Don’t say gay? Don’t say anything.
If you’re an American with a pulse, you’re surely aware that Florida just passed a controversial bill that would prohibit schoolteachers from “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity.” Critics of the bill say it is targeted at the LGBTQ+ community, painting innocuous descriptions of queer love or the simple experience of being trans as indoctrination. Given the politics of its backers — Republicans, one and all — and the un-ironic use of phrases like “woke gender ideology,” the critics are almost surely right.
The law targets the youngest students in kindergarten through third grade classrooms, but also includes a pretty broad clause that prohibits the teaching of gender identity and sexual orientation “in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” It then empowers parents to sue schools that violate their ideas on what that constitutes.
The thing is, heterosexuality is a sexual orientation and being cisgender is a gender identity. There’s a massive amount of curriculum featuring both. By the “Don’t say gay” bill’s own logic — and language — that material is equally guilty of indoctrination. Sorry, we literally don’t make the rules here: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his cronies do. Maybe they didn’t take into account that simply being social defaults doesn’t exempt heterosexuality or a cisgender identity from their proper categorizations.
Now, the fact is that many people exist who are not straight or not cisgender despite being constantly exposed to literature that reinforces these defaults. That does seem to indicate that cultural material doesn’t influence sexuality or gender in the way our friends in Florida think it does, but that’s neither here nor there.
So let’s be really safe. Instead of entering into a sprawling, endless culture war over books, we’ve come up with a simple way for Floridians to resolve this bit of legislative hypocrisy: ban it all.
That’s right, ban straight sexual relationships and cisgender gender norms from school materials, too. If the goal is to keep kids from being exposed to ideas that might lead them to believe certain sexual relationships and gender expressions are okay, it’s really the only way.
Right off, we’re going to have to strike any children’s books with mommies and daddies, but why stop there? Why should schools expose any impressionable minors to ideas that might make them gay, straight or anything in between? There’s going to be a lot of “Fahrenheit 451” reenactment to do, but we figured we’d do our part by sifting through a particularly fraught genre: the high school summer reading list.
As it is, not passing the Bechdel test is pretty much an unwritten requirement, so these books are already a veritable thicket of hypermasculinity and graphic descriptions of heterosexual sex. Here are a few suggestions of what to start the burn pile with.
‘1984’
Sorry, but everyone’s favorite anti-Soviet novel to incorrectly cite in debates about whether Twitter constitutes a public forum has got to go. Sure, it might have some important and — given the bill that prompted this piece — still-relevant ideas about the risks of state censorship, but our boy Winston does the dirty with not one but three different women over the course of the book. One is even in the context of prostitution, and another in the context of an affair.
Even if it were safe for kids to be taught about heterosexuality, is that really how we want them to learn about it? That you can get so upset about someone reading your journal that you hire a sex worker and seduce a porn producer? It’s straight up straight deviance!
‘Othello’
Okay, obviously “Twelfth Night” isn’t going to survive the “Don’t say gay” part of things here, what with the wacky gender-swapping twins subplot, but once you apply the strict interpretation of the bill, neither is any of the bard’s other stuff. Especially “Othello”! I mean, “the beast with two backs”? Really? We’re going to let this creepy old bald dude describe sex positions to minors?
On the other hand, given how much the contemporary American right loves talking and thinking about cuckolding, “Othello” might be right up their alley.
Either way, the book’s fundamental premise — that men and women get married and inevitably cheat on each other in increasingly dumb and confusing ways — is a strikingly precise definition of heterosexuality that we can’t be exposing children to.
‘The Odyssey’
Whew! Where to even begin with this one? I guess at the end, where Odysseus and his son Telemachus engage in a little father-son bonding by killing something like 100 guys who think Odysseus is dead and are trying to steal his wife. Rewinding a bit from this astonishing orgy of macho violence, we’ve also got to square all this Odysseus’s defending of his honor with the fact that the dude spread his seed pretty widely while he was zipping around the four corners of the earth. There is, of course, the minor goddess Circe, with whom Odysseus had not one but three sons — pretty impressive considering he spent exactly one year with her. Even when he finally came to his senses and realized that living in sin with a not-even-major goddess who had turned his loyal crew into swine was maybe not the move, he was not done wandering. And we’re talking about his eye here, not his odyssey.
Next up was the nymph Calypso. At least his crew was dead this time, so they didn’t have to get transmogrified for the minor crime of cock-blocking. Anyway, to be fair to our fair hero, Calypso bewitched him with song, keeping him on the island for seven years, after which she gave him tools to build a boat because his patroness Athena pulled rank to set him free. Anyway, this is his last stop before heading home to Ithaca, and he spends it crying on promontories, being sad about being separated from his wife, still sleeping with his hot nymph mistress, drinking wine alone and taking a really long time to build a boat, which is another shockingly accurate description of heterosexual male behavior if I’ve ever heard one.
‘The Old Man and the Sea’
My grandfather, a walking talking caricature of gruff newspapermen from the 1950s, cried the day Hemingway died. Would he have if he’d known how very, exceedingly close ol’ Ernest was with fellow summer reading list darling F. Scott Fitzgerald? I do have Gramps’ first edition of “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and I guess I see why straight men loved the dude so dearly. He also wrote perhaps the most bizarre description of the female orgasm ever put to paper, so maybe that resonated, too. But that’s not all!
Hemingway’s breakout novel was ironically also his last; “The Old Man and the Sea” was ostensibly about aging, accepting your mortality and also sharks. All the ingredients of great literature, really. However, when you place the book in the context of autofiction, which is pretty much all Hemingway wrote, things get weird and horny again.
You see, while Hemingway didn’t invent leaving your wife for a newer model, he did have it down to a science (Henry Miller made it an art, but I digress). When Hemingway’s first wife, Elizabeth Hadley, found out he was having an affair, she made him agree to give up all contact with the other woman, Pauline Pfeiffer, for 100 days. After that, provided he was still in love with Pfeiffer, he would be granted a divorce. They made it about three quarters of the way through before Hadley did the smart thing and bounced.
As a fitting punishment for his caddishness, when he reconnected with Pfeiffer, he found himself … a bit withered down there. As he told his late friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner, he tried every known remedy up to and including electric shock therapy. Pfeiffer suggested praying, which the irreligious Hemingway was understandably skeptical of. In his own words, he felt it was “kind of foolish getting down on my knees and asking Jesus to give me an erection.” It’s only foolish if it doesn’t work though, and apparently he left chock full of the holy spirit. Anyway, the titular old man in this book is a fisherman who hasn’t caught a fish in 84 days. Just sayin’.
Tobias Coughlin-Bogue is the associate editor for Real Change.
Tobias Coughlin-Bogue is the associate editor at Real Change.
Read more of the Jun 8-14, 2022 issue.