Let's Talk Queerness in Libraries

Growing up in Houston, I used to go to this gay bar. They would let you in before you turned 21, but you had to sign an actual waiver at the door. 

My friends and I would stand hovering at a side table in the entrance, each signing our names and getting Xes drawn on our hands in sharpie. 

In the bathroom, I’d take a nip from the leopard-print flask stuffed down my knee-high boots, wash off my Xes in the sink, and join my people.

I didn’t know they were my people, but they did. They protected me, kept me safe, picked me up and twirled me in the air, dropped glitter in my hair at New Year’s. 

They didn’t question me or why I was there. I didn’t know why I was there, yet. 

You have probably read this a lot, but I was a late-blooming queer.

I thought I was just an ally, someone who really cared about fiercely protecting queerness and anyone who was treated like being themselves wasn’t enough. I thought I was just supporting my friends by gently cajoling them to the bar with me, to Pride.

In high school and in college, I don’t remember ever hearing or reading of being nonbinary. Not in any substantive way. I didn’t know what that was. And you might say that sounds unlikely, but I grew up in Texas. And when people don’t want you to know something in Texas, they have a lot of power and resources to make sure you don’t. 

I didn’t know that being who I am was even an option. And that’s why I’m a librarian – a queer librarian to be exact. 

You might have read some of my Gay’s Guide to the Library columns from last year. I had so much fun doing them, and enjoyed hearing from people who shared them with someone or learned something from them. We decided this could be a regular thing at The Lavender, where I talk about libraries and queerness – the joys, the new connections, the books and media that keep us going, and the challenges in the world and in my field specifically that impact queer people.

Being a queer librarian, to me, means protecting access to books that help people see themselves. 

The mother of multicultural literature, Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, in a 1990 essay now famous in our field, said “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.”

In this column, I’m planning to talk to some people in my field who are doing the hard work to protect diverse books and make sure librarianship is more diverse. 

Librarianship is becoming a pretty queer field, I must say. There’s a lot of us here in library land. It feels like coming home. It feels like being picked up in the air by a go-go dancer and feeling safe. You know the world is spinning but your people have you. 

But just because a space, or a friend, or a community is queer doesn’t make it safe. I’ve seen too many spaces that are only safe for white people like me, or androgynous like me. Librarianship, for example, is overwhelmingly white — the American Library Association’s “Diversity Counts” study shows only 12 percent of credentialed librarians in the U.S. are racial and/or ethnic minorities. 

When Master’s degrees are as expensive as they are, as inaccessible as they are, when our field has a history of racism and exclusion, it’s not surprising this statistic hasn’t gotten better. But it should be enraging. We should be finding better solutions to tackling this than a couple of scholarship programs and some assistantships that people have to manage on top of learning. We should be overhauling our field. I definitely don’t have all of the answers to the problems in librarianship or in literature, but I’m planning to talk to people for this column who are trying to find them. 

I’m also hoping to talk about what it’s like to be a queer, chronically-ill librarian, especially in a field that’s not easy for us. For me at least, queerness is often an aspect of myself I’m managing in the midst of everything else. When I’m trying to figure out how to get a hostile organ removed or managing my chronic illness, doing something gender-affirming for myself doesn’t make my to-do list. 

But the good moments, the ones where I look around and feel my mask drop and know that for a minute we can be us in this house— those are the moments I’m fighting for. I want to talk about how much it means to me when you come up to the desk and say this is the first time you’ve seen a book that reminds you so much of your own life, or how I feel when we fan-club out over our favorite queer reads, or trade recs on leftist literature that helps us fight another day.

I’m fighting for kids to have books where they know being nonbinary is an option. I’m fighting for books where queerness isn’t even the only thing or the biggest thing about the characters or authors, it’s just their lens for viewing the world. I’m fighting for books where we get to love, and grow, and learn, and mess up and grow again. I’m fighting for books where we can learn how to take care of each other better, to love each other better.

I want you to see yourself.

...........

P.S. This summer I’ll be running a pop-up bookshop for queer and political literature, Carnation Bookhouse, at Urbana’s Market at the Square every Saturday. I’ll be tabling with queer artist Emery Smith (A Buug Kid). We’re hoping to talk to more people about queerness, art, politics and organizing, music we like and more. We want to build a community space for queer people at the farmer’s market, a place I have loved for years as part of my summer routine. 

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