admit that search interfaces are usually extremely limited in scope, and items may not be easily retrieved with terms familiar to the queer community. However, most library websites today allow you to use boolean searching (almost always housed under “Advanced Search”, which can be extremely useful when finding items. When searching for queer terms, it should be noted, there are a few areas where it’s extremely easy to run into problems.
Booleans are, to put it simply, AND, OR, NOT and other terms that can be used to limit searches to more relevant results. I could write several posts on them, but because this is a queer library blog I’ll instead direct you to other resources that explain them better than I could in this post.
But, if you’re really unwilling to look at those, a TL;DR is, AND searches for the search terms on either side together, OR searches for either (and the results contain items with either, not necessarily both), NOT means exclude the second word, (word*) means that you want all versions of a word (e.g. excit* would give you exciting, excite, excitable, and any other variations), putting quotations around a phrase such as “queer community” ensures the two words will be searched for together, among other more complicated uses that are less likely to apply to your average library catalog.
How does this apply to the theme of this blog?
I’m so glad I asked! So, sometimes when using boolean phrases it can help quite a bit. “Queer community” searched for together is probably going to get more practical results than the search finding instances of both queer and community, as well as the two together. Similarly, (lesbian*) could retrieve more results, having asked for all variations of the word.
But if you look at the aro community, it can be a little more complicated. If you search for (aro*), you might get aromantic, or aromatherapy. Anything that starts with aro is free game because the search system can be severely limited at times. To find materials (using booleans) about aromanticism, you may need to search for (aro OR aromant*) in order to find the same information you can find by typing in (lesbian*).
(Why aromant* specifically? Stemming, is the short answer, and will be talked about another day. Because it won’t find the results you want if you don’t, is the slightly longer and still unhelpful answer that goes back to stemming.)
Similarly ace* will not bring back terribly useful results. Neither will straight searching Ace, given that there is an author named Ace that is extremely popular. (Incidentally, Ace* has the exact same problem, except that it’s just part of a name.) Even though asexuality is commonly shortened to ace, search systems are incredibly literal, so either using the formal term (asexual*) or adding together the informal and more formal term (ace OR asexual*), is required in order to achieve the same goal. In this case, it’s probably better to just go formal, given that even if you narrow it to a subject search you’re still far more likely to get a book about a person named Ace, than about asexuality or materials containing asexual characters.
If you think about other terms in LGBTQIA+, it’s pretty easy to see where there might be other terms that also easily cause confusion with literal searches depending on what version of the word you use.
I’ll be the first to admit, even using booleans correctly, these are the more niche areas of the community and the resources on these subjects are less common in libraries. So it may be that with only a few items available, there’s no need to narrow the search further than a straight search with aromantic, or asexual. It should be noted, however, that boolean searches are applicable throughout most search features these days (so if you happened to want to search for books on asexuality on Google, you might just get better results with this, especially given how many resources use both formal and informal terms for areas of the queer community). Just be mindful that computers can only do what we tell them to, and the English Language is deeply inconvenient in how similar it is to itself.
So go forth with this knowledge! Play around with the advanced search! Then apply booleans to searching everywhere! It can narrow results down more than you think.
(Image Description; In what looks like hand drawn letters, the image reads “Queer Books for Teens”, the letters of queer and books each a different color forming a rainbow, then “for” being smaller and cursive, and teens being large again, but not block form or colored. End.)
Queer Books for Teens is a website that sorts and lists well over a thousand queer books for, as the title would suggest, teens. It allows users to sort by gender, sexual orientation, romantic orientation, ethnicity, religion, genre, location, disability, own voices, middle grade, and the types of endings each books has. It’s a browsing resource, though it does have a search feature.
While there aren’t visible updates in 2021, the last updates listed were 2020, meaning it’s fairly recently up to date. I highly recommend it for anyone who just wants to browse some titles for teens!
(Image Description; A book cover. At the top it reads, “Drawn together by a quest of not their choosing, would they find their true destinies in a fight against spells, swords, and betrayal? TANYA HUFF, The Fire’s Stone.” The Image is of a young man in fantasy-historical clothes, a white puff sleeve covered by a red shirt, blue trousers and leather boots. He is standing on a rock overlooking lava leading up to a mosque-like Castle. The sky is green, and there is a moon in the background. End.)
Title of this book; The Fire’s Stone
Where you might find it; YA, Sci-Fi (if your library has a sci-fi section), Adult Fiction.
Why I recommend; The Fire’s Stone is a classic quest tale. Doom has come to a kingdom, a thief, a prince, and a princess wizard have to go and retrieve a magical object to save everyone. While it may sound formulaic, the characters themselves and their interpersonal dynamics are executed beautifully.
