The Brief

Last year, the virtual book club at the Huntington Beach Public Library voted to read and discuss the humorous novel The Guncle during its May 2025 meeting. The book, published in 2021, is about a gay former sit-com star who suddenly finds himself the primary caretaker of his niece and nephew.

Then, just a month before the book club meeting, library staff were told to remove the book from the club’s discussion calendar, according to several sources. An LAist review of the book club’s calendar and library newsletters confirm the switch.

Some library supporters suspect the book was removed because it has a gay protagonist. It’s one of several indications, they say, of what’s sometimes called “soft” or “quiet” censorship.

“Any time that you restrict access or create an impediment to access, it's a form of soft censorship,” said Sam Helmick, president of the American Library Association.

The Guncle incident is also an indication that the book battles that have divided this historically conservative beach town are far from over — despite a special election last month in which voters rebuked the City Council’s conservative agenda for the public library system. The continued controversies over Huntington Beach’s libraries has put the city at the forefront of the so-called culture war battles taking place across the country.

“In reality, there's a lot of things going on still, even since the election, that we're concerned about,” said Carol Daus, a volunteer and former board member of the group Friends of the Huntington Beach Public Library, “certain areas that, again, could be involving book censorship.” These include:

• Conservative activists filing formal requests for library book reviews, effectively taking books off the shelf, potentially for months.
• The continued exile — to an isolated shelf in the city’s main library — of some books about puberty and sexuality that used to be available in the children’s section.
• The city’s still-existing resolution that restricts minors’ access to books deemed to have “sexual content,” a term that is debated.

Daus told LAist she asked a city official with library oversight about the removal of The Guncle from the virtual book club list earlier this year and was told it was necessary “to lower the temperature” ahead of the special election. One of two measures on the ballot asked voters if they wanted to repeal a board of residents with the power to decide which children’s books are appropriate for the library.

Corbin Carson, a city spokesperson, said staffers could not comment on the decision to remove the novel from the club’s reading list or otherwise comment for this story because of a pending lawsuit from several Huntington Beach residents and civil rights organizations, including the ACLU. A hearing in the case is scheduled for Aug. 22.

What happened after the special election?

In the June special election, a solid majority of Huntington Beach voters rejected the city’s efforts to exert greater control over the content and management of the libraries. Just over 58% voted to repeal the library review board. And an even greater margin, nearly 61%, voted to restrict the city’s ability to privatize the libraries.

The proudly all-MAGA City Council quietly accepted the results of the election at its meeting earlier this month. “The people have spoken,” Councilman Chad Williams, who campaigned against the ballot measures, said in a phone interview. He said the point of the book review committee was to give the community more say over which books are selected for the library.

But as of Friday morning, more than a month after the election, the city’s website had yet to be updated to fully reflect the election results. The review board is still listed on the city’s website as one of the official advisory bodies, and it has yet to be removed from the city’s municipal code, as called for in the ballot measure.

Plus, the library’s website still links to a collection development policy — guidelines to help librarians select and maintain library materials — that cites the powers of the repealed “Community Parent/Guardian Review Board” and contradicts the new selection policy adopted by voters in the special election. Although, as of last week, the website now notes that pursuant to the results of the election, the city is “reviewing the Collection Development Policy.”

“ I think it's just a matter of time,” Williams said. “It's all going to be codified.”

Librarians at the Huntington Beach Central Library review books in the children's section on Feb. 7, 2024.

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Jill Replogle

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LAist

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What's in the restricted books section?

The City Council’s establishment of the book review committee, by way of a resolution passed in 2023, was just one part of its efforts to restrict access for minors to certain library materials. The resolution also states: “No city library or other city facility shall allow children ready access to books and other materials that contain any content of a sexual nature.” The question of what that means is very much alive.

The issue will be discussed when Judge Lindsey Martinez hears oral arguments in the lawsuit that seeks to overturn the sexual content resolution. The plaintiffs argue the resolution violates California’s Freedom to Read Act. The law, which went into effect in January, was squarely aimed at Huntington Beach. The city argues that it’s not subject to the law because it’s a charter city, which gives it more independence from the state.

Currently, the central library maintains a shelf labeled “Youth Restricted Books Section” for books that librarians have moved out of the children’s section under an evolving set of criteria intended to comply with the sexual content restrictions. The mostly empty shelf sits between an art gallery and a study area. Minors are not allowed to check out the books without a parent’s consent.

The library posted its most recent list of books restricted to that shelf in December 2024. The list has seven titles, including It’s So Amazing! A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families, first published in 1999, and It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health, first published in 1994.

A recent visit by LAist found just two books on the restricted shelf, It’s Perfectly Normal and The Care and Keeping of You, a book published by the American Girl doll company. The latter is not on the library’s list of books with restricted access under the youth sexual content resolution, raising questions as to how and why it was on the restricted shelf.

Why challenged books are unavailable books

Other books considered inappropriate by some City Council members and conservative activists have been completely removed from shelves while librarians review them. The review policy, which has existed for years, allows library patrons to lodge complaints about books and ask that they be recatalogued or removed altogether.

