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TJ Alexander Talks Commercial Censorship of Queer Romances
Katherine Grant: Welcome to the historical romance sampler podcast. I'm your host, Katherine Grant, and each week I introduce you to another amazing historical romance author. My guest reads a little sample of their work, and then we move into a free ranging interview. If you like these episodes, don't forget to subscribe to the historical romance sampler, wherever you listen to podcasts and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
Now let's get into this week's episode.
We are back with another special episode of the Historical Romance Sampler. Today we're talking about book bans and we're gonna specifically talk about how they impact us commercially. And to join me in this conversation is the amazing author TJ Alexander. Hello, TJ. Hello. TJ is a Lambda Literary Award finalist and the USA today bestselling author who writes about queer love.
Originally from Florida, they received their MA in writing and publishing from Emerson College in Boston, and now they live in New York City with their wife, cats, and various house plants.
TJ Alexander: Really, thanks for
having
me.
Katherine Grant: I really appreciate you coming on. For listeners who are tuning in for the first time to this series, I'm part of authors against book bans.
You're part of authors against book bans. I kind of put out a call earlier in this year saying, does anyone wanna come on my podcast and talk about book bans with me, and that has produced a whole series. So episode 23, Olivia Waite, came on and gave us a nice overview of the landscape of book bans in the US in 2025.
In episode 36, Anne Knight came on and talked a little bit about how library funding is impacted and also shared her experiences growing up in a censored community. And now TJ, you and I are here to kind of figure out as not quite experts what's going on with commercial censorship.
TJ Alexander: Yeah. I'm so glad that you're letting me chat about this while still not having like any official professional background in this topic at all.
I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an, you know, a politician. I just am a guy who's been noticing some things and they're things that I think the readership of our genre historical romance and, and just romance readers in particular, I think should be aware of. I think it's going to affect them first and hardest and I think that they are going to be one of our best lines of defense against this kind of censorship.
Katherine Grant: Yeah. So to kind of set the stage, what are we talking about?
TJ Alexander: So commercial censorship is any sort of part of the larger capitalistic system that affects the book industry where by some weird mechanism, usually under the auspices of like, well, this is just good business,
censorship is occurring and books are being either taken off of shelves or from digital storefronts. So an example of this that has affected me personally in the past year or so is I've been contacted by bookstore employees or journalists who are covering local bookstores who have been the target of harassment from individuals who don't think they should carry certain books and books like mine and mine will be removed from the shelves to
appease those people who are complaining. And there's not a whole lot I can do about that. It's not like I can go on social media and put this individual bookstore on blast because, you know, this is a, a free country. Ostensibly a small business owner or a bookstore manager can make decisions on what they carry and what they don't carry.
And even if their decisions are based in transphobia or homophobia there's not a whole lot I can do to, you know, quote unquote prove that. And even if I did, like what court of law would I go to? What petition would be made? And, you know, there's limits to even as a traditionally published author, like I am.
There's limits to what my publisher can do in this situation. They're hoping to sell many more titles than just mine to stores like this. So they're not going to burn that bridge or ruin that business relationship by questioning their decision to pull titles like mine. So it's a really frustrating situation where
I'm being contacted by people who are on the ground or in the trenches and saying like, Hey, this is happening and I know it's happening for these reasons. And I'm just kind of sitting there going, cool, that feels terrible and there's nothing I can do about it. You know? So that's, that's one, I think very
obvious example of commercial censorship. And the one that I think I, I wanted to kind of focus on in our talk today was more of the digital space that has the potential, I think to really affect more queer authors and more readers of queer romance and queer literature just because simply like payment processors, banks that are behind payment processors like PayPal, MasterCard, visa, have been targeting certain digital like shops that sell content made by indie creators.
A lot of the focus has been on video games, but also, you know, websites like itch.io also carry eBooks. And a lot of queer and trans indie authors rely on these places to reach new audiences to you know curate an environment where their work has a chance of being recognized and, and selling.
And if payment processors refuse to honor those transactions, then you know, these marketplaces just sort of shrug their shoulders and say, well, we're, we have no choice. We have to not allow this type of content because these credit card companies are telling us.
