Last week, while returning home to promote my latest book, a memoir about growing up gay in western North Dakota, the Dickinson Press participated in the latest attempt to create a story where there wasn’t one. Dickinson Public Library is carrying the informative, affirmational approach to sexuality and relationships called “Let’s Talk About It.” It makes sense to me that a library would carry a book that promotes healthy sexual relationships, both to one’s self and to others. The book has already been challenged in Valley City, and certainly will be challenged in Dickinson.

Libraries are the last home of democracy in our country; they’re places where all are welcome, services are provided, and books, those wonderful houses of stories, knowledge, and information, are accessible to all.

Unless you believe, like some North Dakotans, in censorship.

I grew up in rural North Dakota at a time where only puberty was talked about. There was no sex education. There were five babies in my class of 23 by the time we graduated high school in the early 2000s. If only there had been a book like “Let’s Talk About It” on the shelves to provide a healthy perspective on sex, sexuality, and relationships perhaps, our lives would have looked different. Instead, like movements across North Dakota to ban books would like it, we didn’t talk about it. And some classmates paid a price for that silence, for not having access to information.

People who ban books, as history teaches, are never the good guys.