After picture books about same-sex families are pulled from city’s schools, 267 writers ask for their work to be taken off shelves

More than 250 Italian authors have written to the mayor of Venice asking him to remove their books from the city, in an act of solidarity with the writers who have seen their picture books about same-sex families pulled from Venice’s schools.

Businessman Luigi Brugnaro, who says he is neither “left or right”, was elected mayor of Venice last month, and swiftly moved to take around 50 books from the city’s classrooms. In June, Brugnaro had told la Repubblica that he had “promised” this during his election campaign, and “I have done it”. “We do not want to discriminate against children,” he said. “At home parents can be called Dad One and Dad Two, but I have to think about the majority of families where there is a mother and a father.”

His move prompted outrage from the book trade, with the Association of Italian Publishers president Marco Polillo saying that pulling books from a school is “always unacceptable”. But a statement from Brugnaro issued last week said that the books had been collected in order to verify “which are, and above all which are not, suitable for preschool children”.

Those which deal with physical, religious and racial discrimination that have been removed from schools, such as titles by the acclaimed Leo Lionni, will be returned, Brugnaro said. But there are still reservations over texts such as Francesca Pardi’s Piccolo Uovo (Little Egg), and Ophélie Texier’s Jean a deux mamans (Jean Has Two Mummies), he said, criticising the “cultural arrogance” of the previous administration, which he said introduced its “personal view of society” into schools without consulting parents, who “must have a say on the crucial issues that affect the education of their children”.

Now authors, led by Andrea Valente and Matteo Corradini, have delivered a letter to the mayor’s office signed by 263 writers. The letter asks Brugnaro to “kindly ban our books as well”, adding “we don’t want to stay in a city where the books of others are banned”.

Valente and Corradini write that they do not consider the “partial reverse” of the mayor to be satisfactory, so decided to ask for their own ban.

“At the moment it seems that the great majority of the books have been ‘freed’ and can go back to school. The ones that are still banned are the ones that talk about gender (the complete list of books was about diversity in a more general way, including colour of the skin, religion, handicap and so on),” said Valente on Thursday. “Nevertheless, as long as even one single book is banned, our letter won’t change.”

Pardi, whose banned picture book Piccolo Uovo follows the journey of a little egg who discovers that there are many different kinds of family, said the support from fellow authors was “very nice, because we don’t feel alone”.

“In Italy, many people are silient, and don’t speak out about things, but now with this, many people are taking a position,” she said. “All the world of children’s literature – they are completely with us.” Pardi runs publisher Lo Stampatello, which aims to reflect the lives of the children of gay parents in Italy in its output, and said that six or seven titles from the press have been removed in Venice.

The books in question, she said, “are very simple books, showing that gay people can be normal people, that they can be good parents”. But “they are saying terrible things [about them] to put fear in people, because they don’t want this message. They don’t want things to change. They want homosexuality to remain in people’s minds, to keep the prejudice”

She is now waiting for the mayor’s next step. “We’re a very little publisher with no money,” she said. “We have had much help from social media, but we are very powerless.”

“Sincerely, I do not think the mayor will do anything, but drink a cup of coffee and think about something else. our goal, though, was not to stand still,” said Valente. “It appears to me obvious that he used the gender topic for electoral reasons. He probably never even saw one of the books.”

One signatory, the award-winning author Giorgio Fontana, said he signed the letter to “prove both that the writers who’ve seen their books removed are not alone”, and to “protest against an appalling gesture of censorship and ignorance”.

“To order that some books must be removed from schools is disturbing, and the alleged motivation makes it all even worse: the idea that these books promote a ‘gender theory’ which would harm the only idea of family that Brugnaro has in mind: an heterosexual married couple with children. It’s all so depressing,” said the writer. “Hopefully our letter will be effective – but even if it isn’t, we have showed at least that we strongly disapprove Brugnaro’s choice. We’ll see what happens next.”

