Know Your Enemy: What’s Wrong With Men?

Matt and Sam explore the “crisis of masculinity” in America through books on the subject by Senator Josh Hawley and Harvard political theorist Harvey Mansfield.

There is a reason men feel shame about their porn use, and it’s time for them to pay attention

The post There is a reason men feel shame about their porn use, and it’s time for them to pay attention appeared first on Feminist Current.

Does Testosterone Affect Your Politics?

Early last year Rana Sulaiman Alogaily, then a Ph.D. candidate at Claremont Graduate University, published her doctoral dissertation—a wide-ranging series of Essays in Behavioral Economics and Neuroeconomics. One explored “vaccine hesitancy,” another considered the “neurophysiologic predictors of mood in the elderly”. But a particular essay caught people’s eyes beyond the tiny circles that usually read niche research by early-career academics: Testosterone Administration Induces A Red Shift in Democrats.    

The text recounts a 2011 experiment: Researchers tested 136 healthy young men’s testosterone levels, asked them about their political party affiliations, then gave them either a placebo or ten grams of AndroGel one percent, a high-end dose of a common form of testosterone often used in hormone replacement therapies. The next day, they tested the men’s T levels and asked them about politics again. Their baseline measurements found that staunch self-identified Democrats had lower T than anyone else in their sample pool. And after dosing the guys, they found that men who’d previously expressed weak affinity for the party felt even less connected to it—and warmer towards Republicans. (They observed no change in firm Democrats’ or any Republicans’ stated positions.) 

Alogaily and the paper’s co-authors argued that this is “evidence that neuro-active hormones affect political preferences”. And perhaps it implies, they added, that “political advertising depicting emotional themes that raise T could influence swing voters and perhaps elections.” 

Given how many people twist this generally reasonable premise into sinister knots, the concept is worth grappling with.

Several experts on testosterone who weren’t involved in this study told VICE it’s too weak to base meaningful conclusions on. The sample was small and narrow. The experiment was brief. And the potential confounding variables were numerous. Paul Zak, Alogaily’s Ph.D. advisor and the paper’s designated corresponding author, didn’t reply to a request for comment. Neither did Alogaily. But the text of the study acknowledges its limitations openly. It also offers alternative explanations for the results of the experiment, such as the possibility that weak Democratic party supporters secretly preferred the GOP to begin with, and rather than altering their politics, T just made them more honest about their views.

Of course, none of that has stopped the far right from jumping on the paper. In recent years, many in this world have become obsessed with the idea that conservative guys are jacked, masculine, high-T GigaChads while liberals are weak, emasculated, low-T Soy Boys. That progressive men are literally sick—victims of a hormonal pathology. That addressing this supposedly widespread hormonal deficit will halt the world’s alleged liberal degradation. These testosterone thumpers have repackaged and exaggerated the study, with a credulity born of zealotry, into articles with shitposty titles like “Trust The Science: Study Links Left-Wing Politics to Lower Testosterone,” casting it as hard proof of their hormonal theories of healthy politics. 

The far right’s testosterone hot takes are, unsurprisingly, utter nonsense. “I treat thousands of men for low testosterone every year in Los Angeles,” says Jesse Mills, a urologist with expertise in T-related health issues and director of the Men’s Clinic at UCLA. If boosting men’s testosterone levels did shift their politics towards the right, he adds, “the red wave Republicans were hoping for would have crashed on the shores of Malibu. But it didn’t.” 

Between its methodological weakness and apparent appeal in the world of far-right gender panic and pseudoscience, it’s tempting to write this paper off as the academic equivalent of outrage clickbait. But the premise of the experiment isn’t actually farfetched. There’s a small but growing body of research on how our biology (and changes in it) can affect our politics. And we know testosterone plays a notable role in shaping our overall moods and behaviors. Might it not also influence our political behaviors to some degree? Given how many people twist this generally reasonable premise into sinister knots, the concept is worth grappling with. So rather than dissect one anemic and overhyped study on the subject, VICE decided to dig into all we know about how T might affect people’s politics. 

Spoilers: The hormone almost certainly doesn’t cause a reliable “red shift”. And any effects it does have are likely weak, contextual, and easily mitigated.

