Top: June Carpenter. Bottom: Some of the ALA's most-banned books of 2022. Screenshot from YouTube and Lucy Gellman File Photo.
June Carpenter can still remember finding a copy of Alex Gino's Melissa at her local library. Back then, she didn't know that it was one of the most-banned books in recent history, simply for its depiction of a trans girl living her life. She didn't know that Gino, a nonbinary author from New York, had written the story because they wanted to give young readers the character they’d never had themselves. And she didn’t know that years later, it would land her in an argument at the State Capitol over who has the freedom to read.
What she did know was that the story, of a girl who the world still sees as a boy, spoke directly to something deep within her. That for the first time in a long time, in the pages of a book, "I felt understood."
Last Thursday, Carpenter brought that story to the State Capitol building in Hartford, during a marathon hearing on SB 1271, "An Act Concerning School and Public Libraries." The bill, which advocates have championed as protecting the freedom to read, would require school and public libraries in Connecticut to develop official policies around collection development and maintenance, programming and library displays, and material review and reconsideration.
In non-legislative terms, that means having shared practices in place—including a committee of accredited librarians and educators for review—in case a parent or patron challenges a book or complains about an event or title in the space. Many libraries in the state, including the New Haven Free Public Library, already have such policies in place.
New Haven City Librarian Maria Bernhey: "It’s a cornerstone of democracy to protect the freedom to read, and to protect the freedom of information."
"The way I look at book challenges in libraries is that we have a responsibility to provide and protect free access to materials," said New Haven City Librarian Maria Bernhey in a phone call Tuesday (she also submitted testimony; read it in full here). "It’s a cornerstone of democracy to protect the freedom to read, and to protect the freedom of information. I didn’t think that I would ever live in a United States where librarians could be imprisoned for having Gender Queer in their collection."
"There is no other institution that welcomes public feedback like public libraries," said Scott Jarzombek, who serves as the president of the Connecticut Library Association. "What we seek, and what this bill provides, is a clear, rational way to hear honest concerns from parents."
Proponents of the bill, who Thursday included hundreds of librarians, educators, and impassioned parents, argue that it will further protect libraries and librarians at a time when they are increasingly under attack across the country, in states from Tennessee to Texas to Wyoming to Florida (Connecticut has also faced proposed book bans; read about that here). Opponents to the legislation, who range from conservative policy makers to "parental rights" boosters, claim that the bill will allow sexually explicit content in libraries.
Their definition is intentionally broad, to include everything from flirty cartoons and mentions of trans people simply existing to illustrations depicting safe and consensual sex (such as in Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan’s Let’s Talk About It).
Organizations such as the American Library Association, New York Public Library and PEN America have noted many times this argument is a red herring: book challenges and bans overwhelmingly target stories with LGBTQ+ characters and characters of color (and LGBTQ characters of color) in an attempt to erase them from the historical record.
In recent years, those books have included titles like Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer, Mike Curato's Flamer, and George Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue, as well as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Khaled Hosseini The Kite Runner and Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes. The last acknowledges and explores the trauma and devastation that students experience in the wake of a school shooting. The book has been banned in 98 school districts, nearly ten times the number of states that have passed a ban on assault weapons.
Thursday, champions of the bill focused on the vital and vibrant role that libraries play in their own communities, and particularly in their schools and for their children. Melissa Thom, a school librarian in Branford, looked to her own experience in a district with collection maintenance policies already in place. For her, "having these guidelines has helped us successfully navigate questions regarding books in our library collections," she said.
She added that she does not see the bill as taking away parental rights, but streamlining and strengthening them. By including parents in the discussions around an institution's collection, she said, both they and librarians have an open and straightforward process that they can follow.
"This bill would allow all libraries across Connecticut to effectively and safely serve the learning needs of their unique communities," she said. "It would also ensure that parents have a voice and a choice in their children's reading lives."
Julia Miller at a ceremony naming her 2025 Teacher of the Year. Laura Glesby for the New Haven Independent File Photo.
Several parents, educators and fellow librarians also chimed in, noting that parents can and should have a role in what their kids read, but not at the expense of other young readers, and readers of all ages. New Havener Shannon Mykins, whose child is in elementary school, pointed to the rise in censorship across the country, which has repeatedly targeted trans and queer voices, women and femme voices, mothers, and Black, Brown and Indigenous voices.
