In her 1976 novel Hiding, Klein does just that. The novel is about an eccentric aspiring ballet dancer named Krii, who is struggling with how she wants to be a woman in the world. At eighteen, she moves to London ostensibly to attend a dance academy, but also to get away from her unusual family. Her mother and father are still together but live apart on separate continents, tethered by their children and what sounds like an open marriage. Her older sister lives on a commune and keeps popping out babies. “Here is Mother with her Planned Parenthood meetings. And there is Paula with the six kids… living in the kind of cheerful squalor I had only read about in books,” Krii says. She describes herself as “the silent, clinging, frightened one. I always knew, from the time that I had any thoughts on the subject, that I would never marry and never have children.”

Yet Krii’s offbeat, enigmatic vibe proves irresistible to Jonathan, a handsome redheaded choreographer. She loses her virginity to him soon after they start dating—she’s not burning with desire for him exactly, but she’s definitely curious about sex. She’s also aware she has anxiety about intercourse and wants to get past it. “I was afraid of the potential for failure and humiliation,” she tells the reader. “At least with masturbation you can’t disappoint anyone.”

She gives her body to Jonathan and then is miffed when it seems as if he wants access to her inner life, too. “Where are you when we make love?” he asks her one morning. Krii is offended. “What am I guilty of? It’s true I don’t shriek out four-letter words when I come. I probably move tentatively and slowly. I don’t have to be wiped off the ceiling afterward.” Despite Jonathan’s attempts to crack her open, Krii won’t—or can’t—climb out of her shell. They break up and Jonathan quickly marries her outgoing classmate, seemingly on a whim. Krii is hurt but she has trouble expressing that, too. “People say: Take off your mask,” Krii explains. “But beneath that mask is another mask and beneath that another. They want to think it can be done by one simple gesture of abandon, but I’m afraid that in my case that won’t work.”

Hiding isn’t an upbeat novel, but it is truthful. The ending implies that Krii is making peace with her mother and father and might let herself open up after all.

“I think she wanted to take the pleasure of girls seriously,” Fleissner said of Klein. “I think she also just felt that usually the exploration of sex by young people was a kind of fumbling, awkward, complicated scenario and just wanted to show it to people, warts and all, as just sort of a part of human life.”

Klein explained that mission in a 1977 article called “Growing Up Human: The Case for Sexuality in Children’s Books.” Published in the journal Children’s Literature in Education, the first-person essay argues against the popular belief that kids are not ready to read about certain topics, such as sex. Klein begins by sharing that in her personal life, she’s as conventional as they come. Married to Erwin Fleissner, a biologist and cancer researcher, and living on the Upper West Side, she writes that she “sometimes fear[s] that my husband and I will be hauled off to the Museum of Natural History to be put on display as one of the last examples of the happily monogamous middle class couple.” She goes on to say that, nevertheless, she’s drawn to stories about nontraditional families: “the kinds of complex family situations that exist now and that perhaps did not exist in quite the same way ten or thirty years ago.”

Unlike these nontraditional setups—same-sex parents, for instance, or mothers and fathers with openly open marriages—sexuality is not new. Sex, she argues, is a core part of the human experience, but has been lumped into the crowded category of topics that adults prefer to hide from their children, probably because mothers and fathers don’t feel comfortable talking about them. She says she’s happy that books have started doing the work of promoting these conversations, and the criticism that authors are exposing young readers to unnecessarily difficult subject matter is nothing short of naive.

“Some of the things we are writing about today are being written about in children’s books for the first time. Therefore I think we sometimes make the mistake of thinking these things didn’t happen before,” Klein writes. “In fact, for decades, even centuries, people have been getting divorced, men and women have been realizing that heterosexuality may not be suitable for them, little children and babies have been lying in their cribs exploring their bodies, girls have been getting their periods, boys have been having wet dreams.”

Klein then writes that she’s compelled to offer an alternative to what she calls the “and so she turned to” books—stories in which kids turn to sexual expression as a way of coping with unpleasant stuff that’s going on at home. “All of these books are setting up what to me is a false and even dangerous premise, namely that sexual activity of any kind is only something children ‘turn to’ as a result of a negative experience.” She echoes Blume’s point that she hopes to see more novels where teenagers experiment with sex and don’t lose their way because of it. And not just that; “I would like, most of all, books about young girls discovering, not in the ‘will I get invited to the junior prom?’ sense, what it is to be young and female in this new and sometimes bewildering age of ours.”