The Simple Story of Testosterone and Politics

Humans drew a connection between testosterone and masculinity long before we knew what hormones were, by observing the effects of injuries like a horse kick to the testicles—where testosterone is produced—and procedures like castration. Testosterone plays a major role in the development of male sex traits during puberty, so without it, people don’t develop body and facial hair, a deep voice, or a conventional male frame and muscle-and-fat distribution. And when people with testes lose most or all of their testosterone, they often lose energy, stamina, muscle and bone strength, libido, and a degree of competitiveness. In other words, they lose their virility. Hence, when researchers first identified testosterone (as part of a larger project to identify and define the essence of masculinity), they called it the “male sex hormone”. 

As we learned how to manipulate and dose people with T, we learned more about its behavioral effects. Experiments seemed to show that reducing T levels increased empathy, whereas increasing T levels seemed to increase appetites for risk, novelty, and strenuous activity—while decreasing sensitivity to stress and anxiety. “There was a fun study years ago that looked at floor traders,” Mills recalls. Researchers found they could “predict how risk-taking they’d be based on their T levels, and traders with higher T levels made bigger-risk investments”.

Modern American politics “have always been ‘gendered’”, says Michael Kimmel, a sociologist and expert on the intersection of politics and ideas of masculinity. Party values and priorities have shifted over time and vary between different intra-party factions, but most Republicans have traditionally painted themselves as advocates of militarism, individual freedom, and competition. Republican men stereotypically try to project their party’s ostensible core values via explicit, aggressive macho-man posturing. On the other hand, Kimmel explains, commentators often characterize Democrats, who’ve traditionally branded themselves as the party of equality and social safety nets, as competition and risk-averse – as soft and feminine. All that has led to a longstanding seed of obsession with testosterone in certain GOP circles, where it’s used as a concrete metric of and justification for their supposedly innate and healthy masculine-conservative values.

“Can you paint the stereotypical behavioral effects of testosterone into a picture of you being more likely affiliated with one party or another? Sure,” acknowledges Justin Houman, a urologist who treats men with clinically low testosterone levels. “But it is a stretch.” 

Like many other worrisome latent trends within American politics, the 2016 presidential election season turbocharged the depth, salience, and visibility of popular connections between T, masculinity, and conservatism. As he leveraged American misogyny by flinging gender-based attacks at Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, Donald Trump bolstered his masculine bona fides by going on The Dr. Oz Show and smirking as the eponymous host rattled off and praised the T levels recorded in candidate Trump’s medical records. A doctor ran ads suggesting men thinking of voting for Clinton might be suffering from low T and offering to test and treat them to uncloud their judgment. And Americans learned a whole new lexicon of testosterone and virility-based insults as the worst elements of the right moved from the digital fringe into the mainstream. 

Associations between T, masculinity, and hard conservatism only grew more pronounced after that. Far-right voices now bash people they don’t like as “low-T”—one congressman even used this term to describe and disregard Trump’s first impeachment. Conspiracy theories about supposed plots to emasculate American men into small-dicked, liberal servility by pumping them full of estrogen and systematically suppressing their testosterone moved from the confines of paranoid outlets like InfoWars and into mainstream public awareness. And last year Tucker Carlson released a full “documentary” about the supposed testosterone crisis in America and its threats to men, promoting pseudoscience like sunning your balls as so-called solutions. 

“The complexities of true science, even political science, do not easily reduce down to one variable.” —Jesse Mills

A couple of studies do suggest that Americans may be experiencing a widespread drop in their average T levels over time. But the ongoing dip they describe is far more modest than people fearmongering about a T crisis make it out to be, and likely due to lifestyle factors like sedentariness and environmental pollutants messing with our bodies. One study’s author suggests that sensitivity of the tests used to measure T levels could account for some of this drift over time, and so could something like the widespread decline in rates of smoking, a habit that may artificially boost T levels. These studies’ authors have also explained that their findings, while worrisome, still need further testing and confirmation. 

In truth, Americans have likely grown irrationally anxious about testosterone thanks to one of the most successful direct-to-consumer medical advertising campaigns of all time: In the mid-2000s, T makers started telling men that if they had nebulous symptoms like low energy or libido, they might be suffering from low T. (Clinically low T is a real medical issue, but it often involves more symptoms than just fatigue and drop in sex drive, and it certainly isn’t diagnosed by those signs alone.) Alongside these ads, a massive pipeline of lifestyle influencers, self-help gurus, health startups, and loosey-goosey doctors emerged to funnel often self-diagnosed men towards cheap and quick T prescriptions that many of them don’t really need. 

The FDA has tried to push back on this marketing, and the rush on T scripts has slowed somewhat. But America’s seemingly unique, existential, and deep-seated cultural fears of a loss of testosterone, virility, and masculinity may have prime some folks to lend credence to talk over the last decade of a supposed T crisis and its effects on people’s politics . 

