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Don’t Quote Me: Caught Red-Handed

“My sons were greatly disturbed by viewing this material and this matter has caused many sleepless nights in our house.”

– Bentonville, Ark., resident Earl Adams in an email to Mayor Bob McCaslin describing the turmoil that occurred after his two young sons found a copy of The Whole Lesbian Sex Book in the public library.

No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women

No fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it’s dark

…That’s why I’m turning Japanese

I think I’m turning Japanese

I really think so …

– “Turning Japanese” by the Vapors

When I was 12 or 13, I kept a copy of Playboy hidden in my cellar. My best friend back then had swiped it from his father’s hiding place in his own garage and then given it to me, a girl, for safekeeping. We’d look at it a lot, both of us hoping silently that the day we’d see a sexy naked woman of the three-dimensional variety would come sooner, rather than later.

If there was a disturbing aspect to learning about the mature female body in a damp cellar, it wasn’t a result of seeing Miss January on all fours, but rather the mold that grew on her curves over time. By May, all the really good parts of her were covered in a green-black slime. If only we’d thought to hide our contraband in a library.

Since it’s doubtful that Bentonville, Ark., resident Earl Adams recently emerged from an alien spacecraft as a fully grown spoilsport, I have to assume that he was once a horny adolescent curious about sex and, like me, willing to take chances to feed that curiosity. It’s probably also safe to assume that he would not have wanted the details of his inquisitiveness fed to the media. I know I wouldn’t have. Yet that’s exactly the position in which he put his two young sons, Kyle and Ryan.

Earlier this year, Adams’ sons, ages 14 and 16, found a copy of The Whole Lesbian Sex Book at the public library while browsing for books on military academies. Hoo-ah! For those reading this who can’t remember the feeling of excitement attached to such a discovery, consider how you might feel today if you found $50,000 in airport just as you’re about to board a plane to Vegas. Jackpot!

But Dad didn’t see it that way. In his view, a public library is no place for his boys to acquire accurate information about a topic they are justifiably interested in: sex. So he sent an email to Bentonville Library director Cindy Suter expressing his anger. “This book contains very graphic illustrations that should not be accessible to our children,” he wrote on Jan. 26.

Clearly, Adams hasn’t spent much time in a public library – a centrally located, purposely convenient and extremely appropriate home for lots of books that contain graphic illustrations of people having sex with their graphically illustrated sex organs. The Joy of Sex, The New Joy of Sex, More Joy of Sex and The Joy of Mature Sex can be found there, as well as two books that were perhaps written with Adams in mind – The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amazing Sex and Sex for Christians.

Why a book on lesbian sex was filed in the military section of the library is, officially, unknown. “All of our books are shelved according to the Dewey classification,” Suter told the Bentonville Daily Record on April 20. “We didn’t alter that in any way.” Unofficially, however, it’s suspected that the filer was not a dyslexic librarian, but a very clever boy with itchy little sausage fingers, perhaps named Adams.

Whether the boys stumbled upon the book in all its precise glory, or found it in its proper place and took it to the military section, hardly matters. The scam (one probably as old as sex itself) — hide something in plain sight and it’ll never be found – worked like a charm. Kudos must go out to the kid who realized what I never did: Every teen deserves a dry, quiet place to come – of age, that is – and discover the things his parents won’t or can’t talk to him about.

The Adams boys are very lucky and now very enlightened victims of their own adolescence – not, as their father believes, of an “immoral social agenda.” Adams’ outrage over his sons’ exposure to “graphic illustrations” is troubling given that he has no issue with his sons viewing graphic images of war, and that he supports their interest in the armed forces at time when the current administration is using the military to support an immoral agenda of its own. But what’s more disturbing is that Adams’ reaction to their find goes far beyond that of most parents when faced with a similar situation.

After contacting Suter, Adams’ furthered his shameless invasion of his sons’ privacy by writing a letter to the mayor of Bentonville, Bob McCaslin. The. Mayor. “My sons were greatly disturbed by viewing this material,” he wrote, “and this matter has caused many sleepless nights in our house.”

