The Library's Holy Saint, Oscar Wilde
Why the Library's Pride Display reveals a great deal about their intents to Queer the Library, but also the Community and our Children
The Wilde Pride Display
This summer’s Pride display is subdued at Christian County Library in Nixa over last year’s.
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This year, they avoided the children’s books, the political messaging about Biden, and the “Banned Books” motif.
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Their display has more adult titles and no children’s titles. However, looking closely, you will see a portrait of Oscar Wilde on the second shelf and his quote above the Read with Pride. We’ll come back to that later.
The “All Ages” Scavenger Hunt
This year, they had a Scavenger hunt. The Librarians labeled the scavenger hunt “All Ages” and ran it for two months, so it wasn’t just June or Pride month. In Nixa, if you look for the Teen Charging Station (why do we want middle-aged men looking for it?), you have about a 33% chance of walking past the Pride Display on your way to the station or on your way away from the station.
I questioned Executive Director Brumett about the display and whether it was appropriate for Scavenger Hunt for children to lead past the Pride Display in Nixa. Her answer is below.
If it includes all ages, then it is for children by its very definition, and the Library should have considered this. My argument is that they did believe this, and this is why, of all the things on the Nixa scavenger list to find, they chose the Teen Charging Station. Either we must believe Librarians are not stupid and might have an agenda in “queering spaces,” or we must believe Librarians are always making mistakes like this and can barely manage to run a scavenger hunt effectively, much less a $4M library system across five cities now.
Gretchen Garrity shared this article. Many Librarians have so profoundly built new dogma into their identities that it shapes their appearances. Their individuality wears away, and a new religious cloth and affectation emerges.
The woman in blue is Otter Bowman, the current Missouri Library Board President. The woman in the middle is Emily Drabinski, a self-proclaimed Marxist and lesbian who is the American Library Association president and the person who originated the quote “queering our spaces.” I do not have a name for the third woman wearing a Pride shirt saying Libraries welcome everyone.
This is the religious doctrine and dogma from on-high coming down from the American Library Association and the Missouri Library Association. Current Library staff have told me that the training they sit through has the expectation on every staff member to get in line—to queer the library. There is no consideration for individualism or religious freedom. Library staff are meant to get in line.
An “all-ages” scavenger hunt that lasts two months is not innocent. It has a good chance of drawing kids past a Pride display, and the Librarians purposefully do these things. They have an agenda and punish those who don’t fall in line.
Oscar Wilde, Gay Saint, and Pedophile
The image used by the Christian County Library on the second shelf is this one.
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If you build a religion, you must have sacred people, including their icons and words. Few Gay people have been as lionized as Oscar Wilde.
Oscar Wilde is known in the literary world for two works, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest. I have read Dorian Gray. It’s haunting. In it, the titular character is groomed by two older men to use his good looks to commit crimes of passion and lust, and he’s never harmed by it because of a portrait that ages and carries the weight of his sins. His youthless face gives him access to people to commit murder and rape.
Oscar Wilde is lifted as a hero of the Gay community. Wilde has been seen as a defendant of being gay, attacked back in the days of hatred and bigotry.
Wilde was more than a Gay saint, though. He was a pedophile.
Wilde going into the boy’s room to ‘perform certain operations with his mouth.’ The pair returning to London, and Wilde summoning the boy, almost daily, for sex. Wilde taking seventeen-year-old ‘renter’ Alfred Wood back to his home in Tite Street. Paying him two pounds. In the private room of a restaurant, with shaded red candles at the table, Wilde with seventeen-year-old Charles Parker, feeding him preserved cherries from his own mouth, then taking the boy to the Savoy Hotel. Wilde summoning the boy, each day for a week, by telegram. Wilde staying at the Savoy Hotel for a month and binging on a procession of teenage boys, a chambermaid describing a sallow-faced, ‘rough-looking boy, about fourteen-years-old,’ in Wilde’s bed; the sheets always in ‘a most disgusting state,’ covered in ‘vaseline, semen and soil.’ The sixteen-year-old servant boy, Walter Grainger, Wilde unbuttoning the boy’s trousers and stroking his ‘private parts,’ buying his silence with ten shillings. In a classic stratagem of sexual abuse, Wilde threatening the boy each time, telling him he would be ‘in very serious trouble’ and would ‘go to prison’ if he told anyone what had happened. Wilde renting a house, with Bosie, summoning Grainger as a servant, bringing the boy into his room every night, Grainger deposing that Wilde ‘acted as before’ and that he felt ‘scared.’ Wilde and Bosie encountering two teenage boys on the beach at the seaside resort of Worthing. Their inviting the boys for a sail. Oscar inviting his favourite, Alphonse, who had turned sixteen a few weeks earlier, for an evening walk. Wilde ‘suddenly taking hold’ of the boy, reaching inside his trousers and masturbating him until he ‘spent.’
When I shared this article with ED Brumett, she told me in a bureaucratic language to screw myself. “If there is a concern about the age appropriateness of a temporary display, I encourage you to submit a request for reconsideration.”
The Virtue of the Faeries
Once you have your saints, you have your list of people who have virtues and those who are sinners. For a good read on how this new world of virtue and sin works, read Liberty Magazine, another substack. It examines the history and culture of the Radical Faeries.
The Radical Faeries are a group of men who have decided that young boys are eligible for sex, much like Oscar Wilde did. They have been working through the North American Man Boy Love Association, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (a Quasi-Religious Group), and local LGBT chapters to do Drag Queen Story hours for kids to turn parents into allies for the sexual molestation of their own children.
We pretend that evils like Pedophilia or grooming cannot govern Librarians because Librarians are virtuous. They protect the community and nurture it like holy priests, and they will bring about the revolution when it comes. While we will go out of our way to protect our children from churches and schools, few people are willing to admit our libraries are full of people we wouldn’t hand our children over to if they were teachers or pastors. We ignore our better instincts and intuitions because we don’t want to be sinners in this new religious order.
Here in Christian County, our librarians created a scavenger hunt that is supposedly innocent for all ages and lasts for two months. However, during that month, there is a chance many of the scavengers will be children, and many will walk past the Pride Display. Our librarians quote Oscar Wilde and include a picture of him—an icon like he’s a saint watching over these LGBT books.
Are we asked to accept that Oscar Wilde’s type of virtue is higher than all other virtues? Is this what “Queering spaces” means for our librarians? Is Pedophilia normalized even here in Christian County? If we ask about it, we’re told to “submit a request for reconsideration.” Does that sound like Librarians hold no power? Or does it sound like they are the new religion and the new power, and is it the expectation for us to get in line and offer our children up to the Oscar Wilde’s of this community?