The Stonewall Library and Archives, a collection of gay-themed materials that was the subject of political controversy two years ago, celebrates its grand opening in Fort Lauderdale on Thursday.
”When I showed the materials to the city attorney, he said it was likely hard-core pornography,” Naugle said at a 2007 City Commission meeting, one of many comments he made that angered gay activists. “I feel troubled a city building would be housing materials with content we have arrested people for in the past.”
Not unusual
For Fort Lauderdale, at least. Its probably second only to San Francisco when it come to the size of its gay community.
The sort of thing that is being described as “hard core porn” the speech above is more like what is shown in many heterosexually oriented fashion magazines, but when seen through certain eyes is interpreted as being “porn”. It is really no more or less pornographically oriented than thousands of other books and magazines than are already in many library systems collections already.
funny this should come up
I had a feeling that Norma’s bee-filled bonnet about “gay porn” given away in the lobby of her local library was something like this. The sort of “it’s dirty if it’s two dudes” kind of thing.
Weak.
Nothing that can be actually classified as
hard core pornography ends up in a public library collection.
I have seen these sort of arguments in every library I ever worked at.
The one I mentioned in Westchester County, New York has a website and the entire “gay oriented” website which was declared “pornographic” by the local right wing religious extremists was simply a news journal run and owned by a local businessman for the gay community. It was banned by the mayor from the lobby of the public library as being pornographic, when the only thing that he really objected to was that the paper came out against this mayor in his campaign for re-election, supporting his Democratic opposition.
The religious right simply assigns the term “pornographic” to these free newspapers because they are written for and by the gay community and they advocate for gay rights. The simply fact that the religious right beleives that homosexuality it sinful makes even advocating for gays “pornographic”. When a small but vocal minority of right wingers demanded these items be removed from the lobby of the library, the monthly meeting of the board that dealt with formal materials complaints met and a body of six professional librarians along with citizen members of the library board and friends scrutinized the complete contents of these items looking for anything that could be considered remotely pornographic and never found anything that one could not find in a copy of Glamour magazine, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal or even the local daily newspaper.
Things like “personal’ sections of the classified ads are deemed “pornographic” by these people simply because they have headers reading “men looking for other men” or “women looking for other women” simply because they are gay oriented.
Also this paper gave listing of recent gay marriages and civil unions entered into by local residents who went to other states to have them performed. This also was placed into the classification of “pornography” by the local right wing keepers of the public morality.
These people have been on the wrong side of every social debate in America for well over 200 years, and its not unusual that the same people who opposed womens sufferage, civil rights for blacks, the ending of slavery, modern medicine, etc, also oppose the latest round of rights for another minority.
Hard core gay porn?
I hope that means hot lesbians.