However, most of these fears—and in fact most popular ideas about the intersection between T and politics—are based on anemic understandings of the effects of what more recent research shows is actually an incredibly complex and malleable hormone. 

The Real Story of Testosterone and Politics 

Some endocrinologists argue that our core understanding of T, as a fundamentally male sex hormone, is inherently flawed. After all, ovaries produce T too—albeit usually at lower levels than testes—and it plays a vital, if less visible, role in female sexual development and general health. Labeling estrogen as a fundamentally female hormone is also suspect, given that that people born with testes produce it too, and men’s overall health depends on a good balance between it and T. 

Average hormone levels also vary wildly from person to person according to genetics, developmental and environmental factors, and a host of other variables. So a “normal” male or female testosterone level actually describes a broad range. According to experts, it’s more a rule of thumb than a hard-and-fast metric. It’s far easier than many people seem to think to find AFAB people with naturally “male” T profiles or AMAB people with naturally “female” profiles. People’s testosterone levels also swing around wildly throughout the day and move up and down in response to developments in our lives: Men seem to experience notable dips in T while caring for a new child, for example. 

Everyone’s body responds a bit differently to testosterone, thanks to natural variations in the number and sensitivity of hormone receptors, idiosyncratic developmental histories with the hormone, and the effects of natural processes like aging. It’s a threshold molecule as well, not some dimmer switch for virility and masculinity. That’s at least partially why many people with T levels consistently below “normal” don’t report any notable effects on their bodies or behavior. And why many people who take testosterone but don’t have catastrophically low T levels and related health problems don’t see much impact on their health or wellness—beyond placebo effects.  

“Efforts to find a biological cause for political behavior are usually doomed to fail. But that doesn’t mean that people will ever stop trying!” —Michael Kimmel

Recent research also suggests that early findings and common knowledge about testosterone’s role in aggression, competition, and risk-taking don’t hold up to scrutiny. On its own, T can also boost altruism and even interest in cuddling in some situations. And T almost never acts alone. Other biological agents and processes, as well as culture, upbringing, and conscious choice, can modulate its effects. Recent research notably suggests: That people who take big risks in one realm of their lives, like gambling, are often risk averse in another context, like investing their savings. That, compared to men, women in America likely take fewer career risks on average—are less ambitious and assertive—not because of their hormone profiles but because they often face backlash for engaging in what many people still consider stereotypically male behaviors. And that in more gender-egalitarian countries, like Sweden, on average, men and women take on a similar approach to risks and competition. 

So drawing direct lines between natural T levels and any behavior or proclivity is dubious. As are explanations for any change observed in people after they take a dose of T. Pointing back to Alogaily and her colleagues’ paper, Mills noted that a dose of T could have brightened some men’s moods and made them generally “feel warmer to puppies and apple pie as well as Republicans”. 

T’s complexity may explain the squishy ambiguities in the handful of studies on the interplay between the hormone and personal politics. For instance, two studies examined the effects of watching your preferred candidate lose an election on your T levels. They monitored men’s testosterone before and after the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections, respectively, and found that John McCain supporters’ T levels dropped after he lost, while Romney supporters’ levels did the opposite after his presidential bid tanked. It’s entirely unclear what factors might account for that difference. 

“Everything is unclear!” Mills says when asked what we do and don’t know about how T might affect people’s politics. To get to the bottom of this question, Houman adds, you’d need to account for so many factors, like people’s individual hormonal and behavioral baselines and all the variables in their lives that might modulate their T levels and responses—not to mention precisely what a given person means when they say, for example, they identify with one party over another. “Age, overall health, sleep, genetics, medications,” he rattles off. “The list goes on.” 

(The incredible complexity of studying hormones’ multi-faceted and malleable effects on our bodies and behaviors may explain why most of the science on the intersections of biology and political views and activities focuses on static factors, like genetics and brain structures.)

None of this means that T has no bearing on our politics. It likely does—but the nature and scale of these effects may vary wildly according to an individual’s context and over time. Given the number of factors that affect our political views and actions, Houman also says he’d expect any testosterone effects to be relatively weak. And the impact of a single dose of T, or environmental factors like political ads that cause a spike in T, are usually short-lived. 

Even if we could nail down one or two clear and reliable, if minor, effects of testosterone on people’s political lives, Mills cautioned against paying them too much heed. “The complexities of true science, even political science, do not easily reduce down to one variable,” he says. 

