Former NFL player Chris Kluwe put down the pigskin in 2013, when he retired from professional football after eight seasons with the Minnesota Vikings. Since then, he’s played bass in Minnesota band Tripping Icarus, written for Deadspin, released a tabletop game, and authored or coauthored three books, most recently the cyberpunk novel Otaku (Tor, 2020). But it is Kluwe’s political advocacy that has put him in the spotlight in recent weeks.
In February, Kluwe was arrested at a city council meeting in Huntington Beach, California, after speaking out against the installation of a plaque to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the town’s central library. The plaque, as unanimously approved by the city council, features the stacked words “Magical, Alluring, Galvanizing, Adventurous” as well as the sentence “Through hope and change our nation has built back better to the golden era of Making America Great Again!“
This wasn’t the first time the former NFL punter (and Huntington Beach resident) has taken political action. Kluwe spoke with American Libraries on the outcomes of his protest, his other efforts in activism, and what libraries mean to him.
What made you decide to speak out against the plaque at Huntington Beach Public Library?
This is just the latest in a string of infractions from the city council involving our library. I’ve been going to these meetings for over two and a half years. At this point, I thought, “They clearly are not listening to the community. If they’re not gonna listen, I’ve gotta do something that makes more of a statement.” The reaction was very, very positive. I had a bunch of people reach out to me [and say], “Hey, thank you so much for doing that. It really galvanized me,” or, “[It] made me feel a lot better in a really trying time.”
After your arrest, you were fired by your employer, a local high school where you coached football.
The reason they gave me was they were getting too much attention and had to let me go. I was disappointed because I felt that it was a cowardly stance to take. History has shown appeasing a bully never works. You have to be willing to stand up and say, “No, this is wrong. This goes against what we believe in; therefore I am not going to do it.”
During your NFL days, you were an activist for same-sex marriage rights. What made you feel so strongly about that issue?
I want to live in a world where I am free to be who I am and do the things I want to do, and I want people to leave me alone. In order for that world to exist, everyone else has to have the same freedom. If they don’t, eventually someone’s going to come for me and take away my rights. If I’m a person in a position of power who has a platform, who can speak out for those who don’t have that, then it’s incumbent upon me to do so. At some point in the future, if I’m the one being oppressed and there’s a person with privilege and power, I want them to speak out for me, even if it does cost them their job.
You were released by the Vikings in 2012, allegedly because of your activism around same-sex marriage. What was your reaction when same-sex marriage was legalized in the US just three years later?
I was excited because it felt like we had turned the corner on a fairly dismal part of our nation’s history, and it was actually surprising in terms of how quickly it happened. It felt like our nation was going in the right direction. Unfortunately, we seem to have regressed quite terribly in the last decade or so, and we have to turn the ship around.
What do you make of this current wave of book bans, book challenges, and attempts to defund libraries?
It’s the same as it ever was. There’s a reason [for the lyrics of] “Bulls on Parade” by Rage Against the Machine: “They don’t gotta burn the books / They just remove ’em.” That’s what authoritarian regimes always do. Libraries and books are always the first step, along with picking out marginalized and oppressed communities. We have to point it out for what it is, and we have to fight back against it.
What role have libraries played in your life?
I’ve always loved libraries, and I’ve always loved reading. I love the idea of a library in that it is an accumulation of knowledge, of other people’s lives, and you can go live those lives. You can see what was important to them. And that’s what makes us something more than hairy monkeys living in a cave—the ability to accumulate that knowledge and keep passing it along. Libraries are how that happens.