So and this is all under the auspice of cracking down on, you know, quote unquote pornography. But as we've seen time and time again in this country, whether or not a piece of media or a piece of art is pornographic is kind of besides the point. You know, whether it is or not, a lot of queer creators are going to be, you know, swept up in the bans of that content just because of, you know, rampant homophobia and transphobia that wants to label all of our art as pornographic.
Katherine Grant: Right. Like because, well first of all, there's this like conflation that we see happening with like the children's book discussions where the presence of a queer identity is being labeled as pornographic, which is conflating someone's identity with sex act, which is like. Not the same thing.
TJ Alexander: Yeah. And it says a lot more about the people who complain about this stuff, where their mind goes when they're told like, oh, you know, this is my friend who's gay.
Well, now I'm just imagine like, okay, that's a, that's a you problem really. But yeah, there is a problem. And we see this in the library bans as well of conflating, like you said, any book that mentions a topic that is difficult or you know, needs to be handled sensitively that can just be, you know, broadly labeled as pornographic by people who are uncomfortable about having those topics in, in books.
I just wanna say super quickly, like I am a friend of pornographers, okay, and erotica producers. I think that, you know, there is artistic merit to all of our different kinds of art. I think that it's important in this fight to stand shoulder to shoulder with these folks who are producing pornography.
And the fact that we are getting lumped in with them isn't, you know. Isn't causing me to say like, oh, no, no, no, no. I'm like, I'm different and, and legal, and therefore I should be let off the hook and, and you go after them instead. I think this is more a. My, my stance is more of a function of, oh, I see what's happening.
And it's very easy to lie to the average person and say, well, there's pornography on your children's school bookshelves. Don't you think that that's wrong? And, you know, a a person who knows nothing about the actual facts might say like, well, yeah, of course that's wrong. I don't want that to happen.
Yeah. I'll sign your petition. Yeah, I'll vote for you. And, and so I know that the, the slippery slope is to demonize you know, any type of erotic expression which is, you know, it's, it's gonna come for romance too. There is no safe echelon that a romance author can reach. There is no cleanliness or, or godliness that their, that their love story can attain, that will make these people happy.
Because it's not actually about, you know, as we know, keeping children safe from products that are not meant for their consumption. It's about terrorizing queer creators. It's about making it impossible for those sorts of people to make a living. And it's about making it extremely difficult to access any kind of work that someone doesn't like.
Katherine Grant: Right. And in this case, like we're not talking about books that are being marketed to children. We're talking about books. Like, for example, I have explicit sex scenes in my books, and I sell them on various retailers including a direct storefront via pay hip, which collects payment from Stripe or PayPal.
And so if Stripe or PayPal decide to say, oh, we have this clause where nothing that includes depictions of nudity will be sold, then people would not be able to purchase my books.
TJ Alexander: I've got bad news for you, Katherine. I've got bad news for you. I also, you know write adult books, meaning like for an adult audience, and some of these books do contain sex scenes as well.
I use these payment processors for things like, you know, my paid newsletter or Patreon, things like that. And according to Stripes restricted business terms of service, they say under adult content and services that they do not allow -this is a quote I'm reading from their website- "pornography and other mature audience content, including literature designed for the purpose of sexual gratification."
So that is romance novels. Now, a lot of people will say, well, they're not gonna enforce that for romance novels. They're not gonna go after everyone trying to buy an ebook of twilight or whatever, right? Like, they're just not gonna do that. That's not feasible. And you know, that is correct. Currently what it does mean is that because of this broad definition that these companies are using to define their terms of service, they can then point to
almost any product, any book that they, you know, for whatever reason politically or whatever feel is makes a good target and say, well actually, because of this, you know, falling under this incredibly broad definition that we have you're in violation of our terms and service. And that means they can legally withhold the money that you have earned and not give it to you so they can steal all the money that you have gotten from your little independent business, your Patreon, your newsletter, your you know, indie bookstore .
And they can retain all that money and say like, well, we can't give it to you because that's actually illegal according to our terms of service. So yeah, it's it's, it's scary and frustrating when the sort of big shift at these, at, at websites like itch.io happened over this summer.
