It Took Me 25+ Years to Realize I'd Earned the "Banned Author" Badge

There are some milestones you expect in a writing life.

You imagine the first time you see your words in print. The first time someone tells you that something you wrote mattered to them. Maybe, if you're lucky, the first time you sign a book.

"Banned author" was not on my list.

And yet, sometime over the last twenty-five years, I apparently earned that badge. I didn't realize it at first, even though I got occasional updates about the anthology and public readings when the book launched. I might have also gotten notification about the book’s banned status post-launch in 2010. However, I was a new mom then and totally immersed in postpartum stress and many a sleepless night for the extension of such a book status to dawn on me. So it took more than two decades for me to realize this — I’m a BANNED author!

Back in 2000, I contributed to Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, edited by Amy Sonnie. At the time, I was simply honored to be included. The anthology brought together young and queer voices that were too often ignored: youth of color, working-class youth, trans youth, disabled youth, young people whose stories rarely made it onto shelves, into classrooms, or into the broader cultural conversation.

We weren't writing because we imagined ourselves becoming controversial. We were writing because we exist.

We wanted to say: we are here.

We wanted to say: our lives are real.

We wanted to say: perhaps another young person, somewhere, might feel a little less alone after reading these pages.

When you're young, especially when you're queer, there is often an enormous pressure to make yourself smaller. To edit yourself before anyone else has the chance. To sand down the parts of you that seem inconvenient, difficult, or too visible.

Anthologies like Revolutionary Voices did the opposite. They handed us a microphone and said: don't shrink.

So I wrote.

Then life happened. Years passed. Careers changed. The world changed.

And somewhere along the way, I learned that Revolutionary Voices had been banned or removed from libraries and schools in at least three states.

Three states.

I had to sit with that for a minute.

Because on the one hand, it sounds almost absurd. I don't think of myself as a dangerous person. I am not smuggling contraband across state lines. I am not plotting revolution from a secret underground bunker. I wrote an essay for a queer youth anthology.

Apparently, that was enough.

There's a strange, dark humor in realizing that you are, technically, a banned author. It feels a little like receiving an award you never applied for.

No ceremony. No plaque. No embossed certificate.

Just the quiet knowledge that somewhere, in some school district or library meeting, a group of adults looked at a book containing your words and decided that young people should not be allowed to read it.

That is both surreal and deeply sad.

Because the people who lose the most when books are banned are not the authors.

We already lived those stories.

The people who lose are the readers.

The teenager secretly searching for proof that they are not broken.

The kid sitting in the back of the library, trying to understand themselves.

The young person who has never seen anyone like them in a book before.

The student who is learning that the world is larger, more complicated, and more beautiful than they have been told.

When I think about my younger self, I think about how desperately I needed evidence that other people like me existed. Not polished, perfect people. Real people. Confused people. Angry people. Hopeful people. People still figuring things out.

That is what Revolutionary Voices offered.

It wasn't dangerous because it taught young people to be queer.

Books do not work that way.

It was dangerous because it taught young people that they were not alone.

And perhaps that has always been what frightens people most.

Isolation is easier to control.

Silence is easier to manage.

A young person who believes they are the only one is easier to shame.

However, once someone sees themselves reflected in a story, something changes. Once they know there are others, once they know there is language for what they feel, once they know there is a history and a community and a future waiting for them, it becomes much harder to convince them they should disappear.

That is why books matter.

That is why banned books matter even more.

I don't say that because being banned magically transforms a book into a masterpiece. It doesn't. A banned book can be brilliant, flawed, messy, earnest, awkward, uneven, raw.

Book bans, however, reveal something important. They reveal which stories are still considered threatening.

And for far too long, stories by queer people, especially queer young people, have been treated as though our existence itself is inappropriate.

There is another layer to this for me, too.

Twenty-five years ago, if you had told me that I would someday think of myself as a "banned author," I probably would have laughed. Not because I thought it impossible, but because I had never imagined that my words might matter enough to scare anyone.

Now I think maybe that is the wrong way to look at it.

Maybe the point isn't that our words are frightening.

Maybe the point is that our words are powerful.

Powerful enough to reach someone.

Powerful enough to survive.

Powerful enough that, despite every attempt to remove them from shelves, they continue to find their way into people's hands.

Books have always traveled farther than the people who wrote them.

Somewhere, right now, there is probably a copy of Revolutionary Voices on a shelf. Maybe in a library. Maybe in a used bookstore. Maybe tucked under a teenager's bed.

Maybe someone is opening it for the first time.

Maybe they will find my words there.

If they do, I hope they know this:

You are not alone.

You never were.

Most importantly, you are loved.

You MATTER.

And if being part of helping someone feel that way earns me the banned author badge, then I will wear it.

Proudly.