This item appeared in the Sept. 24 edition of Washington Post book critic Ron Charles' "Book Club" weekly newsletter. Sadly, recent events in Virginia and other states have made it even more relevant than when I first read it.
"The Plum Creek Literary Festival is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Founded in 1996, this convention at Concordia, a Lutheran university in Nebraska, usually draws thousands of children to see the nation's top writers and illustrators. But less than 48 hours before the festivities were set to begin, the events planned for today and tomorrow were canceled because many of the guest authors withdrew in protest over Concordia's discriminatory policy toward LGBTQ people.
The controversy started when two-time National Book Award finalist Eliot Schrefer was getting ready to attend Plum Creek. He noticed that the festival website was missing his recent novel, The Darkness Outside Us, about a relationship between two teenage boys on a spaceship. The website was also missing Ask the Passengers, a celebrated LGBTQ novel by another festival guest, A.S. King.
Schrefer says the festival director told him that the omission of The Darkness Outside Us was "an inadvertent slip." But when Schrefer looked into Concordia, he discovered that the university's official code of conduct calls homosexuality "a sin" deserving of "disciplinary intervention."
At this point, Schrefer withdrew from the festival. "When you're visiting an institution, there's kind of an implicit trust, and that left when I put all the pieces together," he told me. "I couldn't contribute to the campus life of a school that actively discriminates against gay people or lesbian people."
Alerted to Concordia's code of conduct, Tim Miller, Varian Johnson, Molly Idle, Laurie Keller, and other authors and illustrators announced they would not attend Plum Creek, either.
Newbery Medal winner Meg Medina came to the same decision. "There was just no way that I could go to that festival without feeling like it was implied that I was OK with that policy," she told me. "I was thinking of children--gay children, straight children--all over the country and what it would do to them to have me attend a conference with such a policy." She says Plum Creek needs to think hard about how it wants to move forward. "If they're trying to run an inclusive conference that includes children's literature as it is today, then it needs to honor the lives of all children. It needs to be a welcoming and safe and nondiscriminatory place."
Dylan C. Teut, director of the Plum Creek Literacy Festival, sent me an email saying that The Darkness Outside Us was not included on the children's book sale website only because Schrefer was scheduled to speak to a middle school group about one of his other novels. (The Darkness Outside Us, which is listed as YA [Young Adult], was going to be available for sale at the adult conference, according to Teut.) And he said that Ask the Passengers was not included because he wasn't familiar with it.
Teut went on to say: "Plum Creek does not discriminate against attendees, nor does Concordia University discriminate against its students based on sexual orientation or identity. Since the festival began 26 years ago, we have hosted multiple authors, illustrators and attendees who have various sexual orientations and identities in our open and welcoming community.
Alas, that's the institutional version of "But some of my best friends are gay!" It is simply not acceptable to host a book festival for a general audience on a campus that's officially homophobic."
To which I say: Amen!
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