Author Bille Jean King, caught in "Don't Say Gay" book ban crossfire in Florida schools

Editor's note: this story was originally published in July 2023.

Dear Frank: 

Book banning is at a fever pitch. Yet, provocative TV commercials daily with floating crooked carrots cover the screen. 

This is about sex. How is this acceptable viewing and a Billy Jean King book sounds an alarm?

— Cheryl Vanderwalle

∗ ∗ ∗

Dear Cheryl:

Like the above referenced crooked-carrot injectable medication, I will try to set things straight.

The book you mentioned is a biography of a tennis legend geared for elementary-school-aged children. It’s called I am Billie Jean King, and it was written by Brad Meltzer.

Meltzer is an accomplished novelist who has branched out to write a series of non-fiction children’s books that introduce kids to American heroes. Along with I am Billie Jean King, Meltzer has written dozens of other “I am” books, including ones about Teddy Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, Alexander Hamilton, Amelia Earhart, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Helen Keller, Sacagawea, Neil Armstong, Lucille Ball …

The list goes on.

As you correctly noted, his book about Billie Jean King is subject to being banned from a Florida public school library. It’s because of the following brief text in the 40-page book.

“Around this time, I realized I was gay,” it reads. “Being gay means that if you’re a girl, you love and have romantic feelings for other girls — and if you’re a boy, you love and have romantic feelings for other boys.”

That’s too much gay indoctrination, according to one mother of a second-grade girl in a public school in Leon County, even though the book is not required reading at the school.

She filed a complaint about the book, citing Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill — the more aptly called “Don’t Say Gay” law — which prohibits the discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools.

“I object to material that discusses being gay and what it means to be gay,” the mother wrote in her complaint. “This book explains that Billie Jean King was married to a man but decided she was gay.”

The book is now under review for removal.

Billie Jean King’s biography would have been under much more solid ground in Florida if the brief mention of King’s marriage had included a fictional discussion of her husband’s erectile dysfunction.

Particularly if the author could work in Peyronie’s disease.

Instead of saying she realized she was gay, Billie Jean King should have blamed her marital woes on the heavily monetized penile ailment. You can’t watch television for very long these days without seeing an ad about crooked carrots and the cure.

And I’m sure the book’s illustrator Christopher Eliopoulos could have drawn some bent tubers to illustrate this page. (Maybe have King swatting at them with her racket? No? Too on point?)

“Manhood looks different from guy to guy, but when yours bends in a different direction, you may feel bothered by it,” the book could have read, mimicking the script for Xiaflex injections that permeate TV.

These commercials also include calls for supplemental “straightening exercises.” Might want to leave that out of the book — or at least not try to illustrate that aspect.

The point is it’s obviously OK to surround children with talk about sex between men and women, or even dysfunctional sex between men and women. But we can’t give kids the idea in Florida that some people choose to create healthy life partnerships with people of their same sex.

The Billie Jean King book, by sitting on the shelves of the school library and not being required reading, is much less likely to be encountered by a child than a bent-carrot TV ad or by the many mainstream TV ads that subject kids on a daily basis to treatment for erectile dysfunction in all its forms.

“Mommy, why are those two naked people in the Cialis commercial sitting in side-by-side bathtubs outside?”

And is there a kid in America who hasn’t heard that if something they don’t quite understand lasts for more than four hours, somebody ought to alert the medical authorities?

There’s also daily exposure multiple times to the “low testosterone” cures, like the Nugenix Total-T television ads that feature two former pro athletes, Doug Flutie and Frank Thomas, hitting golf balls at a driving range and talking about their improved sex drive due to taking these testosterone-boosting pills.

“Mommy, what’s a ‘man-boosting formula?”’ a child might ask. “And what does it mean when that big man says, ‘and she’ll like it, too’?

“And why are there women standing next to these guys when they swing at golf balls? Isn’t that dangerous?”

Frank Cerabino is a columnist at The Palm Beach Post, a part of the USA TODAY Florida Network.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Billie Jean King book subject to anti-woke ban in Florida schools.