Klein and Blume were clearly in lockstep, exchanging ideas as they spent time together; Jennifer Fleissner remembers Judy coming by their apartment back when she was a teenager and playing an REM song for her mother’s famous writer friend. In 1979, when Judy was still living in Santa Fe, Klein wrote her a long letter in which she confessed, good-naturedly, that she was terribly jealous of Forever because she thought it was terrific, and also because she had wanted to be the first author to write so frankly about teen sex. In the same letter, she admitted that she hadn’t liked Wifey and thought Judy had shortchanged Sandy by having her stay with Norman. Fleissner laughed at this and concurred that yes, her mother could be blunt. “It’s funny, she could be very shy with people that she didn’t know. She was definitely not shy in print. I would say she was not at all shy with people she was close to,” she said.

If Klein—who published over thirty novels during the course of her career—felt any friendly competition with Judy, it likely fueled 1977’s It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me, which is her version of Forever. The narrator is Jody Epstein, a rising high school senior who meets green-eyed, unassuming Lyle Alexander over the summer when they’re both working as techs at Sloan Kettering. Unlike Jody, Lyle is new to New York City, having moved from Ohio to live with his sister and brother-in-law after his parents died in a car accident. Where Jody is outgoing, Lyle is quiet and reticent. Their romance blossoms over tennis.

Jody, who is Jewish, recognizes herself as a “type” that’s nonetheless exotic to Midwesterner Lyle. “In New York girls like me are a dime a dozen,” she tells him. When he asks her to elaborate, she flippantly describes herself as “sort of aggressive, but insecure. We’ll all end up being doctors and lawyers and being analyzed for nine million years.” Jody is nothing at all like Krii, except that they both come from complicated homes. Jody’s parents are divorced, and her dad lives in Scarsdale with his new wife and their young children. She lives with her brother, her mother, and her mom’s on-again-off-again boyfriend Elliot, who is still technically married to his ex. The closest thing Jody has to a fond father figure is her mother’s second husband, Philip, a physicist who teaches at Columbia. Philip is who she calls when she needs a nonjudgmental ear.

Like Forever, It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me hits on a range of taboo topics: premarital sex, contraception, rape, and abortion. But Klein’s most innovative spin on the teen romance novel lies in Jody and Lyle’s dynamic—she’s sexually experienced and he isn’t. Because Lyle is a virgin, he takes sex more seriously than she does, at least initially. As Jody tells us, she’s made out with boys before “out of sheer horniness,” and she lost her virginity with her previous boyfriend. But Lyle wants his first time to be special, for both of them. One night, when they’re lying in bed, he admits to Jody that he doesn’t want to have intercourse yet because he doesn’t know if he’s in love with her.

“That’s okay. I’m not sure I’m in love with you,” Jody says.

“That’s what I mean,” Lyle answers.

“I don’t care if you love me or not,” Jody continues.

“You should,” Lyle responds. Then: “It’s your birthright to be loved.”

Jody wonders about this but is understanding with Lyle, especially when he brings up the death of his parents in the context of feeling overwhelmed. The next week in school, Jody’s English Comp teacher asks the students to write stories based on their previous Saturdays, in an effort to get them to tackle real subjects. Jody ends up sharing about her night with Lyle and the teacher reads her story aloud to the class—anonymously, of course. Her classmates argue that the piece is not, in fact, realistic. “First, most of the boys couldn’t believe that there was a boy who wouldn’t sleep with a girl who was willing to sleep with him,” Jody says. “Then, the girls started in and they all latched onto the line about Lyle having said it was my birthright to be loved by someone. They all said they couldn’t understand a girl ‘stooping so low’ as to be willing to sleep with someone she knew didn’t even love her.”

Jody doesn’t take the comments too much to heart; she’s generally pretty confident, and her teacher assures her that she shared the story with the class because she thought it was “poignant.” Having been raised in a sex-positive household, Jody is a direct product of the feminist movement and the sexual revolution. Klein’s novel is a study in what happens when a teenage girl is physically comfortable with herself but more fearful of genuine intimacy. The morning after she and Lyle have sex for the first time, they make breakfast together. “There was just this very peaceful, contented feeling,” Jody explains. “I don’t intend to get married for years, maybe ever, but it was the way you wish being married could be, without people yelling and ending up saying they can’t stand each other.”

