"There is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all."
-- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
-- Mark Twain
"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime..."
-- Justice Potter Stewart, dissenting Ginzberg v. United States, 383 U.S. 463 (1966)
"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot."
-- Eugene Gladstone O'Neill, American playwright (1888-1953)
"The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be... Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself."
-- Granville Hicks (1901-1982)
" If your library is not 'unsafe', it probably isn't doing its job."
-- John Berry, Iii, Library Journal, October 1999
Earlier this week I received email from one of the people who operate "
The Hex Files, The Draco/Harry Fan Archive," that they intend to ban (remove) both
Shooting Star and
Fallen Star from the archive.
It is the opinion of their moderators that
Shooting Star "does not meet the archive’s requirement for .... a mutual, positive emotional attachment between the main characters." Which, apparently, they consider a prerequisite for inclusion on their site. Interestingly enough, they allowed all of
Shooting Star to be archived on their site, approving each chapter. It is only after I began to archive
Fallen Star that they decided to ban the stories. They say that
Shooting Star "will, therefore, along with its sequel
Fallen Star, have to be removed from the archive." They say they will give me a week (from Oct. 3) to remove it or they will.
Their prohibition is a strange one for a fan archive in the first place. And, I believe, unworkable, especially given that not even therapists can agree on what defines such a relationship. I could name quite a number of stories on their archive which include relationship dynamics many would consider unhealthy. In a letter to them I wrote: "If you are going to do a psychological examination of every H/D story for whether it is a kind of love of which you completely approve, I think you will find yourself in an even bigger quandary than you are with my stories. Will you ban all stories involving magical binding, or any other device that forces the characters together? Every non-con or dubious consent story? Every depiction of violence which is too graphic (or realistic)?" (They also object to what they termed "excessive and gratuitous" violence in
Shooting Star, even though there is no prohibition against it listed on their site, let alone a definition of it.)
I have spent the last week thinking a lot about these stories and what they mean to me. I have a lot to say on that and may write (an post) a series of essays on fiction and what I think about the type of stories I write. In the meantime, I find it interesting that that
Shooting Star was originally written as a challenge fic in response to censorship on livejournal. I don't consider the action Hexfiles moderators are taking to be any less offensive than the censorship that has been carried out by and threatened on LJ. In fact, I find it even more upsetting that it is other fans that would do this. At least, Six Apart has a financial reasons for their censorship. Hexfiles moderators simply do not approve of what I and my co-author have written. It is my opinion that the Hexfiles moderators restriction is not a reasonable one, and, even more importantly, it is not applied evenly to all fiction on the site.
I have decided my response will be: 1) I will no longer archive
any of my fiction on "The Hex Files," 2) I will let other people know about this censorship, and 3) I will not censor my own work. While Hexfiles claims to be "
The Draco/Harry Fan Archive," they are not the only archives out there. I will continue to archive on other sites.
For additional comments relevant to this, please read:
An Author's Understanding of Stars - my analysis of the two banned stories;
Morality, Fiction and the Idealistic Author- an essay morality in fiction; and
Warnings and Violence in my Fiction - another short essay.
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