I love this town. Just when I started getting fed up with
writing a column, just when I started feeling that all is vanity,
that there is nothing new under the sun, I got an email from a
political crony to the effect that he has a friend who looks at
pornography in the library.
I love this town. Just when I started getting fed up with writing a column, just when I started feeling that all is vanity, that there is nothing new under the sun, I got an email from a political crony to the effect that he has a friend who looks at pornography in the library. And in a subsequent email: “(Mr. Library Porn) may let you interview him (provided his real name is not used). Interested?” 
Of course I was interested. And after a few more weeks of emails passing in the night, I got a phone call from my crony, who said, “I have ‘Ted’ here, ready to be interviewed. You have a pencil?” I tried to persuade ‘Ted’ – not his real name – to allow a face-to-face interview, so that I could record his remarks with my little tape recorder and be able to quote him verbatim, but nothing doing. He did not want to be recognized, ever. So the following is his story from our phone interview as reconstructed from my cryptic notes, rather than his story in his words. Alas.
Ted likes looking at smut – his word. He is a young adult, and not married. He complains that the girls in Gilroy do not want to have no-strings-attached sex with him, so he goes to Nevada to visit whorehouses – his word – occasionally. Before he plans a trip he likes to go online and check out the whorehouses in Reno and Carson City, see what the girls look like. So he was doing this in the Morgan Hill Library one day. He doesn’t like the Morgan Hill Library because the computer screens all face the room at large. He prefers the Gilroy Library, where many of the screens face walls or shelves, or have really good privacy screens, and where some of the screens are even sunken into tables, so no one can see what he is looking at. 
Ted thinks it is the pink screen that comes up that signals the room at large that he is porn surfing. And he thinks on this particular occasion that probably a father whose kid might have seen something, some narrow-minded religious zealot kind of guy, must have noticed and ratted him out to the librarian. ”A narrow-minded religious zealot like me?” I asked. And he said he didn’t mean anything personal by his remark, which I thought was quite sweet and very polite.
So the librarian, a male librarian, told him he couldn’t look at that stuff there, or he would lose his Internet privileges. And that was the last time he porn surfed at Morgan Hill Library.
“So you prefer to use Gilroy Library?” I asked. ”Not any more,” he told me triumphantly. “I got myself a computer. Now I can look at whatever I want at home.” I congratulated him on taking his hobby into the privacy of his own home. 
I had some questions for him, and he had some for me. He was not sure if what he was looking at, mostly topless women, was illegal. I was able to reassure him that what he was describing was called harmful matter, and that it was illegal for children, but legal for him because he was an adult, but that it would be illegal for him to exhibit or display it to a child. And I was able to delineate the difference between what he was describing and obscenity, which is a misdemeanor even for an adult, and child pornography, which is a felony.
He seemed shocked at the very suggestion that he might look at child porn. He likes looking at adult women. He also thought that kids should not be looking at the harmful matter he was looking at. He thought the adult, unfiltered terminals should be in a separate section, and that librarians should keep an eye on them and not let children use them. Ted has a lot more sense than children’s librarian Linda Glawatz, head librarian Lani Yoshimura, and the rest of the American Library Association, whose mantra is “All material to all patrons regardless of age.” 
