Fahrenheit 2025
I spent my first 23 years living in a culture where censorship was a normal part of life. Growing up in Russia and Ukraine, I saw firsthand how book bans can change a society. As a child, my parents recalled how the Soviet Union destroyed, prohibited, and “edited” literature to serve “party needs.” Rather than take these things in stride, as many do in that part of the world, I have always found censorship terrifying, both as a writer and a trans person. I still read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1952) — about a totalitarian, anti-intellectual future where all books are burned and people fight wars whose causes they don’t know and are conditioned not to wonder about — as a work of horror. And modern Russia is not as far removed from its Soviet past on this front as they’d have you believe.
In Russia today, people actually believe that there is considerable overlap between LGBT people and ISIS — in part because information about both groups is heavily restricted by the state. When I moved to the UK as an adult, one of the first things I did was buy books about the War on Terror and seek out primary source material from terrorist groups. In the West, I finally felt free as a writer and reader. Until it all began to change, starting with LGBT books.
In June 2025, I visited Women’s Prize Live, a festival dedicated to one of the most prestigious literary awards in fiction and non-fiction. One of the events I attended — which was visited by British Queen Camilla herself for a time — was a conversation between the award-winning novelist Elif Shafak and the non-fiction author and founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, Laura Bates. I was struck by the fact that both Bates and Shafak, despite their prominence, were deeply concerned about the future of women’s fiction, not in Afghanistan or Russia, but in the UK. In light of recent political changes, their fears aren’t misplaced.
While the UK’s misguided prosecution of “hate speech” has made headlines in the past year, the growing problem with literary censorship has received far less attention. According to new data from Index on Censorship, more than half of surveyed school librarians in the UK (53%) say they’ve been asked to pull books off shelves — many of them LGBT titles. But it's not LGBT people sounding the alarm. Authors, librarians, and booksellers are also worried. Studies show that bans on LGBT books not only lead to situations where younger gay, bi, and trans people are more likely to struggle with acceptance and mental health — it also leads to further censorship.
Source: The Bookseller.
In the US, among the wave of history and biography books banned from schools in 2024, 25% included LGBT figures. When it came to illustrated books, 39% featured LGBT characters or themes. Some books have also been banned because they dealt with topics about racism. Others, because the main character is a ginger-haired girl with freckles learning to accept her appearance. Encyclopedias about dogs and cats have even been banned because they were somehow considered to include sexual content. The sheer ridiculousness of this reminds me of a scene from Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner (2003) in which Taliban leaders at one point force an Afghan artist to paint pants on “nude” flamingos.
In the West, the resurgence of literary censorship began with LGBT books, but the problem is much more global than it may seem at first glance. The fight against “gay books” — often seen as being immoral, subversive, or inappropriate — is often used by governments as a foot in the door to wage a broader war on freedom of speech and expression. In May 2025, a Moscow court placed three people under house arrest in the so-called “publishers’ case”, targeting staff from Individuum, a publishing house now accused of “extremism” over alleged LGBT “propaganda.” Individuum is part of Eksmo, one of the largest and most influential publishing groups in all of Eastern Europe that owns the publishing rights to thousands of Russian titles and translations.
Dozens and dozens of LGBT books in Russia have appeared on what critics call the “Fahrenheit list.” They were banned not just from Russian schools or public libraries but from sale in the country. Russian bookshops are now forced into the role of Bradbury’s Guy Montag and ordered to physically destroy books. This wasn’t only done to books about LGBT people or themes — some simply had characters who happened to be gay, bi, or trans. The Russian government uses the “LGBT extremism” law to apply pressure on authors and editors and to cut people off from information. In the words of Fahrenheit 451: “A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. [...] Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man?”
Some may scoff at the notion that banning books from school libraries is, in fact, censorship. Ironically, this skepticism usually comes from those who are quickest to decry cancel culture the instant anyone left-of-center wants to restrict any kind of information. When it comes to schools, they insist, right-wing moves to prohibit certain books are simply about protecting children. But the reason for Russian book bans — or American and British book bans — is not about protecting the youth. That is the useful pretext. The Trojan horse. Literary censorship comes from the authoritarian and anti-intellectual fear of educated people. There’s a quote often attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “Information is the currency of democracy.” It turns out there’s no evidence he ever said that, but the statement is nevertheless true. The government needs to allow information to be public so voters can make informed decisions. As Benjamin Franklin in fact said: “If all printers were determined not to print anything until they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”
Censorship is a kind of political virus. Whatever one thinks of where it begins, it never stays contained. It spreads like a pandemic of ignorance until the entire society is infected. Today, the government or institutions may be suppressing the expression of some group you are opposed to. But if we let the government decide what people can say or read, it’s only a matter of time before they come for your freedom, too. Those who carry out or support these censorship campaigns are playing a dangerous game that no one will win, because the war on books is, at bottom, a war on the mind.
All authoritarian regimes, from the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany to the Afghan Taliban and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, were famous for banning and destroying books. And they never stopped there. As the 19th-century German philosopher Heinrich Heine prophetically wrote, “Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn people.” We all know how that turned out. Indeed, it is a common feature of genocides throughout history to attempt to destroy not only a category of people, but also the written evidence of their existence. During the Holocaust, Nazis torched Jewish books while at the same time rewriting history and erasing Jewish achievements from German archives. Similar policies were carried out by Joseph Stalin against Crimean Tatars as well as the Chechens, Ingush, and other persecuted nations. When Stalin exiled those nations from their historical lands, locked them in reservations, and gave their houses to ethnic Slavs, he also burned books in Chechen, Ingush, and Tatar languages, prohibited any literature in which those nations were mentioned, and even destroyed some archival information referring to them.
Nazi book burnings in 1933. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Information erasure too often goes hand in hand with physical violence, up to and including mass murder in some cases. Modern-day anti-LGBT bans are evidence of bigotry and anti-intellectualism, but they may also be the first step in something far more dangerous if we don’t reverse course quickly. We must oppose state censorship before it’s too late — not necessarily in the name of LGBT books, but in the name of all freedom and humanity.
Published Oct 15, 2025