You know, I had been using that website to look for and buy lots of new romance novels that featured trans characters. This is where the bulk of romance is happening for my community. You know, we're not making a ton of inroads in traditional publishing unfortunately. Still we're getting better at it, but it's still not where it could be.
So I try and make a point of supporting and reading indie authors in the space. And when this judgment was handed down very quickly and without any warning many of these creators, their products were just simply removed from the website and the money that they had earned that was supposed to be paid out to them, you know, in regular installments was in some cases withheld and
they were told, well, now that you are violating our brand new terms of service that we have just updated without any warning we won't be, you know, giving you this money. It's not yours anymore. And it's very frustrating to see, I mean, you know, as creatives we get kicked around a lot financially in a lot of other ways, but this is just like salt in the wound for a lot of these folks.
And it's just, it's, it's scary to consider how insidious it is to have all these hidden traps that will only trigger if and when someone steps out of line, for example.
Katherine Grant: Yes. And just to clarify for the listeners who might not have been following along this summer, and, and I'm not sure that I've found an article that has laid it out for me, but my understanding of what happened was there were people who were, there was a small group of consumers who were complaining to like MasterCard and Visa, that like pornographic materials were being sold.
And so MasterCard or Visa put the pressure on Itch io to "clean up their act", so to speak, or to, to put in these new policies.
TJ Alexander: Yeah, correct. And a lot of, again, because it affected the indie video game industry, so you know, badly, a lot of video game journalists have been covering this very well. If anyone wants to go look at polygon has a great rundown of it.
The gamer.com has a great, very simple sort of, here are is the order of operations in which they happened. And yes, you're, you're absolutely right. It, but it actually wasn't just a random group of consumers. It was a very small Australian political faction called Collective Shout who say that they are an anti pornography feminist group.
But what they actually had been in the past is an anti-abortion group. They no longer needed to harangue American businesses about their anti-abortion stances because we lost the Roe v Wade Protections in the last few years. So they pivoted to this anti pornography stance. And they were the ones who approached Visa and MasterCard and again, a very small, very, I would say fringe group that isn't even based in this country, that doesn't represent any consumer in America. These are people that Visa and MasterCard could have, in my opinion, very easily ignored if they had wanted to. Yeah, they do not want to, they want to keep a tight reign on who is allowed to use their services and what products are
able to enjoy the privilege of being processed by this credit card, which is wild. Like my credit card should not be able to tell me what I am allowed to buy and not buy, right. I'm supposed to be the customer here, so it, you know, it's, it's really wild to me and I just, I hope that people, you know, just pay a little bit of attention and get loud when stuff like this happens. I know a lot of romance readers think, well, it doesn't really affect me. I don't really read those kinds of books or, you know, all the books that I read are, are pretty tame, but like. These are the sorts of things that, like, if they wanted to, they could very easily all of a sudden flip a switch and say like, Hmm, actually, you know, you're not allowed to buy or sell romance novels under, under this scheme.
And then, you know, stores will stop carrying them. Unfortunately.
Katherine Grant: Right. So we're seeing it in bookstores that are choosing not to stock books because there are some a among like a small number of loud customers complaining, and we're seeing it in the digital space where you can no longer, where there's this threat that they will take down your content or keep your money and stop this sale of romance books.
And so it's. It's like you can't use your dollar, your American dollar that's supposed to be free. Yeah. But to buy whatever the heck you want as an adult from another consenting adult.
TJ Alexander: The one single promise of capitalism that we were all supposed to like clinging to, you know? Yeah. There's a lot of faults with it, but at least you get to buy yourself a nice little treat once in a while.
Well, not if you know granddaddy MasterCard doesn't like the little treat you've picked out for yourself, I guess. Which is just bonkers to me. Absolutely bonkers. But yeah, it, I think it speaks to a shift in the broader culture as we see like fascism creeping into so much of our everyday life where before we could just kind of ignore it, you know, it's very difficult to ignore now.
