#LibrariesAreEssential to LGBTQ+ Communities

Category: #LibrariesAreEssential, Blog

by Isadore Auerbach George, Director and Founder of Book 28

Almost fifteen years ago, community health and social care researcher Jacqueline Goldthorp wrote a paper called ‘Can Scottish library services claim they are socially inclusive of all minority groups when lesbian fiction is still so inaccessible?’ While drawing attention to the lack of availability of broad-ranging lesbian fiction in Scottish public libraries, Goldthorp wrote of the “psychological support and sense of inclusion” that reading such fiction can provide to lesbian women. If you research LGBTQ+ provision in public libraries, this is something you will find again and again: LGBTQ+ people have a strong desire to ‘find’ themselves in the stacks. This manifests in many forms: from wanting romances that show the possibilities of a queer happy-ever-after; to histories that are so often left out of the mainstream; to getting simple information on legal rights, medical care and local community groups.

The psychological and material benefits of being able to access this material for free, in a welcoming space, are huge. This becomes especially relevant when we examine the continued marginalization of LGBTQ+ people in the UK, with as many as a quarter of homeless young people identifying as LGBTQ+, and LGBTQ+ people, on average, earning less than their straight and cisgender counterparts. Many BAME and POC LGBTQ+ people say they have faced racism within the LGBTQ+ spaces that they turned to for inclusion. To an LGBTQ+ person with little income and community isolation, being able to walk into a public library that has even a small selection of well-curated LGBTQ+ books and information about local support is huge.

Since Goldthorp’s 2007 paper, a lot has improved in terms of awareness amongst UK libraries in supporting LGBTQ+ users. Some now include collecting LGBTQ+ works in their policies, are actively trying to improve representation in their collections, run LGBTQ+ reading groups or LGBT History Month events like those in Lambeth, Sheffield and Edinburgh. Special libraries, such as Glasgow’s Women’s Library, hold significant LGBTQ+ collections (click here for GWL’s LGBTQ Collection Online Resource) and do extensive programming, while Scottish university libraries are being challenged by new professionals to enhance the scope and scale of their collections. And yet as recently as 2015, library researcher Alanna Broadley found that “no public library services in Scotland had a collection development policy that addressed the need for LGBT fiction or materials for LGBT users” (p.69) and it is clear that much more still needs to be done.

In some places, LGBTQ+ provision has actually gone downhill, with cuts to stock budgets weeding ‘niche’ collections in favour of guaranteed-circulators like bestsellers and trained library staff being replaced with casual volunteers with little knowledge of equalities. Financially-strained councils have been known to ‘colocate’ other services, such as police, in library spaces, or even hand branches over to community groups like churches, making them feel less welcoming to many LGBTQ+ people. An atmosphere of increasing hostility to trans people has seen efforts to support them in libraries attacked, as with the repudiation of Drag Queen Story Time; and recently, trans writing researcher Harry Josephine Giles wrote, ‘Scottish literature has a transphobia problem’, potentially making it harder for libraries forced to rely on mainstream stock suppliers to bring trans writers work into the collection. And, seeing that hundreds of libraries have been closed permanently in the last ten years across the UK, we are faced with a worst case scenario: there are no queer books in a closed public library.