Staff members at Bodacious Bookstore & Café, an independent bookstore in Pensacola, Florida, say that when they were instructed to remove LGBTQ titles from the shelves, some refused, while others resigned in protest or quietly hid queer books to protect them.
“I started working at Bodacious because I love books and being surrounded by stories and knowledge,” said a former employee, who asked to remain anonymous because she fears retaliation from the bookstore’s owners. She said she began crying when Beth O’Connor, the bookstore’s interim manager, directed her to remove LGBTQ books. When she refused, the former employee said, O’Conner sent her home and told her to re-evaluate whether she wanted to work at the store.
“It was heartbreaking to see us removing them — especially starting with LGBTQ+ titles,” the former employee said.
O’Connor didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Book censorship has reached historic highs over the past several years, with titles centered on LGBTQ issues and queer characters among the most banned and challenged in public schools and libraries. Independent bookstores have been dependable holdouts amid the growing conservative push, with many proudly featuring “Banned Book” sections, but in Florida’s Escambia County — arguably ground zero for the country’s book censorship battle — even a beloved indie bookstore isn’t immune.
Bodacious Bookstore & Café is in Pensacola, the largest city in Escambia, Florida’s westernmost county, which is on the Alabama border. The county, which made headlines last year after its school district pulled 1,600 book titles from shelves, also sits at the center of two federal lawsuits on book censorship.
The first suit — filed in May 2023 by the nonprofit organization PEN America, Penguin Random House and a group of authors and parents — argues that the Escambia County School District’s initial removal of over 150 books, many of them addressing topics related to LGBTQ issues or race, violates students’ First Amendment rights. The suit is ongoing. The second lawsuit, also filed in 2023, challenges the school district’s removal of the children’s book “And Tango Makes Three,” about two male penguins who raise a chick together. In September, the school district in that suit agreed to return three dozen books related to race and the LGBTQ community to shelves as part of a settlement agreement.
Now, many of the same stories are under scrutiny at Bodacious Bookstore & Café, owned by businessman and philanthropist Quint Studer and his wife, Mary “Rishy” Studer.
According to one current and three former employees, management began reviewing all store materials after receiving a complaint from a customer against profanity on a greeting card. They said that what began as a purge of purportedly profane materials, including greeting cards, stickers and book titles with swear words, quickly escalated into the quiet removal of more than 60 books from the store.
Roughly half of the books that were removed, the current and former employees said, featured queer stories or authors, including celebrity memoirs like Billie Jean King’s “All In” and Elliot Page’s “Pageboy,” as well as young adult novels like Casey McQuiston’s “I Kissed Shara Wheeler” and Alice Oseman’s popular “Heartstopper” series. Others included sex education books, popular young adult romances that don’t feature romance between LGBTQ main characters, such as “The Summer I Turned Pretty” by Jenny Han, and even books about the history of book banning.
Quint Studer and Studer Entertainment & Retail President Jonathan Griffith declined an interview. On Monday, Travis Peterson, a spokesperson for the Studers, said in a statement on behalf of the bookstore that it removed greeting cards that featured profanity because they were “inconsistent with our brand values.”
“We also began a thorough review of our inventory to ensure that books with explicit or graphic sexual content were not easily accessible to young children,” the statement read, adding that the review is ongoing.
The statement continued: “At no time were any books removed because of LGBTQ+ (or any other) subject matter, authorship, or genre. Any assertion to the contrary is not true, especially if made by former employees who are no longer involved with our operations. We stand by our decision as a privately owned bookstore to determine what titles and merchandise are suitable for our shelves or easily accessible by young children. Our goal is to be a welcoming place for every child and every family, and we believe that means not prominently displaying books and merchandise with profanity or explicit content.”
Bodacious Bookstore denied in a statement on Instagram last week that any specific categories are being banned. However, it said it “did temporarily pull some titles for review.”
“While many have returned to the shelves or been relocated to more appropriate sections, some will not return as we adjust our offerings,” the statement read.
Nichole Murphy had been a volunteer at Bodacious Bookstore since 2023 helping to facilitate book clubs and community events. She had just begun working at the store on April 2 when, just six days later, the book removals started, she said.
