Tracing the History of GLBT Library Collections and
Services
Melissa
Townsend-Crow
LIBR200
Running head:
Tracing the History of GLBT Library
Abstract
This
paper seeks to explore how a special collection, specifically one composed of
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and/or Queer/Questioning (GLBTQ) focused
materials, can be created, built, and made more easily accessible to all
patrons. It will touch on the following issues:
the history of GLBTQ literature, what knowledge and experience is
required of the librarians/archivists in charge of these collections, and
acquiring funding to purchase these items for a public library or, conversely,
opposing a form of censorship through withholding such funding. Particular attention is paid to the ONE
Archives, which is the oldest active GLBT organization in the United States and
the largest repository of GLBTQ materials in the world.
Introduction
The library setting seems the ideal place for a
special collection of a somewhat controversial nature, such as Gay/ Lesbian/
Bisexual/Transgender/Queer or Questioning/ Intersexed (GLBTQI, hereafter
referred to as "GLBT" as reflects most of literature consulted)
related materials. Libraries are often oases of intellectual freedom in the
middle of otherwise repressed regions. The reasons behind this are found in the
ethical standards set by the American Library Association (ALA). These
standards are centered on intellectual freedom and accessibility of all
materials to anyone who wants them. There is certainly a need for such
collection, not only for the people who identify as GLBT, but for friends,
family members, and others who seek to understand. In addition to needing basic
information, the GLBT community needs role models and characters in literature
with which they can identify. Having such a collection and making GLBT
literature accessible, gives the community a sense of, well, community as well
as a sense of history. Radclyffe Hall, Oscar Wilde, Allen Ginsberg all fought
their battles to have their voices heard, paving the way for Rita Mae Brown,
James Baldwin, Annie Proulx and others. GLBT literature has evolved in content
and quality and some GLBT-identified authors have entered the mainstream. If
the role of the public library is, as we read in our texts, to serve the public
then that should mean the whole public, leaving no group out.
History
To keep the discussion germane,
focus of this discussion of history will be confined to a history of the
development of literature specific to the GLBT community and how it has been
historically collected and managed. James V. Carmichael, Jr. offers a wonderful
piece which reflects on gay archives, gay biography, and gay library
history. Carmichael's paper was one of the most useful discussions of these
subjects that I found. It was especially useful is describing the librarian's
role including what sort of special training or knowledge might be required to
fill such a position in managing an archival collection of GLBT materials. His
anecdotal relating of a gay professor's letters, sent for archiving by the
professor's estate was especially touching after Carmichael states that he and
friends wrote similar letters until one of the couple died of AIDS.
The
night John called me to tell me he had AIDS in October 1993 I had just seen the
AIDS Quilt for the first time. When I got home from work in May 1994 to find a
message on the phone from Gary saying that John had just been removed from his
house in a body bag, I could not believe that we were not ever going to write
those letters again. (p. 90)
The story brought home the
realization that there are certain events that are unique to a community's
history and common experience. At the time of his friend's death, everyone in
the GLBT community knew at least one friend who had died, was dying, or who was
positive and waiting to get sick. Paul Monette wrote of the experience of
losing his partner in Borrowed Time (1988),
but he also described the fear surrounding the disease and the race and
networking among his friends to find a treatment, let alone a cure, to at least
slow the inevitable progression to death.
Like the Jewish Holocaust or the Armenian genocide, AIDS was a
devastating event in GLBT history which was hushed by governments and society
alike. Yet so devastating was the AIDS
crisis, that one forgets what the community was like before – or those who
lived it have since died. Andrew Holleran's Dancer
From the Dance (1978) describes a summer on Fire Island and gives readers a
peek at the parties and habits of some
gay men before the first cases of the mysterious "gay cancer" and
mass exodus to the West Coast to try and escape it (but which really just
brought it across the continent) changed everything. It is almost an
anthropological piece, written from the viewpoint of a pair of friends
remembering a telescopic point in time now gone.
Carmichael goes
on to say, "… recent findings that
suggest that, even in urban collections, gay literature and gay studies have
received uneven treatment or recent evidence of a backlash against social
responsibilities" and implies that
some librarians may be resentful at having to include GLBT materials in a
collection under their control, code of ethics notwithstanding (p. 91). In all fairness, Carmichael admits that the
negative examples of libraries' role in the treatment of the GLBT community far
outnumber the positive accounts (p. 92) but that does not mean there are no
positive examples. The American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual
and Transgendered Task Force (GLBTRT) is the first professional gay
organization in the world. The ALA ended discrimination based on sexual
orientation in 1974, the same year homosexuality ceased to be classified as a
"disease" in the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but a
resistance to reform in GLBT issues within library and information
professionals still exists despite the fact that the demand for GLBT literature
and other materials has grown exponentially. It is crucial that such
collections exist, if only to preserve the community's history as in the
examples cited above.