Right around her eighteenth birthday, Jody’s father calls to invite her to spend the weekend at his house in Westchester. He tells her she can bring her boyfriend, too. The very idea of introducing Lyle to her semi-estranged father twists her stomach into knots. “To take Lyle along and have him meet Daddy would, for me, be an act of trust that would go beyond practically anything I can think of,” she says. “There’s not a sexual act on earth that would come anywhere close.” Ultimately, she decides to bring him for “moral support” and the trip goes almost exactly how she anticipated it would—her father disappoints her. Less predictable: Lyle gives her her very first penetrative orgasm.

It’s not all happily ever after from there. Jody slips up and has a one-night stand with her ex. She picks a fight with Lyle’s ultrareligious older sister. The pair break up but in the end they both take a leap of faith—Lyle invites her to play tennis again and Jody lets herself really feel something. “I wish I could be looking back ten years from now so I could know if Lyle will be someone important, someone who’s still there, or someone whom I’ll just remember because he was the first,” she says. “Not the first in one sense, but the first in terms of being all-out in love.”

All-out love, for Jody, is far more vulnerable than sex. Even though the novel is explicit about lovemaking, It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me is about a young woman setting her heart free. But for a vocal contingent of readers, all they could see was the body parts. And these body parts, they argued, didn’t belong in school libraries.

Chapter Twenty Censorship

“I willed myself not to give in to the tears of frustration and disappointment I felt coming.”

The temperature was unusually mild the day of January 20, 1981, in Washington, DC. For the first time ever, the inauguration was set to take place on the Capitol’s west front, facing the National Mall and providing more room for spectators. There, the newly elected president of the United States stood to take his oath of office. The onetime governor of California placed his left hand on the Bible and repeated after the then–chief justice of the Supreme Court, a white-haired Warren E. Burger. “I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God,” he said.

Reagan then went on to kiss his wife on the cheek—an impeccable Nancy Reagan dressed in a matching red Adolfo dress coat and pillbox hat—and delivered his inaugural address. “As great as our tax burden is, it has not kept up with public spending,” Reagan announced, his folksy, Midwestern rhythms burnished by the years he’d spent as an actor in Hollywood. “For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.”

His hair pomade-slick, Reagan was the picture of the elder statesman. “I believe we, the Americans of today, are ready to act worthy of ourselves,” he went on, in response to a quoted passage from the Massachusetts physician Joseph Warren, a Founding Father. The faintest smile played at Reagan’s lips during an otherwise somber delivery. “Ready to do what must be done to ensure happiness for ourselves, our children, and our children’s children.”

That afternoon, the country’s fortieth president made his aims clear: “to reawaken this industrial giant, to get government back within its means, and to lighten our punitive tax burden.” This approach aligned with the philosophy of his Republican supporters; Reagan’s suggestion that “with God’s help we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us” called out to the evangelical Christians who helped put him in office.

The government’s priorities were shifting dramatically from the liberal approach of Reagan’s predecessor, President Jimmy Carter. Judy Blume would later cite this as the day that everything changed.

“When we elected Ronald Reagan and the conservatives decided that they would decide not just what their children would read but what all children would read, it went crazy,” Blume told the Guardian in 2014, of the challenges against her books that began in the early 1980s. “My feeling in the beginning was wait, this is America: we don’t have censorship, we have, you know, freedom to read, freedom to write, freedom of the press, we don’t do this, we don’t ban books. But then they did.”

The tide against her turned practically “overnight,” as she explained while she was on tour promoting In the Unlikely Event. And it wasn’t just Blume. In December 1981, almost exactly a year after Reagan ascended to office, the New York Times reported that challenges against books had “shot up” since the late 1970s. Moreover, instead of requesting that access to certain books be restricted, complainants insisted that titles should be removed from public libraries altogether. “The reason would-be censors give most often is that a book is unsuitable for minors because of its vulgarity or its descriptions of sexual behavior,” the Times explained. “But the censors also condemn the depiction of unorthodox family arrangements, sexual explicitness even in a biological context, speculation about Christ, unflattering portraits of American authority, criticisms of business and corporate practices, and radical political ideas.”

Among the books being called out were Blume’s novels—the Times described her provocatively as “a best-selling author of sexually explicit books for children and young adults”—as well as Portnoy’s Complaint, Avery Corman’s 1977 divorce novel Kramer vs. Kramer, Our Bodies Ourselves, and Stuart Little, E. B. White’s adventure starring a natty mouse. The article attributed the rise in book challenges to conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, and the Moral Majority, which Jerry Falwell Sr. had recently founded in 1979. These groups were empowered by Reagan’s election, and they were efficient. Once leaders set their sights on certain titles, they were able to drum up passions among their supporters and encourage them to voice their grievances.