“Efforts to find a biological cause for political behavior are usually doomed to fail,” Kimmel agrees. “But that doesn’t mean that people will ever stop trying!” The appeal of finding some sort of biological button for swaying people towards our views—or of finding some root pathology behind theirs—is intoxicating, after all. 

Intoxicating, but moronic. 

Men Haunting Men: A conversation with Richard Mirabella

As a gay reader (and gay writer, myself), I take special notice when I come across a deal announcement for a queer novel written by an openly queer person. There are few enough of these books that I often find myself reading books destinated to disappoint me—young adult coming out stories, romantic comedies, women in their twenties and thirties having their first queer experience while already married to a man. These books are all valuable, and are often quite good, but I’m not their best reader. I want the uncomfortable nuances of queer life we don’t often find in queer media—even media created by queer people—thanks at least in part to the parameters set by cisgender, heterosexual people. I want, as I eventually realized, exactly what Richard Mirabella delivers in his stunning debut, Brother & Sister Enter the Forest.

Mirabella, a civil servant in his forties who lives in upstate New York, is a brave writer. Adult literary debuts are no stranger to the “ambitious” descriptor, but Mirabella’s novel is quiet. His prose—which could be described as plain or simple by someone who doesn’t understand its power—is controlled. Mirabella’s sentences ache in their simplicity.

Why does this stylistic choice work so well? Mirabella’s novel could easily be high drama. We have a dual timeline story of siblings—Justin and Willa—whose adolescence in a quiet, wintery town is permanently marred by violence committed by Nick, Justin’s older boyfriend. Readers watch this origin story unfold juxtaposed against the siblings decades later as they try to navigate their relationship as well as new ones. Willa, a nurse, creates dioramas. Justin lives with addiction as best he can. Does the violence that haunts this family change it forever?

That’s not the question this text answers. It’s too simple. Mirabella delicately portrays the after effects of trauma, and one of those traumas is a disturbing act of violence that defines the plot. But Mirabella also goes to that brave place: He shows readers the trauma of a mother who is quiet, even patient, in her homophobia. Of classroom bullies who are still around today. Of building a chosen family that disappoints. Of remembering—and not.

I was lucky enough to chat on the phone with Mirabella about these themes and his craft. We spent a good hour talking about depictions of dating violence in queer media (and how our community responds to it), healing from homophobia experienced both inside and outside of the home, and how it feels to wrestle with these hurts while Republicans wage war against queer people from a new angle—one where the sort of relationship Mirabella writes could be misconstrued as evidence that all queer people are predatory monsters.

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The Rumpus: Would you like to start us off by sharing what you think your book is about?

Richard Mirabella: I would say my novel is about siblings; in this case, Willa and Justin, and their relationship in youth and adulthood. That relationship has been affected by violence that the brother, Justin, experienced as a teenager. I also think it’s about the failure of a family to care for their queer child whose pain is inconvenient to them.

Rumpus: We have chosen families in this book who both heal and disappoint us.

Mirabella: Yeah, I’m actually glad you said disappointing. Nothing in life is perfect and Justin has found kind of a lovely little family but . . .

Rumpus: But?

Mirabella: I’m gonna slow down a little bit and just say: I wanted to give them to him. It’s kind of a gift. [But] they’re not magical. They’re just people. There are lovely moments between all of them where they’re trying but failing.

Rumpus: Do you think straight people and queer people will have different reactions to these failures?

Mirabella: It really depends on the person. Justin’s gonna sink all of them—he’s taking them all down with him. Justin is a victim of heterosexist, homophobic abuse. The violence that happens to him is a direct reaction to that. He is failed by his chosen family too. I don’t know if straight people will get that. I want people to read it and get whatever they get from it, but I think queer people will immediately see and understand it.

Rumpus: Why do you think it works so well to have Nick [Justin’s older boyfriend] missing in the adult narrative?

Mirabella: I started writing this book and I thought, I’m gonna write like a Shirley Jackson novel. You know, the sort of literary novel that is haunted or has something unreal or supernatural about it. There were elements that I cut from it. But I think Nick is still a ghost and haunts the novel in a lot of ways. Maybe being haunted is just feeling something crooked nearby. In this book, that’s Nick. Justin doesn’t know what happened or where he is. To me, that’s so interesting, to have this spirit hovering over you.

Rumpus: Can you say more about your idea of it being a haunted literary novel?