And people who feel emboldened by that I think are, you know, rubbing their little hands together and saying, now is the time that for me to leap forward and say like well it's porn and you are probably some sort of pervert who should be in jail if you disagree with me. Because they know that there are very little people in a position of authority willing to stand against that kind of sentiment right now. Right. Most people in positions of power right now are in fact encouraging that kind of sentiment, so, yeah. Yep.
Katherine Grant: Do you have any thoughts while those people are rubbing their hands together with glee, what can the rest of us who still want to be able to purchase whatever the heck we wanna purchase and who wanna create whatever the heck we wanna create and have the freedom to sell them to each other?
Do you have any ideas for how we can stand up against this?
TJ Alexander: I mean, I think that, it is important for romance readers especially to be looking into ways to support creators who are affected by this. These folks are still selling their, their material or trying to. A lot of them are using things like pay hip to
try and take a little bit more of the power on themselves, creating their own websites where they can sell their own books so that they can't, you know, so that they hopefully will not wake up one day and be told like, oh, you're removed from my store. That's one thing that people can do if, if the you know, voting with your dollar appeals.
Another thing is, is that I just have like a beautiful vision of just a, an army of aunts and grandmothers, you know, getting angry and calling up Visa and MasterCard every day to say, now I just heard. And, you know, giving them piece of their mind because right now the people who I think are the loudest complaints about these issues are the people that it affects, you know, queer people and, and trans people people who are making
adult content for adults. And unfortunately we are often very often brushed aside as like, well, you're just a very vocal minority. We're gonna listen to the other vocal minority. Yeah.
Katherine Grant: That
hundred
people in Australia.
TJ Alexander: Yeah. We'll listen to the hundred people in Australia instead of the, you know, 10,000 trans people who are really mad about this because like, you're just a bunch of perverts that we can ignore without any, any, consequence, really. But I think it's when they realize that, oh, the people who do care about this stuff are, you know, the grandmas who are going to their grandkids soccer game and you know, the ladies who are going to church every Sunday, if they are able to even just one time stand up and make a phone call or an email to say like, Hey, I think what you're doing is trash.
And I demand an answer or else I'm gonna cancel my credit card and just go cash from now on, baby. I am loving a cash lifestyle these days. Honestly, I don't need anybody knowing what I'm doing these days. Yes, if I can help it. And of course that's inconvenient and not feasible for every part of my life.
But, you know, I, it's, it's getting to the point where, you know, what can you do, but just like beg other people to get on board with you is how I feel pretty much every day.
Katherine Grant: Right. Well, I think, you know, on average I have at least 150 people listening to this podcast. That's more than a hundred people calling Visa right now. So everybody listening to this, if we all just make a call to Visa and MasterCard, a lot of us probably have both. We're customers, we have a right to call. And even if you're not a customer, you have a right to call and just say, Hey, stop.
And also stopping to bookstores, Barnes and Noble, your local bookstore, wherever you get books, and ask for TJ's book and ask for other queer books or books that you think should be there. Because if there are people stopping in to complain about them, we need to stop in to say, Hey, we're gonna spend our money on this.
Why don't you stock it?
TJ Alexander: Yeah, that would be great. Yeah.
Katherine Grant: Yeah, and I think also it's important in addition to purchasing from indie creators, it's important to follow wherever you're gonna follow them. Social media newsletter, wherever they're available. Because that's how I found out this was going on was authors against book bans.
People were talking about it like there's not a mainstream news source that is saying guys, our books, they're endangered. Yeah.
TJ Alexander: Yeah. Which is wild. But you know, that's part of the whole collapse, the whole collapse of our institutions. The media arm of it was an early one to go, I think, unfortunately.
So, I mean, along those lines, yes, please follow authors that you like on social media, but please, please, please subscribe to their newsletters or check out their websites regularly because. Unfortunately there are dangers that like we will not be on those social media platforms going forward.
There are many reasons. There are a lot of reasons. Yeah. For a lot of reasons. I just don't wanna be on Instagram. I'll be honest. Like I would minute that I can get outta there without feeling too bad about it. I will, but yeah, there if this censorship continues, then it's going to mean that more and more of our voices are going to be erased from those spaces.
