I think I accidentally started an urban legend. My bad.

During Banned
Books Week last month, you may have heard that some
busybodies banned Green
Eggs and Ham because they thought the story was kinda gay.
Metro
reported that this happened “briefly in the 1990s because of
supposed homosexual innuendos.” A Minnesota radio station
said the book was targeted for its “homosexual theme.”
Feministe
announced that it had been challenged in California for, “No
shit, ‘homosexual seduction’ on the part of Sam.” Many other
outlets have related the same story, not just last month but in
years past. In 2013, Dr. Seuss’ classic even made its way into the
Oberlin Public Library’s banned books display. “Inside the bright
orange book,” a local paper
reported, a “slip explains that it was once thought to have
‘homosexual seduction,’ because Sam tried to seduce his
friend.”

None of these reports say where or when this purported
prohibition took place, other than those vague references to
California and the ’90s. A Lexis-Nexis search turned up nothing. I
asked the American Library Association, which sponsors Banned Books
Week and
keeps track of such things, if they were aware of such an
effort; they told me it wasn’t in their database. Metro
said it got its info from a book called Seuss Facts, which
as far as I can tell does not exist—though a Facebook feed by that
name did mention the
alleged ban without citing a source. I got in touch with some of
the other reporters and bloggers who had repeated the story. None
of them were certain where it came from. After I contacted
BuzzFeed‘s Spencer Althouse, who included Green
Eggs in a banned-books
list last year, he concluded that the story was “a terrible,
terrible rumor” and added a correction to his article. I’m open to
the possibility that there’s a real event here that I haven’t been
able to track down, but that seems extremely doubtful.

Besides, I’m pretty sure I know where this began. It’s my fault.
Sorry. My bad.

Way back in 2002, I wrote a satiric Banned Books Week column
that mocked the nation’s prigs by suggesting they try to pull
something new off the nation’s school shelves. The article
then devolved into me decoding the supposed sexual subtexts in
Treasure Island and, yes, Green Eggs and Ham. Dr.
Seuss’ book, I wrote,

is a thinly disguised account of homosexual seduction.
In this kiddie favorite, “Sam I Am” (that is, “Same As I Am”) tries
to persuade the narrator to “eat” green eggs and ham. Anyone who
has traveled in the Spanish-speaking world knows what “eggs” are.
The ham, of course, is a long, phallic sausage, perfect for
“porking” someone. The protagonist repeatedly denies any interest
in the offer, but Sam persists, proposing that he join him in any
number of locations, positions, and kinky arrangements. (“Would
you, could you, on a boat? Would you, could you, with a goat?”)
Finally, our hero gives in, just once—and discovers that he enjoys
fellating breakfast after all. Sam has made a convert, and the
legion of God-Fearing Heterosexuals is diminished by
one.

When I first read that Green Eggs had been banned
somewhere, I worried that some literal-minded puritan had taken me
seriously and launched a crusade. That doesn’t seem to have
happened. But phrases from my piece have turned up in several
accounts of the legendary Green Eggs ban, and

one article actually links to my old column to back its claims
up, apparently unaware that I was making a joke. It’s true that I
never claimed that this ban actually happened anywhere, so those
references to California and the ’90s didn’t come from me. But
The Lorax, another Seuss book, really has faced parental opposition in
California; and an alleged Green Eggs ban in China
reportedly
ended in 1991. Both of those factlets were mentioned in some of
the same articles that claimed a gay-hating Grundy had tried to
keep kids from reading Green Eggs and Ham. I suspect
that at some point in the chain of transmission, those different
elements got mixed up.

Someone once said that if a spooky legend catches on, it says
something true about the anxieties of the people who believe and
repeat the tale, even if it says absolutely nothing true about the
subject of the story itself. My yarn may be more funny than
scary—that’s what I was aiming for, anyway—but the idea that people
would prohibit a harmless children’s book is still pretty
frightening. And it’s not hard to imagine what underlying worries
might be at work here.

Many educated elites live in
fear of Bible-thumping troglodytes haunting the hinterlands,
some great redneck beast slouching towards Washington to make Sarah
Palin president. Book-banning stories are tailor made to fit that
terror. Palin herself had to deal with rumors in
2008 that she had fired a librarian who wouldn’t remove offensive
texts from the shelves. The Guardian once ran an Amanda
Marcotte
editorial under the headline “The Tea Party moves to ban
books.” The editorial contained exactly zero examples of Tea
Partiers trying to ban anything.

There really are crusaders out there whose fear of demons leads
them to try to suppress speech. Just ask the American Library
Association. But there are also people whose fear of demons
leads them to imagine book bonfires where none exist.