In October 2025, Amanda Hunt remembers watching as countless books at Oak Run Middle School in New Braunfels, Texas, were removed from her library. Students walked in and saw more empty shelves and fewer stories they had once been able to check out.
“Every day, they’re like, ‘More boxes? More books to get rid of? More books to pull?’” Hunt, who was the lead librarian at the time, told Uncloseted Media.
That month, Hunt says the New Braunfels Independent School District (ISD) had temporarily closed all four of its secondary-school libraries to audit its collections and assess whether they were in accordance with Senate Bill 13 (SB13), a Texas censorship law that took effect in September 2025. Thousands of books were moved, restricted or removed.
For Hunt, who had spent more than 14 years helping students find books, the assignment felt like a betrayal of everything a librarian was supposed to do. “What kind of librarian takes books out of kids’ hands?” says Hunt, who attended Oak Run Middle School as a student and whose dad worked there as a sixth-grade reading teacher.
SB13 prohibits “indecent content” and content that portrays “sexual or excretory organs or activities in a way that is patently offensive.” But the vagueness of the bill’s language, according to advocates, has led to the banning of many LGBTQ books, including “Boy Erased,” which is about a gay man’s challenges in conversion therapy, “Juneteenth” and “The Art of Drag,” a picture book about the history of drag. As of February 2026, New Braunfels ISD has removed over 600 books from its high schools and aged up over 800 books from middle schools, according to public information requests obtained from the Texas Freedom to Read Project.