Peter Silsbee recalled being on the receiving end of written complaints aimed at Bradbury about Judy’s work. “We began to get letters from these people… It was Jerry Falwell [spearheading it], who had just sort of come on the scene.” Silsbee said it was obvious that the objectors were all following a script. “We came to understand that a lot of the letters were very much the same. It felt to us like it was a campaign that was all across the United States.” Sending angry letters was just one way that these fired-up folks would operate, Silsbee continued. “They’d go after school librarians, they’d go after teachers, and disrupt school board meetings and PTA meetings.”

They accused certain books of promoting Secular Humanism, a once-obscure philosophy that became a conservative buzzword in the 1980s, much like Critical Race Theory today. Dating back to the nineteenth century, Secular Humanism hinged on the notion that humans are capable of behaving morally without the scaffold of religious or theistic dogma. But in the mouths of the Moral Majority and other right-wing groups, the term evolved to mean blatantly anti-religion and anti-God. “Thanks to Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority I went from being called a ‘Communist’ to being labeled a ‘Secular Humanist,’ ” Blume wrote in a 1993 essay for the New York Law School Review called “Is Puberty a Dirty Word?” According to her new Christian fundamentalist critics, Judy’s books were not only “undermining of parental authority”—as she put it in the same article—but undermining the sovereignty of Jesus Christ as well.

You’d think the decision in Island Trees School District v. Pico would be enough to defang today’s most ban-thirsty elected officials and parents. But the Supreme Court’s ruling on that case didn’t go far enough, even according to the lawyer who argued it. “We didn’t create the law that we would have liked,” Pico’s legal rep Arthur Eisenberg told WNYC in 2022. At the time, the Supremes argued that a political or ideological objection to a title isn’t a good enough reason to evict it from schools. Looking back, Eisenberg said he wished that they’d been able to legally enshrine curatorial power over libraries to the librarians. “Just as academic judgements should be left to the academics… decisions about the content of library collections should be left to the librarians.”

Without that, the decision in Island Trees v. Pico still leaves room for the idea that certain books are too objectively vulgar or offensive or obscene for the eyes of children. Governor Ron DeSantis defends his stance on book removals in precisely this way: “In Florida, pornographic and inappropriate materials that have been snuck into our classrooms and libraries to sexualize our students violate our state education standards,” he says on his official website.

In the 1980s, book challenges weren’t coming from government officials like they are now. But in the fall of 1982, one book was effectively banned by the federal government. It was called Show Me!, and it was a Germany-imported sex ed publication that came out in the US in 1975. It billed itself as “A Picture Book of Sex for Children and Parents” and consisted of black-and-white photographs and captions by an American named Will McBride, along with educational passages by European doctor Helga Fleischhauer-Hardt. Covering it for the New York Times, reviewer Linda Wolfe described paging through Show Me! with a mounting and palpable sense of alarm. “The photographs reveal the world of sex through the eyes of two exquisite noble savages of about 5 years of age,” she writes. “We puzzle with them over their bellybuttons and the fact that he has a penis and she a vagina. She turns bottoms-up so he can see close-up what she’s got, and he shows her how he ‘pees’ and ‘poops.’ ”

Up until this point, Wolfe says, she still believed the book could be an asset to families. Then, it got weirder. “But soon these children are pondering the sexual behavior of their adolescent siblings. The boy has seen—and we see through his eyes—his teenage brother and a barely pubescent girlfriend having intercourse. The girl has watched her older sister rub her clitoris, and we see that, too.”

The prose is tempered but it’s clear that Wolfe is so repulsed by Show Me! that the effect is borderline humorous. “One begins to suspect that the photographer enjoys scaring children,” she writes. “And throughout the book one grand and erroneous impression about sex in our society is conveyed: it is that sex is something which happens in public.”

