By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Private Policy and Terms of Use.
Thousands of books smolder in a Nazi bonfire, 1933. The burnings were conducted by the German Student Association of Nazi Germany.
Opinion: While you don’t see many literal book burnings anymore, censorship is still occuring in the U.S., argues Lambda Legal's Kevin Jennings.
One of the first things the Nazis did was burn queer books.
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was a gay, Jewish socialist (in other words, everything the Nazis hated) who established the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1919, a first-of-its-kind institution where research on sexual orientation and even pioneering health care for trans people was done. On May 6, 1933 – barely three months after the Nazis came to power in Germany – Hitler’s henchmen ransacked the Institute and, four days later, publicly burned its library of thousands of books pertaining to gender identity and sexual orientation in Berlin's Bebelplatz Square. (Hirschfeld himself was luckily abroad on a lecture tour at the time and consequently unharmed: he would die in exile two years later in France.) Those grainy films of Nazi book burnings you’ve seen countless times were most likely of the burning of the library for the Institute for Sexual Science on May 10, 1933.
Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.
The Nazis gave book-burning a bad name, and modern-day authoritarians have figured out that torching tomes is bad for their brands, so you don’t see many literal book burnings anymore. But censorship is occurring even as we speak in the United States, as the Trump Administration seeks to control what information young people have access to through their libraries. The purged books are usually ones about LGBTQ+ and/or BIPOC issues. A recent example took place at the U.S. Naval Academy (an institution attended by grown adults) where, in compliance with an order by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, nearly 400 books were removed from its library, including works like Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer: A Memoir. Ironically (or maybe not so ironically), Hitler’s Mein Kampf is still on the shelves.
To be fair, this trend did not start when Trump took power in January 2025. In March 2022, Florida enacted its now notorious “don’t say gay or trans” law, which censored what teachers could say and students could read in the state’s schools. Eight other states (Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Ohio) soon followed suit. The Iowa law includes a specific book ban on queer books, with 3,671 books pulled from the shelves of the state’s school libraries in 2024, the second most of any state in the nation. (Not to be outdone, Florida remains the leader in book banning, with 4,561 titles banned in 2024). Lambda Legal, the ACLU of Iowa, and the law firm Jenner & Block LLP are currently in federal court challenging Iowa’s draconian law in Iowa Safe Schools et al v. Reynolds, where we are representing Iowa Safe Schools, a non-profit organization supporting LGBTQ+ and allied youth, and seven Iowa students and their families affected by the law.
While the Trump Administration may not have started the fire, they are certainly fanning the flames with actions such as those taken at the Naval Academy, which we joined the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) in denouncing. And the climate in many schools is becoming dangerous. A lesbian elementary school teacher in Indianapolis this week was threatened with a gun by an irate Mom who felt that her lesson on flags, which included a reference to a rainbow flag with the words "be kind" on it, was inappropriate. Luckily no one was hurt – this time.
Why this obsession with removing library books that address LGBTQ+ and BIPOC lives? After all, no one can force you to go to a library and check out a book (as a former high school history teacher, believe me, I tried), so who’s harmed by a book sitting on a shelf? Yale Professor Jason Stanley explains this obsession in his recent book, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, where he wrote: “Fascist education works by strategically erasing accounts of history and current events that include a diversity of perspectives, narrowing the scope of what can be taught until students are presented with a single viewpoint, which is formulated specifically to justify and perpetuate a hierarchy of value between groups.” If you truly believe that certain things (like, say, heterosexuality) are morally better than, say, homosexuality, you literally can’t stand the idea of someone checking out a book that suggests otherwise. In their world, queer books must go.
The playwright Moises Kaufman wrote, withAmanda Gronich, in the 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist play about the Holocaust, Here There are Blueberries, “No genocide starts with the killing. Every genocide starts with words.” If you’re okay with removing words and books, sooner or later it becomes ok to remove people (to El Salvadoran prisons, apparently). A genuine democracy must have a marketplace of ideas, not a monopoly where only one point of view is represented. When Hitler is OK to read but Maya Angelous is not, we’ve started down a dangerous path. Let’s turn back before it’s too late.
A former high school history teacher and Assistant Deputy Secretary of Education, Keivn Jennings is the CEO of Lambda Legal.
