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Librarian Alice Leggatt shares her experiences of having an author visit to her school cancelled, and what helped her as the situation unfolded.
Back in December 2021 I was idly scrolling my school library's Twitter feed when I noticed that an author we followed, Simon James Green, had posted a picture of his dog and that she looked identical to my own. By total coincidence I had recently taken a photo of my dog lying on top of one of Simon's books, so I sent him the picture. We had a little Twitter chat, I told him his books were popular in our library, and he mentioned that he lived locally and so it would be easy for him to visit if we ever needed an author.
This tiny moment set off a chain of events that I never anticipated. I will not rehash the whole story here (we are librarians, we know how to do background research!) but the short version is that we did book a visit from Simon; a far-right Catholic blog somehow got hold of the letter I'd sent to parents and published an article entitled 'English Catholic School MUST Cancel Scandalous LGBTQ+ History Month Book Signing Event'; the blog's followers responded by sending homophobic messages to the school and our Archdiocese; the Archdiocese decided that Simon and his books fell 'outside the scope of what is permissible in a Catholic School,' then sacked our governing body for supporting the event; press attention followed, and approximately seventy NEU members at my school went on strike for six days in protest. I made the tough decision to move to a new school this September.
I am sure that any librarian reading this can imagine what this was like to experience - the panicked phone calls to my manager as hateful comments started appearing online, the futile...