Unfortunately for the boys, they found Newman’s book of positions before discovering West Point’s secret position on girl-on-girl action: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and for God’s Sake Don’t Let Your Uptight Father Find Out You Know More About Lesbians Than He Does!

Adams’ overstated fears and very public whining exhibit a selfishness that, in the face of his sons’ natural eagerness to become men, is appalling. Instead of acknowledging his kids’ curiosity privately while admiring their intelligence to seek out accurate information instead of taking notes from a locker room wall, it appears that he invented a cockamamie notion that the book thrust them into a state of distress.

Why and under what circumstances the boys told their father about the book, and how they related their feelings about its content to him isn’t, as far as I can tell, a matter of public record. But if our own teenage experiences can be an accurate guide, we can be fairly certain of what didn’t happen. The boys did not, as Adams wants us to believe, leap from their beds at night, and in a restless state run screaming to their father, “Dad, get these horrifying images out of our heads!” If they did, Adams has an entirely different sexual issue on his hands.

Even if Adams had told his sons that lesbians are Satan’s playmates, the idea that boys their age were anything less than euphoric over the book is ludicrous. If they lost sleep, it’s probably because they were struggling to retain Newman’s images of lesbians and taking turns kicking each other in the head for not tracing a few pages and selling copies to their pimply faced pals in front of Kinko’s.

What’s most likely is that Adams learned of the boys’ exposure to the world of clitorises and G-spots by overhearing them talk incessantly about what they’d seen, or after catching them washing their own sheets — frequently.

Tsk. Tsk. Boys can pee standing up, but girls have all brains.

Whatever the truth behind the blabbing, Adams’ priceless words to the mayor were followed by another letter to him on Feb. 16 in which Adams complained that the book is “patently offensive and lacks any artistic, literary or scientific value.” He insisted that it be removed and threatened a lawsuit.

As if the boys had seen a framed picture of a dildo during a field trip to Town Hall, the powers-that-be in Bentonville went into action. The issue was taken up by the Library Advisory Board and, on April 3, board members voted unanimously to remove The Whole Lesbian Sex Book and replace it with a similar resource, if possible. If a suitable replacement can’t be found, according to Suter, the book will likely go back on the shelf.

Adams didn’t like the sound of that, and on April 19 he sent an email to northern Arkansas’ The Morning News, in which he wrote, “Any effort to reinstate the book will be met with legal action and protests from the Christian community.”

The following day, Adams contacted the Daily Record, writing in yet another email, “For some reason, God placed this burden on me, and I will follow God’s plan to preserve a sense of decency in our public libraries.”

Did somebody say “God’s plan” and “Christian community”?

On cue, Fox News entered the picture on April 27, giving the job of breaking the story nationally not to its legal eagle, the somewhat virile-looking Greta Van Susteren, but to Megyn Kelly, uber-femme blond hottie and co-anchor of Fox News’ America’s Newsroom.

Kelly, who obviously didn’t get the memo that Fox Newsiness is next to Godliness, chuckled after reporting that Adams claimed the book gave his sons “many sleepless nights,” and could barely keep a straight face while discussing with guests Adams’ decision to file a $20,000 lawsuit against the town of Bentonville for obscenity.

As of this writing, there’s been no further word of the suit, but rumor has it that Adams has contacted Ilene Chaiken to express his outrage and his sons’ horror over her use of the letter L. “You’ve taken a perfectly good letter and defiled it!” he wrote in an email to her that he copied to the mayor of Sesame Street.

Gah.

But there’s a silver lining to this story oozing with ridiculousness and brought to national attention for all the wrong reasons, and it’s provided by none other than the author of The Whole Lesbian Sex Book, Felice Newman. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle on May 3, Newman correctly noted: “If there was one teenaged lesbian or bisexual girl in America who didn’t know there was a book about the sexual experiences she so desires, she knows now. Thank you, Fox News.”

Thank you, indeed, from the bottom of my heart, and the cellar of my libido.

Kim Ficera is the author of Sex, Lies and Stereotypes: An Unconventional Life Uncensored. Her monthly column at AfterEllen.com, Don’t Quote Me, is dedicated to all the folks in and out of Hollywood who talk without thinking or who don’t know when to stop talking. Email her at [email protected].

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