Corrupt and Offensive?

Burning books. Ripping off the covers and destroying them. Removing them shelves, ripping them from a person’s hands. Locking them and throwing away the key.

This is what may happen when a book is deemed, “weird,” “freakish,” or “unacceptable.”  I was reading Quill and Quire online, and discovered a blog about a blog (hopefully not too confusing, right?). Derek Weiler wrote about publisher Brian Lam over at Aresnal Press who sent a few books to a convicted man whose sitting in a Texas prison.

The prisoner is a gay male who politely asked if they had any extra copies of gay literary books we could send, in order to help him “forget about the outside world.” He was sent some. One of the titles was called, The Carnivorous Lamb and it was, almost immediately, destroyed. The reason  was that “the publication is detrimental to offenders’ rehabilitation, because it would encourage deviant criminal sexual behavior.”

The Carnivorous Lamb

This quote is in regards to the editorial in the book. It was destroyed “because three pages in the book describe acts of incest between two brothers. But while incest is one of the plot elements in The Carnivorous Lamb, the book is a beautifully written melodrama that is also a stirring indictment of Franco-era fascism in Spain.” Lam writes,

“What I found interesting was that the State of Texas appears to be paying prison authorities to read EVERY PAGE of every publication sent to prisoners (a good use of taxpayers’ money), and that, at least in Texas, the archaic idea that literature WILL (not “may”) encourage DEVIANT CRIMINAL SEXUAL BEHAVIOR is alive and well.”

Just as music creates bombers and gun shooters, books create deviant criminal sexual behaviour. (Does my sarcasm come through?)

What do you think? Ridiculous? Not so much? Tell me why.