ST. CHARLES COUNTY — An internal review committee has determined that the controversial book “Bang Like a Porn Star: Sex Tips From the Pros,” should be removed from the St. Charles City-County Library system — just not right away.
Twenty people are waiting to check the book out, said St. Charles City-County Library CEO Jason Kuhl, so it will be removed once that waiting list is clear.
The 175-page book, published in 2018, became a lightning rod of controversy at recent library board meetings when parents began pushing for the book’s removal. It features interviews with several gay adult film stars and photographs detailing various sex acts. It was the photographs that some critics said were too sexually explicit for inclusion in a public library.
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Ultimately, the committee of library employees agreed.
Kuhl said in a statement Tuesday that the review committee found the book “did, indeed, have explicit photographs that seemed unrelated to the text they should have been illustrating.”
The book’s banning is the latest instance of St. Charles County — and especially its library system — being at the center of culture war controversies. In addition to calls to ban that book and others, patrons have complained about the attire of a library employee they say was wearing nail polish, makeup and a goatee, and some called for the implementation of a gender-neutral dress code for employees.
Kuhl said “Bang Like a Porn Star,” which has not been publicly available for months, was purchased by the library system because “it was the only item readily available at the time about sexuality and sexual health for gay men.”
“It contains important information about health, safety and consent that are not contained elsewhere in our collection,” Kuhl said. The library system has close to a million books and other items in its collection.
Since 2018, other books have been published that provide the same information as that book but don’t contain the “explicit imagery that is superfluous to the text,” Kuhl said.
At the time parents began pushing for its removal, only one copy of “Bang Like a Porn Star” was in the library’s system collection. Additional copies of the book had to be purchased so that the committee could review the material.
Library officials said prior to the backlash surrounding the book, it was checked out several times since it was purchased more than five years ago.
Ethan Colbert ecolbert@post-dispatch.com