Until recently, librarians had only received official complaints about a handful of books. But in recent years, dozens of complaints have been lodged, including from City Councilmember Gracey Van Der Mark and Carla Strickland, president of the group Huntington Beach Republican Women and the wife of Tony Strickland, a state senator and former mayor. Van Der Mark and Carla Strickland did not respond to repeated requests from LAist for interviews for this story.

In a social media post following the special election, the Huntington Beach Republican Women vowed to “never give up this fight to keep our children safe from sexualized content, both in our HB libraries and schools.” The group wrote that its members had challenged more than 40 books that “have no business being in our taxpayer funded libraries.”

The challenges alarmed library advocates, who filed a public records request for related documents, which they shared with LAist. Some of the challenged books are frequent targets by conservative activists across the country, including the young adult books This One Summer and Flamer, both coming-of-age books with LGBTQ protagonists.

Other challenges to books catalogued as children’s books included:

• Making a Baby, billed as answering the classic question “Where did I come from?” 
• Pride Puppy! an ABC book in which a family’s dog gets lost at a Pride parade.
• The Big Bath House, a picture book about Japanese bath house culture.
• The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish, written by Lil Miss Hot Mess, the founder of Drag Queen Story Hour. 

On the library complaint form about The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish, the complainant, whose name was redacted, wrote that the book's “content is gender confusing.” The complainant also wrote that the book had “sexually explicit” content. LAist reviewed the children’s picture book and found no sex, kissing or nudity.

The person who filed a complaint about The Big Bath House wrote that the content included “sexual and obscene themes.” The complaint included drawings from the book depicting naked women at a communal bath with penciled pubic hair and sketched outlines of breasts.

Another of the complaints was about an adult book, Call Me By Your Name, about a love affair between two men. Adult books catalogued as such are not subject to the city’s sexual content restrictions for minors.

At least one copy of each challenged book, including Call Me by Your Name, is currently unavailable for check out at the central library while the books undergo evaluation. Those evaluations could take up to a year, according to the library’s collection development policy.

“ We see that as making books inaccessible to readers who want to read them,” said Daus, from Friends of the Huntington Beach Public Library.

Khloe Rios-Wyatt, chief executive of the group Alianza Translatinx, one of the groups suing the city over the sexual content restrictions, told LAist the actions of city leaders and their allies are “a direct attack on LGBTQ people's ability to access library resources that are self-affirming.”

The unexpected reach of censorship

Proponents of Huntington Beach’s book restriction efforts have said their goal is to protect children from age-inappropriate sexual content. When asked whether those efforts constitute censorship, Williams, a City Council member, said, “ I think that we all believe in censorship to some degree. And I guess the question is, where's that threshold?”

Williams cited the book Let’s Talk About It: The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human as one of the books he thinks should not be available to minors without parental permission. The book, which the library catalogues as young adult nonfiction, contains a discussion about pornography and advice on how to explore it ethically, including that you should pay for it.

“ I think that [voters] weren't aware that that's one of the things that they were voting on,” Williams said. He said if his critics feel like restricting access to a book “that instructs its readers, minors, to go and watch porn and pay for porn, if they think that that's censorship … I guess that's on them. I guess that's on each individual community member.”

Ada Palmer, a University of Chicago professor who studies the history of censorship, said the goals and effects of censorship go well beyond the obvious target. “What they're going for is the chilling effect, side effect of censorship,” she said.

For example, “if you have a big, scary, public ceremonial book burning of Harry Potter books … a nearby school librarian will be more conservative with what she orders for the school library. A young writer will be more conservative with what she puts in her book if she wants to get published, right? It makes other people self-censor,” Palmer said.

Another potential effect in Huntington Beach: Nearly a dozen librarians and other library staff members have left their jobs since the book controversies started. One librarian was let go days after the June special election, despite being promoted in January.

“Everybody who I know who left, left because of the City Council and the resolution,” said Melissa Ronning, the former principal librarian and one of the first to announce her resignation. (She did so at the public podium during a contentious City Council meeting about the library.)

A local lawsuit, a national debate

Versions of Huntington Beach’s book battles are taking place across the country. Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a group of Maryland parents who sought to excuse their children from class during discussions of books featuring LGBTQ+ themes and characters, citing religious beliefs. One of the much-discussed books throughout the case was Pride Puppy!

There’s evidence that conservative national leaders want to elevate Huntington Beach’s library debate to a bigger platform. Last week, a nonprofit law firm co-founded by Stephen Miller, a top White House aide to President Donald Trump, signed on to defend Huntington Beach against the lawsuit that seeks to block the city’s library book restrictions. It’s a high-profile ally for a city that has emerged as a conservative darling in the so-called culture wars.

Helmick, from the American Library Association, said librarians have a duty to provide a wide variety of material for all sectors of the population. “It is the responsibility of credentialed library staff to offer a wide and robust collection of information for the community to pursue,” Helmick said, and to let people “make their own determinations” about what books to read or not read.

Otherwise, Helmick said, “I am afraid we will have a generation that is afraid to think and afraid to reason on their own.”