ALTFor those who haven’t heard, Sho Harusono’s Sasaki and Miyano got banned in the state of Florida because a parent didn’t want their child exposed to LGBTQIA material at a public school out of fear of exposure to porn. This ban got a lot of attention from the manga and education worlds because one misinformed parent’s words suddenly became statewide authority – which is nutty as the parent only read the description and based their decision off of that.
If you’ve read the manga and/or watched the anime, you know that this series is pretty wholesome. BL stories are fun to read, like Sasaki says. So why does it matter, right?
That made me think about the Florida government right now. They have shown how anti-LGBQTIA they are with their “Don’t Say Gay” mantra. There has been pushback against their policies, but it’s sad to see what the state is like now. There are still parts of the state that are trying to quell anything related to LGBTQIA topics.
I think back to something I listened to in 2019 about Americans accepting gay marriage. Gay rights advocates pitched the idea that gay couples are just like heterosexual couples. They valued love and commitment and family. Linking those common values allowed for greater acceptance of gay marriage. The podcast talked about anti-gay bias has dropped considerably over the past two decades.
But here we are now. A big reason why Florida is falling down the cracks is because it’s being driven by organized religion in a very conservative sense of the word. They think “left-wing rhetoric” will ruin society. About Sasaki and Miyano, it’s about two young men who are trying to find themselves in an all-boys school. It’s about the two of them learning what does love truly entail and how it’s not always constrained by sexual/gender norms. More importantly, it’s about two teens who are gaining agency without being bound by authority. The beauty about BL stories is that they’re often written as a ways to express oneself against an authority that thinks sexual relations should be heteronormative.
The freedom to express yourself with no qualms is frightening to those who want to control others’ ways of thinking. America, to be honest, loves to emphasis strict control in a Puritanical sense in the guise of freedom. Their whole history has been linked to organized religion in awful ways. I think some people really don’t want to think for themselves because TRUE freedom is scary when you have only yourself to rely on.
And we still have so much trouble talking about sex of any kind here.
In any case, we have to fight against unjust bans of books of all kinds because books are kind of a last bastion against poor education. There’s bad influences that want us to be unable to criticize anything that puts people in harm’s way. They want people to fight each other via discrimination tactics as a distraction from serious issues caused by poor institutional oversight.
If you haven’t read Sasaki and Miyano, go read it. I I love the relationship dynamics between all the characters. I love the humor. I like how the story is about learning how to slowly embrace your weak side with confidence in order to gain the love you need. Reading is fun. Manga is fun. People have fun enjoying these types of stories.
If someone of a certain community wants to ban fun that enriches lives because their definition of fun doesn’t match, that’s a community no one should be a part of.
What I got from reading a banned manga wasn’t pornographic. What I got was a message that while we’ve come a long way, the fight for marginalized groups and feelings to exist is never truly over. We all got to be like Sasaki and stand up for our Miyanos in the best way we can.