"People are seeking to ban books because they include gay people, or Drag performers, or single mothers, or Black people, or some other harmless group of people," she wrote in testimony submitted prior to the hearing. "My child has the moral and legal right to an education and that sometimes includes exposure to people who are not like us. All kids have that right as humans, and this bill will provide protections to ensure that happens."
In written testimony. Metropolitan Business Academy Teacher Julia Miller, who in October was named Connecticut's 2025 Teacher of the Year, added that school and public libraries are fundamental to her life and work as a mom and an educator. Last week, libraries felt front and center when she taught the First Amendment in her civics classes. At Metro, she explained, teachers do their best to help students find books that speak directly to them, in part because “research shows that reading has long term positive benefits, not only on a person’s cognition and critical thinking, but their overall social-emotional wellbeing.” In the school, the library includes not only hundreds of beloved books, but a thriving makerspace and sanctuary for students who have a free period and need a quiet place to work.
"Having diverse representation in reading can create greater student engagement and sense of self," Miller wrote, adding that Metro has introduced a thriving book club to its roster of extracurriculars. "We want to support this power of reading. Threats of censorship and book bans have the opposite effect."
Kids at a Stay and Play at the New Haven Free Public Library in 2023. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
Others still leaned into the performative and reactionary nature of book bans themselves. Stamford Rep. Corey Paris, who serves as the House Chair of the Committee on Children, read from the Song of Solomon. He shifted to a passage from Ezekiel 23:20, which describes the promiscuity of a woman by describing the genitals and ejaculate of animals in detail.
"Quite honestly, given that the Bible itself ... contains the passages depicting explicit violence, and sexual content, and slavery, and I think that that quite frankly is a little bit more risqué than Playboy and Hustler," Paris said, referencing examples that have become common GOP talking points. "Do you think that these thoughts around the censorship efforts are truly about protecting children, or is it more selectively silencing perspectives that are often disagreed with?"
But it was Carpenter, a Farmington resident who is a student at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts (GHAA), who made the strongest case for the bill by speaking right from the heart. Even before finding Melissa at her town's library, she always felt welcomed by the librarians, encouraged to read books that were age-appropriate and interesting to her.
Melissa, previously titled George, tells the story of a trans girl who is still figuring out how to come out, and does so with the help of a school production of Charlotte's Web. From 2018 to 2020, it topped the ALA's list of banned and challenged books each year. But for Carpenter, it was and remains an example of how fiction can be magic.
"I found this book at my local library, which is a warm, welcoming place where I am free to be me, thanks to librarians," Carpenter said, a spray of purple hair flowing past her shoulders. "They are professionals who understand that their role is not to judge, but rather to ensure that everyone has access to materials that speak directly to them, their interests and their hobbies—not just one segment of their community."
Throughout the hearing, a much smaller group of opponents framed the bill as anti-parent, rejecting the argument that parents should not limit what other kids consume.
State Rep. Anne Dauphinais, who has been vocal in her opposition to the bill, asked nearly every participant if they were comfortable with the inclusion of sexually explicit material in libraries, using nude magazines like Playboy and Hustler as examples. In reality, those magazines have not been at the center of a proposed ban in over three decades, and there is no record of them ever ruffling feathers in Connecticut.
The books that have received challenges, including in the state, feature LGBTQ+ characters, an acknowledgement of rape and child trafficking, and discussions of slavery, racism and economic disenfranchisement of Black people in the U.S.. Dauphinais has a long track record of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, including a vote against banning conversion therapy in 2017 and two current, in-session bills that would out trans students to their parents and ban gender-affirming care for trans youth in the state.
"You're saying we must trust the librarians, but we often differ on what we think is right and wrong, I would say," she said in a heated back-and-forth with Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, who stressed the importance of parents playing an active role in what their children read. "I don't know that a librarian's school degree or a fact that they're trained makes them qualified to decide what's right or wrong for my child to see, and I think that those are the things that are missing here."
