[Serious] That Trans Thread

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com...index.html

(CNN) A school board member in Florida wants someone to be criminally prosecuted for allowing a young-adult memoir for Black queer boys on school library shelves.

Children's books have come a lonnng way since I was child, reading for pleasure from age 8. Read a lot of comics.

Our choices were limited to authors such as 'Captain' W E Johns  and his Biggles books.*** Or Enid Fucking Blyton with her Secret Seven and Famous Five series. Both series were about small groups of white, privileged  bourgeois English brats. 

Thank goodness for Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe.

From about age 12 my  solution was to read books meant for adults. If I couldn't understand it, dropped it and got another book. Mum and dad read three books a week each, so there was usually something to look at.. I really liked H Rider Haggard. There were also some terrific history books in the school library. My favourite was about the voyage made by Captain Bligh after the Bounty.  In an open long boat, he made his way to Timor . An epic voyage of 4000 miles.  Gives a very different view of Bligh and the low life Mutineers.

Today the range of books on offer for kids is mind boggling.   


ADDENDUM: I read "another Country" by James Baldwin when I was about 16. It was very touching and a revelation to a naive Catholic schoolboy. . The issue of male gays in Australia at that time was to demonise and criminalise gays , then to ignore the whole thing and hope it would go away.

The topic of female gays rarely if ever came up. I read 'The Well Of Loneliness' in my late 20's, after my beloved sister came out.



***removed from many school libraries in latter days because Biggles' relationship with  his friend Ginger was considered a bit gay.