Mirabella: I’m really fascinated by strange fiction, weird fiction. This novel was inspired by a Grimm’s fairytale, called “Brother and Sister” or “Little Brother and Little Sister,” where the brother is transformed into a fawn. And the sister vows to care for him.

It made me think a little bit about being transformed by something that happens to you, something that changes you in a way that is disruptive to you. Perhaps destructive even to other people in your life.

I think there are a few hauntings in this book. Nick is haunting Justin. Justin’s experiences of violence are haunting him. The feelings of fear. I think Willa is haunted by Justin in different ways—not knowing what to do or how to care for him. I think Justin is haunted by men in general. At one of my favorite moments in the book, Justin has this sort of surreal encounter in the middle of the night. That was a surprise when I wrote it, and it made me realize how haunted Justin is just by manhood.

Rumpus: Do you feel like men in this book are haunted by toxic masculinity?

Mirabella: I have to say yes because, I mean, we all are. We’re swimming in the ocean of patriarchy at all times. So yeah, absolutely.

Rumpus: Can you talk to me a little bit about your process of deciding to have dual timelines for adolescence and adulthood? Were you always hoping to use this method to show the aftermath of trauma?

Mirabella: That’s always what I wanted this book to be about, but I just didn’t know how it would play out. At first it was linear and then it sort of shattered and broke apart a little bit more. I wanted to write about a brother and sister, and so I started writing about them dealing with something in adulthood, but I wasn’t sure of what.

I’m really interested in what happens after something bad. So yeah, it was important for me to show the far reaching effects of trauma and of violence in people’s lives. I think it’s less interesting to me to just focus on one person. So I started writing about Willa and Justin coming back into her life. It kind of grew out of going back to their childhood to work towards whatever it was that happened to them.

Rumpus: What went into your decision to have this specific age gap in this book? Did their ages or the degree of the age gap ever change while writing?

Mirabella: My drafts are all hugely different from each other. So in earlier drafts, Nick was a side character associated with an older person that both Nick and Justin were sort of in a relationship with—like a friendship and a sexual relationship. And I just realized the other person wasn’t very interesting.

I liked Nick more. I thought Nick was more interesting, and I also thought he was frightening, a little bit. In then the next draft he became the focus rather than this other character, who eventually just went away.

Rumpus: Why do you think it’s valuable or interesting to write a character that’s a little scary to the writer?

Mirabella: It’s more interesting to write about that. Nick represents something that I’ve always struggled with, which is masculinity. You know, he’s toxic. And you know, he’s a gay person. He won’t accept that about himself. When I think about him I think of somebody who cannot accept himself. He also criticizes what he sees as signals of Justin’s queerness; the way he holds himself, the music he chooses when they go to the CD store. He’s always telling Justin: The world’s gonna eat you up, basically.

I’ve tried writing Nick for a long time. The muscle dude I would have avoided in my youth, who may have approached me in my youth, and who I was attracted to, but terrified of. I think my early fear of men comes out in writing Nick.

Rumpus: When I think about Justin’s teenage years, I think about him being bullied by his peers, and I think about him on the internet. A lot of readers today will relate to both the bullying and going online—including meeting people online—as the escape. What made you include the internet in this way? Do you feel the presence of the internet establishes readers in a very contemporary sort of narrative?

Mirabella: You know, the internet was pretty new when I when I was a teenager. But at this point, in the book? It’s not much later on. And I was thinking about how even if at that point I knew someone else was gay in my high school, we couldn’t speak to each other about it. That would have been dangerous.

I haven’t been in high school in an extremely long time, so I don’t know what it’s like now. I feel it’s probably a lot more open. But I wanted to include a situation where Justin had seen Nick in school, knew who he was, but they never spoke to each other. What created the opportunity for them to speak to each other was the internet. Here was this website where Justin could see: Oh, this person is gay. I didn’t know that! And could reach out to him.

Rumpus: That’s so interesting. It feels notable to me that while there isn’t a significant age difference between Justin and Nick, their lives feel so different because Nick is out of high school.

Mirabella: Nick has the freedom that Justin doesn’t yet possess. Nick sort of gives Justin a hard time about that too: Oh, why do you have to listen to your mother? They’re only a couple of years apart in age and I like the idea that Nick has a freedom that Justin doesn’t.

Rumpus: Do you feel the story would be very different if Justin and Nick had met when they were the same age? Or if their age difference was larger, as tends to be how age gap couples are portrayed in media?

Mirabella: In an earlier draft, Nick was older. What worried me was that the book would become about that topic; a young queer person being [in a relationship with] an older queer person. But the book is not really about that.

