Blame it on the cucumber

May 8, 2004

Ban me? Not without one hell of a fight. When the moral right in Florida turned on novelist Linda Jaivin, a bitter and at times comic censorship battle ensued.

Last July, an 83-year-old grandmother called Loretta Harrison visited her local library in Marion County, Florida. A brightly covered book with a funny title caught her attention. After reading just a few pages, she filed an objection with the library that the book was "to [sic] obsene [sic] for general reading".

"Like a character in the Tom Clancy novels she enjoys," reported the county newspaper, the Star-Banner, Harrison became "a player in an intrigue", triggering "forces she was hardly aware of" and which were out of her control. The result, the paper wrote, would have an "indelible impact on the library system and the community". Marion County, 480 kilometres north of Miami and home to many horsebreeders, Republicans and retirees, has been embroiled ever since in a bitterly contested battle over censorship, sex and the role of the public library.

The book at the centre of the controversy is my first novel, the comic-erotic Eat Me. In the opening, highly parodic chapter, a woman shopper samples both the produce and the store detective in a late-night supermarket. Published in a dozen countries and almost as many languages, Eat Me was a bestseller in Australia and France, and was a book club selection in Italy and other countries.

It made the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list as well as those of independent bookshops in the US from Rhode Island to Seattle. Vintage, in Britain, is publishing a special edition of it as one of the 12 books for its Summer Reading promotion this year, alongside Portnoy's Complaint, Fear of Flying, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion and novels by Martin and Kingsley Amis, among others.

In 1997, the internet filtering company CyberPatrol put the entire website of The Booksmith, an independent bookseller in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, on its CyberNOT list for publishing the cover of my book, a summary of the contents and a description of me reading the first chapter at the shop. The Booksmith launched a courageous (and successful) fight against the ban. But not even then was Eat Me the subject of moral panic such as we've seen in Marion County.

One member of the library committee that considered Harrison's complaint alleged "emotional shock" as a result of reading the novel from cover to cover. In the end, a majority vote deemed that the book would stay on the shelves. It was a brave decision. Fundamental Christianity and patriotism are the dominant religions of Marion County: at last year's Patriotic Celebration in the First Baptist Church, congregants found inspiration in such hymns as Bring This Nation Back to God.

A few years earlier, the library's director, Julie Sieg, ruled against complainants wanting to remove the sex-education book It's Perfectly Normal from the shelves because it told kids that homosexuality and masturbation were just that, perfectly normal. She decided to have a look at Eat Me for herself. The fruity adventures of my heroines were not to her taste. In fact, she gagged on them, decided that Eat Me was "not worth defending", and pulled it off the shelf.

Enter Brian Creekbaum and Mary Lutes. Creekbaum, a Marion County native, had fought several censorship battles over the previous three years, including the one over It's Perfectly Normal. For this, the informal citizens group he chaired received the 2001 Intellectual Freedom Award from the Florida Library Association. Creekbaum has a lazy Southern drawl, an indefatigable devotion to civil liberties, a sharp mind and a dry wit. Referring to one of chapter one's naughtier bits, he wrote to me in an email, "I find it hard to believe the cucumber has nothing to do with this decision."

Dr Lutes is a former chair of the Library Advisory Board (LAB) and a voracious reader who holds a PhD in social science. She told me she found the first chapter of Eat Me a "knee slapper". Lutes and Creekbaum believed the book was absolutely worth fighting for; there were higher principles at stake. Lutes lodged an appeal against the removal.

This put the ball back in the court of the LAB, an appointed citizens' committee. County commissioners got involved. The Star-Banner published articles, editorials and letters on the subject. One of the editors remarked to Creekbaum when they met, of all places, in a grocery shop: "If you were going to censor a book, that would be the book." But the paper came down publicly on the side of the civil libertarians, with such published sentiments as "let freedom ring - loud and clear". The National Coalition Against Censorship weighed in against the ban. The book's opponents grew more hysterical by the day.

