Teacher Fired Over Lesbian Content from Anne Frank Graphic Novel
Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation, an illustrated adaptation of Frank’s indispensable, historic book The Diary of a Young Girl.
In the passage, the then-teenaged author and victim of the Holocaust described her genitals and attraction to other females.Frank, a German-born Jewish teenager who died in 1945, just months before Germany’s defeat in World War II, wrote the diary during a two-year time period when she and her family were in hiding to avoid being sent to Nazi death camps, remaining ensconced in a secret annex above the Amsterdam warehouse for the company that her father had owned.The graphic novel, which hews closely to the text of the unedited, original version of Diary, contains portions of Frank’s diary that had previously been edited out of the book’s 1952 English edition, but were restored in the book’s 1989 republication, reports The Dallas Morning News.Those censored sections included passages where Frank wrote about her understanding of male and female genitalia — including the development of her own body during puberty — and where she expressed feelings of attraction toward a female friend.Pulling from those passages, the graphic novel adaptation depicts Frank asking a female friend if she’d feel comfortable exposing their breasts to each other, with her friend declining.
In another section, Frank walks amongst nude female statues, stating, “I must admit, every time I see a female nude, I go into ecstasy.
If only I had a girlfriend!”Several parents in the Hamshire-Fannett Independent School District of Jefferson County became enraged over the book’s content dealing with issues of sexuality and same-sex attraction, arguing that such topics are inappropriate for minors, especially middle schoolers.Many of those parents also demanded the teacher be removed from the classroom for including such “inappropriate” material in the reading assignment.“I mean, it’s bad enough, she’s having them read this for an assignment, but then she also is making.