Murphy said she was on the floor the day management began pulling LGBTQ titles from the shelves. She refused to participate in the removals themselves, she said, but was then directed to delete the titles from the store’s inventory system, which she reluctantly did. She spoke out, informing management that the exclusive removal of LGBTQ titles was discriminatory and that it violated the company’s own core mission, vision and values of inclusion and integrity, she said. In resistance, she hid queer books and documented each title removed from the system.
“I refused to pull any books from the shelves. There were never criteria for the books being removed,” she said. “Management started pulling anything that looked queer — books with pictures of two girls kissing on the cover or romance books with main characters that have the same pronouns. These were not sexually explicit or profane materials.”
Murphy, the former employee who asked to remain anonymous, and a current employee who requested anonymity due to fears of retaliation from the Studers, said O’Connor told them that she had a meeting with Rishy Studer, who, O’Connor said, told her to remove the LGBTQ books. O’Conner told the employees that Studer also directed her to then pull the witchcraft books, which the former employees say was an attempt to disguise the targeted queer removals. Murphy resigned on April 22, and books were still being removed up until her last day, she said. At least five of the bookstore’s 10 staff members, including Murphy, told NBC News they have resigned since the books began to be removed.
Regarding the meeting between O’Connor and Rishy Studer, Quint Studer said in an email that Rishy “never mentioned any specific titles or categories” and that “all conversations regarded language in the children’s area.”
O’Connor didn’t respond to a request for comment about the meeting.
According to Melissa Smith, the former manager of Bodacious Bookstore who resigned on April 28 over the store’s alleged censorship practices, it isn’t the first time LGBTQ books have been targeted.
Smith, who joined Bodacious in 2021, took pride in building its book club community and ensuring the store offered diverse and representative reading materials. She wasn’t in the store when the most recent removals began, as she had been on family and medical leave since early March. However, in July 2022, while she was out on vacation, she said, the store implemented a stealthy policy to exclude LGBTQ books from the children’s section after a customer complaint about the book “Melissa” by Alex Gino, about a young transgender girl. Despite the policy, one book, “My Mommies Love Me,” was mistakenly ordered for Mother’s Day and quickly pulled last month during the broader removal of queer titles, according to Murphy and the two former staffers.
“I even created a banned-book section in the store in February because of customers’ demand for these titles,” Smith said. “That’s the whole point of books: to either see yourself represented or understand someone else’s experience.
While the bookstore maintains it isn’t banning books or LGBTQ content, vetting books only to create a “family-friendly” space, Murphy and the two employees who asked to be anonymous also reported the removal of queer greeting cards and pride stickers, including a Mother’s Day card that was mistakenly identified as representing a queer family. Several former employees, authors and community members have questioned whether the definition of “family friendly” includes LGBTQ families.
Young adult author Ginny Myers Sain was scheduled to visit the store on April 26 for National Independent Bookstore Day to promote her new release, “When the Bones Sing.” However, she canceled her appearance after the store failed to clarify which books were being targeted for removal and what qualified as “family friendly,” later posting a widely shared statement on Facebook condemning the shop for censorship.
“We expect independent bookstores to be leading the charge against this sort of thing, not leaning into it,” she told NBC News. “Readers are counting on us. As someone who writes for teens, I feel that obligation particularly deeply. All kids deserve to be able to walk into their local bookstore and see themselves reflected and celebrated in the books they find there. And everyone knows that, in history, the people banning books have never been the good guys.”
According to former employees, bookstore management is using the nonprofit organization Common Sense Media to vet titles for removal or potential return to the shelves. While educators, librarians and families commonly use the platform to evaluate age ratings in books and media, Murphy and one of the employees who asked to be anonymous argue that it was never intended as a tool to restrict access to books. It remains unclear whether employees will be permitted to special-order queer books or other titles no longer carried in the store, as many report that all orders now require management approval.
“My manager told me that as a private business, they don’t have to sell or cater to certain people, implying queer families can shop elsewhere,” said the current employee who requested anonymity. “From both a political and business standpoint, I think it was a stupid decision to pull the books, because that’s actually more political than not pulling them.”
The employee said none of the removed titles have been returned to shelves, though the Studers contradicted that both in their public statements and to NBC News.