“It was a pleasure to burn,” reads the opening line of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel “Fahrenheit 451” and the opening screen of Kim Synder’s documentary, “The Librarians.”
On Oct. 7, Drake University’s Cowles Library and School of Education partnered with the Varsity Cinema to screen a 2025 documentary in honor of Banned Books Week, a city-wide effort to observe the impact of book censorship.
Following the screening of the movie, which premiered in January 2025, the president of the American Library Association, Sam Helmick led a discussion panel. The chosen guests featured voices around the community. The panel, organized by Cowles Library, strived to address how the issues raised in the film are being experienced in Iowa and how communities can act.
Up on stage, below a list of rolling credits sat Amanda Jones, a school librarian and film participant who has been named to the Time100 Next list that spotlights rising stars. Beside her sat Melissa Peterson, the legislative and policy director of the Iowa State Education Association, as well as Alicia Mangin of the Des Moines Public Library East Side branch and Sara Hayden Parris, founder of Annie’s Foundation.
The film showcased the story of librarians in Texas, Florida and across the rest of the nation uniting to combat book bannings initiated by Texas representative Matt Krause’s list. In October 2021, Krause sent a letter to the Texas Education Agency and school superintendents with a list of more than 800 books. His letter inquired whether schools held the books that covered topics of racism, gender and sexuality. Krause has not responded to queries from media like NBC News about how he generated the list.
Starting in Granbury, Texas, with Krause’s list, book banning initiatives through civic engagement at K-12 school board meetings spread throughout the nation, with legislators, the nonprofit political organization Moms for Liberty and other proponents of the book bannings citing their rationale as removing sexually explicit content and child pornography crimes.
Audience member and Drake sophomore studying musical theater, Ian Gray, graduated high school in 2023 and witnessed the book bannings firsthand in Arizona at his liberal arts high school. His school didn’t have a library, he says, but he saw how this impacted his English teachers and their safety.
“My junior year, I especially noticed it,” Gray said. “My senior year, I took an English course with an English teacher who brought in a ton of banned books and invited us to read them. I actually read ‘All Boys Aren’t Blue’ and saw myself in a piece of literature and it clarified ideas that I was having and made me feel more confident in who I was.”
“All Boys Aren’t Blue” is one of the most frequently challenged and banned books across the states for LGBTQ+ content, sexually explicit descriptions and profanity.
Dozens of librarians were interviewed in the documentary, who expressed outrage because to them it is clear the books targeted specifically go after topics of race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities, sex education, Roe v. Wade, the history of the Ku Klux Klan and more.
That intentional targeting feels clear to Gray, too.
“Something needs to be done,” Gray said, “because if I, a bisexual man, am feeling this, I can’t imagine how a gay man or trans person or something who is pan[sexual] reading this literature and how it’s connecting for them.”
The documentary similarly highlighted the voices of appalled queer youth in interviews from states like Texas where the modern book bannings in schools and libraries originated. One high school student from the Granbury Banned Book Club expressed they understand the intent of book bannings, remarking they all read “Fahrenheit 451” for school.
The student explained they have access to other heavy books like “A Clockwork Orange,” which contains exceptionally explicit sexual content, yet those weren’t pulled from shelves in the book ban efforts. To these students, it is clear there is only an issue with access to books if their material elevates LGBTQ+ or Black and Brown voices and stories.
One librarian interviewed in the film, Nancy Jo Lambert, gave an explanation of the issue.
“Politicians are playing a very dangerous game when they try to make libraries battlegrounds for politics because the only people that’s going to hurt are our kids,” Lambert said, choking up.
Nicole Schmuff was a community member among the audience. As a student at the University of Nebraska Omaha working on her Bachelor’s of Library Science to pursue archival work, Schmuff’s interest was immediately piqued when she saw the event in a Drake Instagram post.
“Not a lot of people know about how many books are banned and really the impact that it has on kids,” Schmuff said. “Kids are being isolated and people aren’t learning about just other people’s lives and lived experiences, and that’s scary. And it’s diminishing at the end.”
In one comment, Mangin assured the audience that if book banning is targeting public schools, it is bound to spread to public libraries. Helmick, too, expressed the importance of student and community access to all kinds of books, especially those under attack, for a deeper understanding of one another.
“We have to read books that are being challenged, but we have to read books that challenge us, and we have to lead in the conversations that wrestle our jimmies,” Helmick said. “The only way we have a moral argument through the First Amendment is if we defend all speech.”