In 2023, the American Library Association reported that a total of 4,240 different books received challenges or proposed bans across the country, marking a 65 percent increase in censorship efforts across the country. As in years past, those books overwhelmingly feature LGBTQ+ characters and acknowledge the existence of sex, sexual violence, and racism.
Between January 1 and August 31 of last year, the ALA reported that 1,128 different books had been challenged or banned (the organization is still processing data for the remainder of the year). During the 2023-2024 academic year, PEN America reported 10,046 instances of book bans, up from 3,362 the year before.
Safeguards Against Censorship: The Story In New Haven
Don Mauri. Lucy Gellman Photo.
As the hearing entered its second hour in Hartford Thursday afternoon, Wooster Square resident Don Mauri made his way through the first floor of the Ives Main Library in downtown New Haven, on the hunt for Percival Everett's James. When he found it, the title rested cozily atop Kate Greathead's The Book of George in his hands.
Raised in West Haven, Mauri hadn't heard about the bill before Thursday, but put his support behind it as a way to protect librarians. He can't remember a time when the library wasn't a part of his life, and still uses it constantly to find books he’s excited about.
"I think having safeguards in place against censorship is definitely more important now," he said. "I thought that was a thing we had gotten over in the 60s."
From left to right: SEJ's Aisha Turay, Thanairy Gonzalez, Rashanda McCollum, Millena Almeida and Marleny. Lucy Gellman Photo.
Downstairs in the library's Teen Center, members of Students for Educational Justice (SEJ) had started discussing the bill during their weekly team meeting (they later flipped on the center’s large screen so they could watch the hearing in real time). Gathered in the space’s booths and chairs, they traded book recommendations and hot takes on the bill, including its ability to better protect librarians.
For students like Aisha Turay, a junior in creative writing at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, the bill feels very timely: her English class is currently reading John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which has received dozens of challenges and bans since it was first published in 1937. She lauded the bill as an extra protection for librarians at a time when many are losing their jobs for refusing to ban books.
“I think it’s disgusting that they would go as far as to target a person that’s so helpful,” she said. “Librarians are like, you know, the keepers of this sanctuary. A library is a sanctuary for most people. To go as far as to attack the person that is protecting all these books—thee keep them in order and keep this place running—is just so crazy to me. I feel like, if a book sickens you or icks you out that much that you want it gone, just leave.”
Rashanda McCollum, executive director of the organization, remembered first coming across The Bluest Eye in high school, and sensing a deep power and truth-telling in Toni Morrison’s words. It gave her language for some of the racism, violence and bias that she saw in the world around her, and that she’s now fighting as a fierce advocate for young people in New Haven. Had she not read it in high school, she said, she doesn’t know if she would have ever found it.
“Just protect the books,” she said. “If a parent wants to prevent their child from reading a book, let them do that. Let that be the rule of their household. But don’t deny my child from learning their history or that of other cultures.”
“Yeah, there definitely needs to be some sort of protection,” added Thanairy Gonzalez, who is also a junior at Co-Op. “This huge movement to ban books, there’s no reasoning behind it.”
“Anything telling a story of a non-European, primarily heterosexual male, is to be possibly on the chopping block,” McCollum jumped back in. “And that’s not the world we live in. To remove these books would be to not prepare young people for—”
“The reality of our world,” Program Coordinator Marleny finished her sentences. “You’re basically blocking off our voices and diminishing our history on the land that we were brought onto.”
In a phone call before the hearing, Bernhey echoed that feeling. Before she ever moved to New Haven, Bernhey served as a children's librarian at the New York Public Library. In that role—as in her current role—"I would really defer to the parent," she said.
If someone told her that they didn't want their kid reading about a certain subject, she respected that choice. But she didn’t think that gave anyone a right to limit the choices of other library users, pint-sized and otherwise. She still thinks constantly about her responsibility to build an informative and balanced collection, regardless of her own feelings about a particular book.
"A parent has a right to choose what their child reads," she said. "What a parent should not do is dictate what another child reads."
As a kid, she added, books helped open up her world. They gave her fair and accurate representation of not only her own experiences, but those of others, building empathy and tolerance page by page.
“Not having representation, not seeing yourself in books—that really does impact you,” she said. For that reason, the NHFPL has made the top ten most challenged books accessible on Hoopla, its digital platform, at all times.