I have to say, I struggled with that for a little while. Honestly, when I started writing more about Nick, I liked his sort of youthful toughness. Justin is kind of a punk kid, but he’s also very soft.

Rumpus: Justin faces violence and harm from a number of people in this book, including, eventually, Nick. What went into the decision to have Justin’s partner be the one to ultimately hurt him, versus, say, a stranger or even a hate crime?

Mirabella: It’s very bleak, isn’t it? I think because it broke my heart, I had to write it. It wasn’t an intellectual choice. It was more about somebody feeling like they could trust a person and then slowly realizing they actually don’t have what they thought they had. They don’t have protection.

Maybe it’s trying to say we have ourselves and we have to find strength in ourselves. We have to do the best we can to love ourselves. I think, in youth, especially at Justin’s age—sixteen, seventeen—it’s very hard to feel that self-love. I think especially as a queer teen, it was hard for me to find that love inside for myself. I absolutely was looking for it outside.

Rumpus: Did you ever have concerns that queer people would read the depictions of same-sex abuse and violence in this book and see it as hurting the “cause” or ruin some sanitized version of queer people?

Mirabella: I lost sleep over that honestly. I think what’s important to me as a writer is to tell the truth about the world as best as I can. And that includes allowing queer people to be imperfect, like all other human beings. You know, writing shining examples of queerness is not gonna change the minds of people who already hate us. I think the realities of our lives don’t matter at all to those people who want to erase and criminalize us.

As far as other queer people, I understand that some queer people may be angry if they read something like this, about a queer person enacting violence on another queer person. But that just goes back to what I said. It’s a reality of our world. And I think there are other more nurturing relationships in the novel. So I think it shows a spectrum, but it is a worry of mine, of course.

Rumpus: Justin and Willa’s mother Grace embodies a sort of quiet homophobia we don’t often see portrayed in media. Do you think some readers, who might see themselves as accepting or even as allies, might recognize themselves in Grace? Like “Oh, I’m not actually as supportive or understanding as I thought I was?”

Mirabella: You know, I didn’t set out to write this novel with that in mind, but while I was writing the novel, I read the book Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and its Consequences by Sarah Schulman. It affected me so deeply (as does most of her work) and it really helped me shape the novel in a lot of ways.

In retrospect, I would hope somebody who perhaps has a queer child and doesn’t necessarily know how to handle that would read this and see the character of Grace—who I think is just unsure about Justin, she doesn’t understand him, doesn’t know what to do with him—and understand that perhaps if she showed some understanding, things would have gone differently for him.

Grace feels she has to do something, where [instead] she could just love and accept him. His troubles in his teen years were brought on by a society that doesn’t accept who Justin is, even though he accepts himself.

Rumpus: Grace fails Justin (and Willa) both when they’re adolescents and when they’re adults, though in different ways. Do you feel that if she was a more accepting or more nurturing parent, the whole plot of the book would be different?

Mirabella: To be honest, no, because it’s not just Grace. It’s the world. I hate to be so black and white about it, but . . . Obviously Grace is homophobic. But I don’t think she is nakedly homophobic. I think it’s a matter of ignorance on her part. What Justin faces in life, and even in school is a lot more intense and naked on the surface. And I think that is a catalyst for what happens later in the novel. I think even aside from Grace, he would be on that path.

Rumpus: We know book bans and censorship are bad. Why do you think it’s important that all young people have access to books by and about queer people?

Mirabella: We’re part of humanity, number one. I think it’s important, not just for queer children to read about themselves, but for other children to read about the spectrum of experience. It’s a part of life. And we want children to understand the world. That’s why they’re in school.

Rumpus: What do you think about the ongoing Republican rallying cries trying to paint queer people as predatory, manipulative, or somehow inherently obscene or inappropriate?

Mirabella: Republicans are always talking about personal freedom. And yet. You know, if they really believed in that freedom, they would allow people’s families to make these decisions. If a family is like, No, I don’t want you to read this, you’re too young, then that’s that family. They can do that (and I believe they’re stifling their children).

I grew up in a house where [the thinking was], You want to read this? Okay, go ahead, read it and we’ll talk about it. Parents don’t want to talk to their children, they’re uncomfortable talking to their children about the realities of the world. They wanna ban books so that other people can’t read them. It’s infuriating. I think a lot of it is that they have a particular vision of the world—which I think is largely white cis and hetero—and so anything that doesn’t fit into that mold is dangerous. Period.

 

 

 

 

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Author photo by Danielle Stephens

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