I began to look forward to Creekbaum's emails - he sent as many as half a dozen updates in one day. His thumbnail sketches of the characters involved made for riveting reading. There was the foul-mouthed guardian of public morals and another opponent who accused my book of being part of a "jihad" against America's children. A third was nearly arrested for attempting to read the entire first chapter of Eat Me into the public record. Like others in the anti-Eat Me camp, he's done a great job of advertising the book. A right-wing shock jock, who calls it "absolute pornography", even put a link to the chapter on his website.

As a comic novelist, I could not have dreamed up such fabulous characters as the 76-year-old anti-Eat Me LAB member whose public activities included penning letters to the Star-Banner alleging that "the liberal-dominated media has tried to turn the United States into a matriarchy with weak and powerless men dominated by powerful, aggressive women". (He ended with the reassurance: "Relax, men - in the hierarchy of the sexes we will always be on top." His proof? That young women "work their buns off" to fit into bikinis "to attract a bunch of guys with beer guts".)

The dispatches from the Marion County morality wars were as engrossing as the push for censorship was alarming. The library system in Marion County is one of the largest in America, serving 128,000 registered users in 11 locations. And with the rise of the Christian Right nationally, the same table was being set all over America. Four years ago, the American Library Association received 700 letters of complaint for daring even to raise the topic of erotica at its annual conference.

Pro-censorship activists in Marion County and elsewhere were taking cues from the likes of Karen Jo Gounaud of the Virginia-based Family Friendly Libraries (FFL). Fighting unfiltered internet access in her own library, Gounaud warned of "aroused teen patrons dumping their DNA on the library bathroom floor" and, where private booths were provided, "disgusting unsanitary accidents and rug damage". (A national magazine faxed Gounaud a page from a children's book for her comments; her response was, "That is definitely the kind of book that we would ask to be moved." It was Mother Goose.) It's in this context that Janet Jackson's right breast could bring a nation to its knees.

Maybe it's because our first colonialists were convicts and theirs were Puritans, but Australia seems less prone to this particular style of moral panic. I say this despite censorship battles over movies such as Lolita and Baise-Moi, and the rare book, including American Psycho. So far as I'm aware, there have been no challenges to Eat Me's presence in libraries here; it's even on some university reading lists.

I've read the infamous first chapter aloud dozens of times in Australian bookshops, at festivals and in performance spaces, usually with a bowl of fruit, a large cucumber and a small whip as props. It's a send-up, not a sex act, a fact that most Australians seem to have little trouble grasping. I'm not saying civil libertarians don't have to be vigilant: Helen Vnuk's excellent Snatched: Sex and Censorship in Australia (Vintage) is a sobering read. But we're not the US yet.

Six days after the first article on Eat Me appeared in the Star-Banner, a Marion County resident urged the library to dump a children's book called A Stone in My Hand, by Cathryn Clinton. It is set in Gaza City during the 1988 intifada and is narrated by a young Palestinian girl; the complainant alleged it would contribute to anti-Semitism.

On December 2 last year, the LAB voted 9-1 to retain A Stone in My Hand. Then it turned to the question of Eat Me. After a heated debate in which I was called an "intelligent pervert" and my novel "pure pornography", and it was asserted that people who wanted to remove Christian prayer from public schools were the real censors, the LAB voted 7-3 to recommend that Eat Me stay in the collection.

At the end of February, after nearly three months of dithering, Sieg finally put the book back into circulation. It went straight out to the first person on a long waiting list.

A local shock jock warned that on Judgement Day, Jesus would be questioning Sieg about the pornography she'd made available to little children. Of more immediate concern, Conservative county commissioners, assisted by their county administrator, a retired two-star general from the US Marines, launched a push for more political control over the library collection. A self-titled fundamentalist preacher put his hand up to be on the newly reorganised LAB. The meeting to decide the library's fate was scheduled to take place this week.

Last month, the Star-Banner opinion editor, Brad Rogers, clearly over it, wrote of both Eat Me and It's Perfectly Normal: "That two books out of an estimated 400,000 could be directly responsible for the moral destruction of our community is a bit of a reach."

Linda Jaivin's most recent book is The Monkey and the Dragon.

Blame it on the cucumber - Books - www.smh.com.au

NOTE: The Palm Beach County Library does not own a copy of EAT ME. Let 'em eat spinach.