So please try as best you can to follow these authors and, and these artists that you like wherever they are controlling as much as they can the, the flow of communication. And again, it's not perfect. You never know what might happen with a newsletter server or, or whatever. But at least it's a little safer than trusting, you know, the Meta corporation.
Katherine Grant: Right. Yeah. And you know, I've shared this before on the podcast but I find a lot of historical stories about fighting against the oppression of free speech to be really inspirational. And so as we've been having this conversation, I've been thinking about Richard Carlisle, who was in the 1820s in England.
He was imprisoned for publishing Thomas Paine's treatise on, like basically religion, which was labeled as blasphemy. So Richard Carlisle was imprisoned for printing that. His wife kept the printing presses going, even though they like smashed up the shop. She reopened it, she kept printing the thing.
She got arrested, their sister reopened it, kept printing it. She got arrested. They just kept going and the system could not keep arresting them and imprisoning them and smashing up the presses. So eventually, like the, the whole approach that the British government had to oppressing free speech changed and it got a lot freer because people just refused to take that.
And I'm on Jane Hadley's serial story right now that's a, about the Civil War era, and she has footnotes that share real historical anecdotes. And there was an anecdote about a woman who was publishing a newspaper in Minnesota leading up to the Civil War, and she published a newspaper calling out the, the Minnesota Leaders for inviting friends and letting them bring their slaves and not freeing the slaves 'cause they were in Minnesota was as they were visiting and the people that she was calling out were so mad that they, they broke her printing press. They threw it in the river, I think. And she just got another one and then renamed it, basically trolling them and called it, you know, the Saint Cloud Democrats
'cause that's who they were. And, and she was just trolling them and she just kept going. And I think. We are gonna keep going. We've been writing romance for ages. We'll continue writing romance for ages. People have always been queer. People will continue to be queer. We want to remain safe. We want to remain doing this.
And like you said, we need, I'm not a queer person, so I'm gonna say we non-queer people need to bring our voices to the forefront because queer people have been fighting for so long, for so much. And you know, we need to, to buffet that and, and protect and be in front. Yeah. So, so please romance readers assemble, unite.
TJ Alexander: Yes, please, please, please, please do that. Yeah, along the lines of what you were saying, you know, when the first real waves of censorship were gaining speed earlier this year, I think myself and every other queer writer out there was starting to really come to grips with the idea that like, oh, what I do for a living could
potentially in a very real way, be criminalized soon. And you know, that's a very scary thing to have to confront. And I was talking with one of my colleagues about it. And he said, well, we've always found a way like, we're not gonna stop like this, this won't, like, sorry, trying to make things illegal that doesn't stop us.
We are descended from an invisible, untold number of generations of criminals. And when I say criminals, I mean people who have been criminalized who are doing things that are crimes only because they have been defined as such by the ruling power. And we have written our stories and shared them and mailed them in underground ways for centuries.
And nothing is ever gonna stop us from doing that. But yeah, we'd love to be able to do it in a safe way. We would love to be able to make a living, even a modest one, doing it. And if, if it comes to it, you know, we'll still keep slogging along. It's just, I would love to not get to that point.
And, you know, unfortunately that means trying to get a lot more people interested in this kind of fight.
Katherine Grant: Yeah. Yeah. Well, TJ, I really appreciate you coming on and talking with me about this. Thank you. Like we said at the beginning, neither of us are legal experts or experts of anything in anything, literally,
TJ Alexander: I'm not an expert in anything.
Please do not ask me for an expert opinion. I do not have one.
Katherine Grant: But we are experiencing this and we're hearing other people experience it, and so we wanted you readers of Romance to know and I hope that you will join us in taking action against this, and I'm gonna put in show notes, those articles that you mentioned and also your website so listeners can go find you and your books.
So is there any particular website, newsletter, social media that you really want people to go to?
TJ Alexander: Yes, please. You can sign up at my newsletter, at my website. I talk about all sorts of things in there. I usually have fun little links. And yeah, I, I would love to have you.
Katherine Grant: Great. Thank you so much, TJ.
Thank you.
That's it for this week! Don't forget to subscribe to the Historical Romance Sampler wherever you listen, and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Until next week, happy reading!