Not
only has the demand increased, but the quality has improved. For example, in my
own experience with lesbian fiction or "LesFic" as both reader and
writer the literature showed a marked improvement in just one author's work in
a little over a decade. Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote several lesbian novels and
stories under various pseudonyms in the 1950's and 1960's in addition to the
science fiction pulp which she published in her own magazines. She also wrote
articles for The Ladder and The Mattachine Review under her own name
as well as various pseudonyms. None of these are listed on her estate's
official website's bibliography, though. The pulps written by Bradley are hard
to obtain now, some going for over two hundred dollars on amazon.com. Still, Strange Women by her pseudonym Miriam
Gardner was available on Kindle for PC for six dollars, so I downloaded and
read it in about an hour.
To
say that I was disappointed is not quite accurate, but I certainly had not
expected to not recognize the writing as that of my favorite author. Where was
her characters' depth, her plot's intricacies, her style? All these years, I had read her work and taken her advice,
but I saw none of her usual quality in Strange
Women. Bradley's Darkover books
are not Pulitzer material (though I think the argument could be made for The
Mists of Avalon), but they are perhaps a step above "pulp" and
they have something that this piece does not. Compare these excerpts from Strange Women and The Shattered Chain,
respectively:
It made Nora dizzy and
a little light-headed to think of Kit—the tanned face, the lean body so firm
and healthy-looking that you expected him, any minute, to pull himself out of
the wheelchair and clasp you in those muscular arms that seemed made for
holding a woman close (Gardner, Kindle Locations 25-27).
Flat, barren sand
desert had given way to low rolling hills as far as the eye could see, and a
low scruffy ground cover of thorn-trees and feathery spicebush. At first the
smell was pleasant, but after a few hours of riding through it, Rohana felt
that if she ever again ate spicebread at Midwinter Festival it would choke her
(Bradley 55).
The
reasons for the difference in the quality are numerous. Strange Women was written in 1962 and The Shattered Chain in 1976. In between, Marion published over one
hundred pieces of fiction including short stories and novels as well as essays,
articles, and book reviews. Practice may not have made her work perfect, but it
may have made it improve. Genre is another reason why these pieces may seem
different in quality. The style is mostly likely deliberately different because
Marion wrote Strange Women under a
pseudonym. Darkover fandom was
already well on its way to being established by 1962 with the publication of
"The Planet Savers" in 1957, "The Sword of Aldones," and
"The Door Through Space" in 1962. She sold her first science fiction
story in 1947, her first lesbian works began appearing in 1952. Marion was a
very prolific writer and with the rarity of some of her work, it is virtually
impossible to read everything she wrote. What I have found is the evolution of
Marion's writing over the course of half a century made her a prime teacher and
mentor for young writers, including this one. Her earlier science fiction
stories bear the same mark of immaturity as her lesbian pulp stories in The Ladder. Her magnum opus in my opinion, is The
Mists of Avalon, published fifteen years before her death in 1999. Nearly
all of her mainstream fiction work can be found at any public library in the
stacks, available for check out; nearly none of her lesbian pulp fiction is
available.
One
early story in The Ladder shows the
potential peeking through her immaturity as a writer, "The House on the
Borderland" written under her pseudonym, Miriam Gardner. It is
self-described as a "fable," I found it to be more of a prose poem.
This is the story that "outed" Bradley to me even more than the
follow up piece called "Behind the Borderline" in which she readily
admits – well, Miriam readily admits -- that
she is a lesbian, albeit a married one. From "The House on the
Borderland":
"I have
tried to live in the sunlit world. I find the light hurts my eyes. The brightly
colored men and women look at me strangely …
I can venture among the masked and mantled as a pretender; unmasked they
would drive me forth with sticks and stones and harsh words.
And I have lived
in shadows. With groping steps I explored further and further into the darkness
… I know this to be my world, my homecoming, my life.
(The Ladder, 4.8 (1960): 5-6)
Despite being attributed to her
pseudonym, Miriam Gardner, I recognize many of the mythological and folkloric
elements in this piece that identify Marion's later work like a signature. I think that's why I was so disappointed in Strange Women. The two female
protagonists in that book, who so clearly to me should have been together, went
their separate ways, back to the men they had married or were going to marry.
It felt wrong, almost like a betrayal, even though I understood while I was
reading it that this story was not going to have a happy ending for these
women. They weren't allowed to do that in the time the book was written. At
least one of them didn’t have to die; then
again, in a way, they both did. They settled.
