Gay Penguins Star At 27th Annual Banned Books Week
THE 27th annual Banned Books Week, organised by the American Library Association, seeks to focus attention on books that have been banned.
The facts are that since 2001 “bans on 3,736 books and other materials have been requested.”
Requested by whom? Gordon Brown would quite like the Sun to be banned. But the Sun is not top of the hit list. The BBC does not say who made the requests, only that they were recorded:
In recent years, Tango Makes Three – based on a true story and centring on gay penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo – has had the most ban requests.
It was a time of penguins… While the polar bears get all the limelight and the fame, penguins are ignored and hated. Once penguins were the face of delicious chocolate-coated biscuits, but then society rallied against fat and penguins were shunned. Batman was right, they cried. But it’s not just fat-haters who loathe penguins. As the BBC reports:
Reasons given by organisations and individuals for their requests to get it removed from public shelves, include “anti-ethnic, anti-family, homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group”.
No mention of plain age-old hatred of penguins. No mention of Old Mr Anorak’s tome Penguins – Jews Of The Animal Kingdom.
The San Francisco Public Library event will be authors and musicians Ben Fong-Torres, Richie Unterberger and Roy Zimmerman.They plan to stage a number of performances and defend controversial books.
Anorak will be staging its own protest at the Holborn Library this afternoon, handing out copies of Penguins Wives and Penguins In Love (a pop-up book) to all passing children…
Posted: 1st, October 2009 | In: Reviews Comments (2) | TrackBack | Permalink