Wolfe was not alone in her impression of Show Me! Although the title was lauded in Germany, even SIECUS hesitated to recommend it. The September 1975 issue of the SIECUS Report opens with a cover story reiterating its position of sex education as a basic human right. But just pages later, Dr. E. James Lieberman’s review of McBride’s book implies that, human rights notwithstanding, there is still such a thing as bad sex ed. “This book poses a problem for enlightened parents and sex educators because those who oppose it presumably wear the black hat of sexual repression,” Lieberman begins. Yet he goes on to argue that in this case, negative reactions to Show Me!—with its explicit, close-up photos of everything from fellatio to childbirth—are probably justified. “There is no need to hustle children into an appreciation of adult sexuality, any more than we need to introduce caviar or Kantian philosophy at an early age,” he writes. “This delicious-looking book is indigestible, an oxymoronic oddity of rawness overdone: it is blandly erotic, childishly adult, somberly silly, elegantly gross.”

Almost as soon as it was published in the States, Show Me! was challenged and subject to claims of obscenity. But it wasn’t until 1982, when the Supreme Court voted unanimously to uphold a New York State law barring child pornography, that St. Martin’s Press, the book’s US publisher, decided to withdraw it. In the New York Times, St. Martin’s then-president Thomas McCormack stated that they were doing so to protect themselves as well as the booksellers who could get in trouble for stocking it. “Until the Supreme Court decision of July, it was not against the law to sell the book,” he explained. “Now, the court has said in so many words that it is.”

Which is to say, the accusation that it was in poor taste wasn’t the death knell for Show Me! However, once the federal government confirmed that it was illegal to show minors engaged in sexual acts on film, in pictures, or on stage, the book—which at that point had sold about 150,000 copies in the US, according to a New York Times story about it—was effectively banned. Today, you can buy a copy of Show Me! from a specialty online bookseller for upwards of $700, but you can’t get it from Barnes & Noble or Bookshop.org or even the New York Public Library. As a culture, we’ve decided that the First Amendment doesn’t protect child pornography, and the vast majority of people agree this is the correct stance. But what counts as pornography isn’t always instantly apparent.

“I distinguish pornography in terms of intent,” Cory Silverberg said. “Pornography is material that is intended to sexually arouse someone. That is the point of it, so that’s why Forever is not pornography, because that’s not why she wrote the book.”

Silverberg’s definition dovetails with the existing legal one, established by the Supreme Court in 1973. Before that, the closest thing America had to a definition amounted to a gut check. In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart delivered his famous but ultimately unhelpful line about hard-core pornography: I know it when I see it. Then came Miller v. California. The case started when a restaurant owner in Newport Beach received a number of sexually graphic brochures in the mail. The pamphlets were traced to Marvin Miller, who sent them out to drum up interest in his mail-order porn store.

Miller’s case found its way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled against him, determining that the First Amendment did not protect the distribution of obscene material. As part of their decision, the judges created the “Miller Test” for obscenity, which is still used today. In order to qualify as legally obscene, a product has to fit all three of these criteria. One: that the average person would say it “appeals to the prurient interest,” according to contemporary standards. Two: that it depicts or describes sexual or excretory behavior—in other words, crude bodily functions. Three: that it lacks “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

That last bit is pretty subjective, don’t you think?

In 1981, the tenor of conversation around children’s books was getting so heightened that for the first time in her career, Judy got pushback from her own publisher about a sexually inflected passage in one of her drafts. The original version of Tiger Eyes included a short scene where Davey—awakening from an oppressive grief after her father’s murder—masturbated.

The scene took place right after a sequence that made it into the published novel. Davey spends an unpleasant night out with her new friend in Los Alamos, Jane. They meet up with two boys in a parking lot, and Jane and the guys pass around a bottle of vodka. Davey doesn’t drink, so she’s still completely sober when Jane and one of the boys start drunkenly making out. After a little while, Jane throws up on a car, and Davey has the unfortunate job of walking her sloppy friend home. With Jane passed out in her bed, Davey nods off on a nearby bedroll. She dreams of an older guy who she met while out hiking, named Wolf.

In the draft, Davey wakes up and starts touching herself. Her climax unleashes her tears about the night, about Los Alamos—everything. But that’s not how it goes in the finished book. Instead, the section reads like this: “I get Jane undressed down to her shirt and her underpants, pull the covers up around her, then climb into the bedroll her mother has set out for me. I fall asleep quickly and dream about Wolf. About the two of us together in our cave. It’s not the first time I have dreamed about him.”

When Judy arrived at Bradbury to consult with Jackson about her pages, he had the masturbation passage circled. Jackson, her longtime friend and collaborator, put down his pencil and looked her straight in the eye. He told her that from a character perspective, the scene made perfect sense, and as a writer she’d handled it gracefully. But he thought she should take it out.