I
recently read Well of Loneliness by
Radclyffe Hall and while Stephen did not exactly get a happily ever after at
the end, neither was she vilified. In fact, her last words of the book are
inspiring, "Give
us also the right to our existence!" (Hall 437). This lesbian is not going
to slink off to die or marry a man or end badly in drink or drugs or jail;
Stephen is going to defy all those conventions that say her natural state is
wrong. Bradley's Renunciates or Free Amazons, even those who prefer men, also
see the love for other women as natural. Lesbian fiction today does not curse
its protagonists to misery for who they are. In fact, just the opposite.
Publishing houses have cropped up from the foundations of Naiad, Spinsters,
Ink, and Cleis and "LesFic" isn’t just for romance anymore. Every
subgenre, even the ever popular vampire novel, is represented. It has evolved
just as Marion Zimmer Bradley's work did, over time and with a lot of work and
she is one of the trailblazers in the field who made such a rich literary
heritage possible. Rita Mae Brown, whose novel Rubyfruit Jungle is considered a classic
coming of age story in lesbian
literature is another author who has transitioned to mainstream fiction with
her "Mrs. Murphy" mystery novels. Patricia Cornwell is a lesbian
whose sexual orientation is not germane to her literary popularity.
I think it is important, however,
to remember the humble beginnings of the lesbian fiction genre, just as it is
important to remember what gay men's life was like before AIDS. The Internet is
an amazing source for finding a lot of this information. Gutterman (2008) in discussing
a GLBT internet archive project the objective of which is to create an
interactive digital history to collect, advance, and project GLBT history. that
" As LGBTQ history gained legitimacy in the 1990s, so did the field of
digital history" (p. 100). In her article, Gutterman states that a 1994
study showed that members of the GLBT community had a desire to learn the
history of their community in order to enact political change (p. 97).
OutHistory.org is essentially a GLBT Wikipedia, so the interactivity is the
contribution of information from the community, but the founders and directors
of the site are Jon Katz, John
D'Emilio and Jennifer Brier, who are academically credentialed GLBT historians,
and thus, their credibility lends credibility to the information on the site,
however, when a scholar or a student needs primary or peer-reviewed sources, I
suspect that the information found on OutHistory.org would be called into
question, much as the information on Wikipedia is considered inappropriate for
references in academic or scholarly work based on the fact that literally
anyone with a computer can put anything on there; the same is true for
OutHistory.org, however, viable source citations are required to post
information or articles on OutHistory.org.
Brittany Parris (2008) offers
practical applications for those interested in the more tangible print
materials. In her article, Creating,
Reconstructing, and Protecting Historical Narratives: Archives and the LBGT Community, she sums up the purpose for having GLBT
collections thus: "In order to
preserve, salvage, or reconstruct a history of a people, an idea, or a
movement, it is important to have access to the primary components of that
history. The careful work of archivists and archival repositories are the means
by which histories like this can be examined" (p.
1). As I stated earlier, in any
community, the community's shared and unique experiences and shared history
that creates a bond between members of a community and helps toward creating a
distinct identity for that community. In the practical side of her paper, Parris
asks the following questions:
- When
sexuality and gender identity are the foci of an archive, what is its
mission and why?
- What role
does the archivist play in relation to this group of people and its
historical narratives?
- Who exactly
are the users of LBGT archives?
- What
internal and external challenges do these institutions face and how are
they handled?
- What does
the future hold for queer archives and the LBGT community?
These questions might be answered
by the oldest and largest archive of GLBT materials in this country, the ONE
archives at the University of Southern California. The mission of ONE National
Gay and Lesbian archives is to promote the
collection, preservation, documentation and understanding of GLBT history and
culture at the University of Southern California Libraries and in presenting events, exhibitions and other
activities. According to the official website ,
ONE
National Gay & Lesbian Archives is the oldest active
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning (LGBTQ) organization in
the United States and the largest repository of LGBTQ materials in the world.
Founded in 1952, ONE Archives currently houses over two million archival items
including periodicals, books, film, video and audio recordings, photographs,
artworks, organizational records and personal papers. The collections at ONE
Archives are a part of the University
of Southern California Libraries.