(Image Description; a book cover with the title in bold pink letters, reading “Prince and Knight”. The title splits the frame vertically from the top left to the bottom right. In the top right there is a man in armor leaning against a horse that is wearing blue. The knight is waving to a prince in the bottom left corner. The Prince is wearing a white coat with blue shoulders, a pink shirt, pink pants and a golden crown. He is surrounded by four princesses. From left to right they are wearing pink and blue, blue with a darker blue bow, a deep navy blue with a purple bow, and a light blue with a pink bow. In the bottom right it reads, “Words by Daiel Haack, pictures by Stevie Lewis.” End.)
Title of the book being recommended; Prince and Knight
Where you could probably find this book in a library or bookstore; the Children’s section, JE, J or E (in the libraries I’ve worked in).
Why I would recommend this book; Prince and Knight is a cute story of a prince, a knight, (and a dragon is there too). It's a fairy tale for queer children, and it is no more or less complicated than that.
OverDrive is the most common source for library eBooks in North America. (An oversimplification, but odds are good if your library has an English eLibrary, it’ll be “Powered by OverDrive”.
(Image Description; the OverDrive logo, dark blue letters that are italicized, reading OverDrive, followed by the Rights Reserved symbol. End.)
OverDrive has most of the books and materials that one might find in a library. The regional rights are a bit less cut and dry than physical copies of books (there are some series that are available in Australia, for example, but not the US,) and each library has to purchase their books from the selection available to their area.
Why is this queer library blog talking about this?
Because a lot of queer materials are available on OverDrive. Depending on your library/consortium purchasing, you may be able to find a large number of both fiction and nonfiction on the topic. However, if you were to go to the tagged content, you probably wouldn’t see just how much.
Below, there are four images of subject headings from four different library systems. The Wisconsin Digital Library, the Ohio Digital Library, the Central Texas Digital Consortium, and Bibliotheque Montreal.
Wisconsin
Ohio
Texas
Montreal
(Image Description; Four screenshots of the “Fiction” section from four OverDrive websites, each listing categories and the number of books that can be found through that subject heading. Under LGBTQIA+ in Wisconsin is 2165, in Ohio is 1902, in Texas is 101, and in Montreal is 161. End.)
It should be noted that the comparison of Montreal to partial State-wide systems isn’t a fair one, but it helps demonstrate the range of numbers one might find tagged in a system. Tagged, being the important part. These identifiers aren’t automatically applied by OverDrive, instead those managing the digital libraries have to choose to tag items with subject headings they can be found under. Which means, of course, that while it’s possible there are only about 2000 LGBTQIA+ materials in the Wisconsin Digital Library, it’s extremely probable there are items there that haven’t been sorted into that category.
All of which is to say, if you’re looking at OverDrive, browsing for Queer media and not a whole lot comes up, do not assume that’s all that’s there. When I first started using OverDrive, the number of Queer books sorted out in the system I was using was 3. I still found dozens of books by looking for specific titles.
Which isn’t to say don’t use the subject feature, you’ll find a lot of great books by looking there. Just not necessarily all the materials the library has to offer on the subject.
What then can be done about it?
Unfortunately, this is a case of; if you know what you’re looking for you’re more likely to find it. Certainly encourage your local consortium to improve their organization system if you feel like it. But on a practical level, if you want to find queer novels, or books about queer subjects on OverDrive, it’s probably best to arrive to the site with knowledge in hand. There are, however, many online resources for finding queer books online. (Some of which I may even highlight on this blog eventually!)
TL;DR, OverDrive has wonderful resources, but if you’re looking for a specific subject (such as queer topics) it’s not the best for browsing. However, just because you can’t always easily browse for these items, doesn’t mean they’re not there.
(A/N, Please let me know how I can improve the image descriptions. I’m new to this medium, and while I want to provide the information in the image, I don’t want to overwhelm with information that is to the side of the subject at hand e.g. listing all of the subjects in the image when the point was really just the one. But if it would be better to do so, I’ll write it all out in the future!)
(Image Description; A book cover that reads “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe” in swirling text. Surrounding the text is a design including x-s, question marks in thought bubbles, pens, a sun, a storm, a day of the dead skull and blankets in a style found in Latin America. Below this there is a red truck overlooking a field and some hills, underneath which it reads “American Book Award Winner Benjamin Alire Sáenz”. End Description.)
Title of Book being recommended; Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.
Where you can probably find this in your local library or bookstore; the YA section.
Why I recommend this;
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is a coming of age story of two boys, each having their own family dynamics to sort out and realizations about themselves to come to terms with. The prose in the novel is very careful, as one would expect of a poet (which Benjamin Alire Sáenz is.) And though it falls into the YA category, some themes within the story being a little harsh for younger children, I would heartily recommend it to adults as well as teens. It speaks to social and cultural issues that many people deal with, and that this novel gives the care and respect it deserves.
