Every Californian with a television has seen the ad: a wide-eyed little girl runs home from school, thrusts the book King and King under her mother’s nose and gushes about how she learned she can marry a girl. The malevolent voice-over warns parents that only a vote limiting the marital rights of gay citizens will save our children from moral dissolution.

And many people bought the argument. Proposition 8 passed this week and, although there are pending court challenges, the right of California’s gay citizens to marry has been revoked. That is the obvious result of the campaign, but Publishers Weekly reports some gay writers fear a literary backlash as well. From PW:

John Rechy, the Los Angeles-based PEN International Award-winning gay author expressed a sense of outrage and betrayal by the passing of Prop. 8. Noting what he called fear tactics used by its backers in their ads, Rechy said, “Of course it helped Prop. 8 to use a harmless children’s book (King & King) about gay marriage in its campaign of minority intolerance. My fear now is that all of gay literature will be more closely scrutinized, and that free speech will become even more endangered.” Rechy and his partner of more than 30 years were recently married.

…

Novelist Christopher Rice, president of the board of the LAMBDA Literary Foundation, is well aware of the power of the written word. “The image of a kid holding a book (about gay marriage) is profound. Unfortunately, the backers of Prop. 8 used King as an example of how a young mind can be corrupted, rather than how it can be opened.” Rice also blames the measure’s backers for using the book in a dishonest way, saying it’s opened a “psychic wound’ in gay writers everywhere who are on the frontlines of unfiltered and candid information about the way they live their lives.

Read more at Publisher’s Weekly.