Yes, Annie on My Mind Is Banned!

Annie on My Mind tells the story of Liza and Annie, two high school girls in New York City who fall in love. Published in 1982 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, it was one of the first YA novels to portray a lesbian relationship with a happy ending. The girls meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and their relationship unfolds against the pressure of school, family, and a society that doesn’t accept them. Nancy Garden wrote it because she’d never seen a book like it when she was young, and she wanted gay teenagers to know they could have love stories too.

In 1993, copies of Annie on My Mind were burned in front of the Kansas City School Board building, and the Olathe School District in Kansas banned it from all school libraries. The ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of seven students and their parents in 1994. A federal judge ruled the ban unconstitutional in 1995, finding that the school board had been motivated by anti-gay animus rather than educational concerns. The district spent over $160,000 fighting the case before restoring the book to shelves in 1999. It’s #44 on the ALA’s list of 100 most challenged books of the 1990s.

Why You Should Read This

Garden gave queer teenagers something almost unheard of in 1982: a love story that ends with hope instead of tragedy. Before Annie on My Mind, virtually every YA book featuring gay characters ended in death, madness, or despair. Liza and Annie fall in love, face consequences, and survive. That simple structural choice was revolutionary.

The book burning in Kansas City says more than any literary analysis could. People were so threatened by a novel about two girls holding hands at the Met that they set it on fire in public. The federal court ruling that restored it is one of the clearest statements American law has made about why you can’t ban a book simply because you disagree with who it represents. Garden spent the rest of her life advocating for intellectual freedom. Read her book because it earned its place on the shelf, and because every attempt to remove it only proved how much it was needed.