Last week, an elderly Grand Junction woman apparently wanted to take matters into her own hands when she located several nonfiction books related to queer topics at the Mesa County Central Library and tried to destroy them and dispose of them in the trash can.
A photo released by the Grand Junction Police Department showed the titles that had been damaged in the pathetic attempt at an attack on queer media: When Harry Became Sally, Beyond Trans Does Gender Matter, Transgender Teen, and Love and Resistance. A screenshot from the security footage shows the unidentified woman bringing the four books into the bathroom before leaving and dumping what was left of the books into the garbage, along with all their ripped-out chunks of pages. Not exactly a smooth criminal, the approximately 70-80 year old white woman seen committing this horrific crime against literature in the CCTV video was wearing a red plaid shirt, a red vest, and blue jeans. Kudos to the poor librarian who had to reach their arm in the trash can, dig around, and fish out what was left of the books.
Hey lady, I have an idea for you. Next time, why don’t you just make like all the other bored, homophobic soccer moms in your town and try to get books that offend your bigoted sensibilities added to the “banned books” list or something? Why do we need to be, in the big year of 2025, murdering books in the bathroom at the library? Do you really not have anything better to do with your day? This just seems like an extremely petty waste of time, and waste of city resources.
I mean, even if throwing away everyone’s tax money (and queer books) on this crap was your end goal, why not do something with a little more dramatic flair, like burn them? THAT would be making headlines for sure. Imagine some poor library patron walks into the bathroom and sees a campfire of books happening like a scene from Fahrenheit 451? Now THAT would be a way to send a real message loud and clear to everyone that you hate gays and trans people enough to take time out of your day to go and destroy some library books about them.
Unfortunately, the Grand Junction PD are not going to be heavily invested in bringing the queer book murderer to justice. The case has gone cold and been closed, but if anyone has information that can help track down the suspect, Crimestoppers of Mesa County can be tipped off online for a potential reward in the event that the book killer can be identified.
