with local censorship getting worse and worse i've gotten into the habit of buying physical porn whenever i come across it secondhand. i'm now $5 poorer and the proud owner of the bare wench project (2000) by way of local thrift bookstore.
i kinda want this to be a joke post but at the same time i'm genuinely scared of the increase in censorship at the local level. the reason i feel the need to pick up some of this stuff when i see it in the wild is because cultural christianity and conservatism impact everything so much here to the point that, most of the time, any art that could be considered even remotely scandalous is at risk of being thrown away / destroyed for its perceived obscenity. i keep thinking about all the stuff that's gonna be lost.
i might've mentioned this before on here but i went to an absolutely beautiful estate sale months ago. it was clearly a home that had belonged to two lesbians who loved each other so much. they had a rich library of feminist texts and so much stunning art throughout the house. the estate sale had been outsourced to a christian organization who, as the estate was going on, were actively destroying, censoring, and throwing out pieces in the house that they perceived as sinful. they were also verbally denying that two women had lived in the home and telling various conflicting narratives in an attempt to erase the history of the house. i was lucky to arrive early and swipe up a bunch of queer books before the organizers realized what they were working with and started to destroy the history of the home. even if i hadn't seen some of their censorship directly, i could see gaps left in the home library of the two women myself - at least one of the women had been fluent in french (like me) and half of the library was in french. the french books (written in a language that i'm assuming none of the organizers could understand) contained much more obscene titles, content, and topics, as well as a variety of books explicitly about lesbians and women in love with each other. i also found some explicitly lesbian titles tucked away in corners of the house that would be out of sight, and am certain that there were countless more that had previously existed in plain sight and were taken off the shelves before the house was opened to the public.
i get so sad knowing that this sort of censorship happens where i live every day. so like yeah i've gotta pick up the titty dvds before the church ladies explode them. but also. it's becoming more and more commonplace to get rid of anything that can be vaguely marked as "too adult" or "too transgressive". people will toss a book with "gender" in the title. i get so sad thinking about the art that is being lost and suppressed every day.
one of my friends lives in a big city nearby and would frequent the only openly queer bookstore there. she just stopped in last week and they told her that they're having to move to an online-only model because they kept getting threats of violence at their current location. they started looking for a new location and applied to at least three different spots across the city, and were explicitly denied the ability to rent any of them because of the books they carry. and this is a big city with a vibrant queer scene, with queer bars and queer nightlife and events and so many queer people out in the streets as citizens of this place every single day.