The ONE began with
founder Jim Kepner's personal collection of letters, photos, and other personal
papers as well as the letters and papers of others who had given them to him for
his collection. Kepner found himself questioning his sexuality at a young age
and began researching and collecting material pertinent to his identity. He was
a writer and journalist and, along with Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay,
one of the earliest members of the homophile movement, pre-Stonewall (D'Emilio,
1998). He donated his large collection of GLBT related material to what became
in its latest incarnation, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian archives. The ONE
relies on such donations as well as volunteers and interns to classify and
process materials. The material housed at the ONE is available to researchers
and the public during the ONE's hours of operation. There is always an
archivist, a librarian and several volunteers and interns onsite to assist
visitors and researchers. In addition to the wealth of print material, much of the
material has been digitalized. For example print issues of The Ladder, a lesbian magazine published by the Daughters of
Bilitis from 1956 – 1972 are stored and are available to view in the archives but
they have also been scanned and digitalized and are available to those with
access to the USC Libraries Digital Collection. The same is true of many of the
materials. This is helpful since the ONE does not circulate its material. So
much of it is rare and valuable (such as the lesbian pulp novels currently
selling for hundreds of dollars on the internet). Visitors are not permitted in
the stacks, but can page materials found on the Boolean search database on its
website which accesses the catalog of processed materials. Despite its established
reputation as the oldest and largest collection of its kind, the ONE is still a
work in progress.
GLBT Collections in Public Libraries
As part of the University of
Southern California Libraries the ONE is an academic archive. Public libraries
face a set of challenges in building GLBT collections which differ from
academic libraries.
Censorship
and other challenges
According to Ritchie and McNeil (2011),
"In theory, building a public library collection for LGBTIQ patrons should
be no more challenging than amassing materials for African-American, Jewish, or
Asian-American customers, but reality may say otherwise." The authors cite
various obstacles in building such a collection, specifically, funding,
visibility, accessibility, patron confidentiality/privacy in seeking the
materials. In the area of collection development, the authors state, as I did
above, that the quality of the literature has improved with society's growing
acceptance of the GLBT community, so acquiring materials of a quality necessary
for a library collection is less an issue than funding to buy these materials
and they list sources to help librarians find material that is suitable for
their constituents. In addition to collection building, they briefly discuss
funding and state that a GLBT collection may require funds earmarked especially
for these materials, but they do warn that "… funding always has
political ramifications …" Other challenges mentioned in this piece
discuss where to shelve the materials – should they be interfiled or in their
own section?
In the area of censorship, my personal experience
working in a library has shown that there are more ways to censor materials
than successful book challenges. "Controversial" books disappear from
the shelves or, in a more blatant way, self-appointed censors after an
unsuccessful complaint about some materials, have checked out the materials in
question, returned claiming to have lost the materials, and paid for them. The
materials from which they wanted to "protect" other patrons are no longer
available or accessible – until they are replaced.
Staff training
Ann Curry (2005)
wrote an article about reference services for GLBT patrons, particularly GLBT
or questioning youth. It was based on a study conducted by observation in which,
a young person asked a gay and lesbian-related question at twenty different
public library reference desks. The behaviors and verbal responses of the
reference librarians were recorded and used to gauge the results. Most of the
librarians were adept at maintaining neutrality and the confidentiality of the
patron, but more work is needed in the areas of the librarians' knowledge and
familiarity with key LGBT materials. It is essential that the reference
librarians who help these young people be sensitive to their emerging
identities and maintain neutrality when helping them because this interaction
will set the tone for these youth when considering the library to seek further
information. Therefore, staff training in this area is as important as building
the collection. Ritchie and McNeil (2011) discuss methods of training and staff
support, including familiarizing those involved in readers' advisory with some
of the literature and reinforcing the knowledge that not everyone who is
interested or who asks for reference assistance with GLBT materials is part of
that community. They may be students, friends, family members, or just curious
community members.
Conclusion
The GLBT community has experienced historical and
cultural events that are unique to that community. Early gay and lesbian
literature or "pulps" are a rare glimpse into the experiences and
societal expectations for gays and lesbians. The quality of the literature has
improved exponentially over the decades, some authors even crossing over into
mainstream popular fiction. Building and preserving a collection which allows
everyone to access those experiences, to see the evolution of the writing and
the literature along with the evolution of the GLBT community's acceptance by
mainstream society as is reflected in much of the material, not only gives the
people who identify as GLBT a sense of
community, but it is almost like an anthropological peek into another culture
for those who identify as mainstream and will, hopefully, foster understanding
and acceptance.
It is important to make available information about
the GLBT experience for GLBT and questioning youths and to make that
information accessible in a sensitive and non-judgmental way. Not every library has the resources of the ONE
archives, but a quality GLBT collection in a public library is not out of the
question in most communities with a well-trained and sensitive staff on board. The
public library is a haven for intellectual freedom. Despite the challenges
involved, it is possible to build and maintain a GLBT collection in order to
serve the entire community, GLBT and non-GLBT.
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