The Library Pride Panic of 1992
Gay people have long had a fraught relationship with libraries. Until the mid-Twentieth Century, public libraries often saw their duty as controlling the content that people should be allowed access to. This meant hiding any material on gay people. For those who held such material, they might be reserved for a limited group of people that the librarian judged as “acceptable” for such material, say a respected academic or doctor in the community. Stanford Library still had books on homosexuality on locked shelves until at least 1975 - it defended the ban at that time as protecting against vandalism that, while a significant reality of queer inclusive material, was almost certainly not the reason the material was originally segregated and locked. Even as the librarian profession changed, embracing broader intellectual freedom norms, change is often slow on the ground. To combat this, gay and lesbian librarians created the Task Force on Gay Liberation within the American Library Association (ALA) to, in part, alter this tendency to still hide queer inclusive books within libraries. This post’s thumbnail comes from the Task Force’s 1971 gay bibliography intended to spread the knowledge of “worthwhile materials that have received little publicity.” The Task Force was the first recognized gay and lesbian division of a professional organization in the U.S. It’s a complicated statement with many caveats but in general the ALA dramatically improved its position on gay and lesbian issues thanks in large part to the Task Force’s activism. This, of course, was not without controversy and in 1992 some librarians objected strongly to the “pro-gay” ALA.
Cover of American Libraries Vol. 23(7) July/August 1992.
While the ALA was broadly supportive of the task force and gay librarians, this support was not without controversy and cost. One example occurred in 1992 when American Libraries, the official publication of the ALA, published its July/August issue. This issue follows the June meeting of the ALA and recounts the highlights of the meeting. The substance of the meeting was not without some controversy as a number of major liberal activists spoke but the major division occurred not because of anything written in the magazine but because of its cover: a picture of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force marching in the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. (In 1995 this was renamed the Pride Parade). The angry response* began with calls to the magazine complaining and some demanding to cancel their ALA membership. Complaints centered on a number of themes ranging from political liberalism, supporting immorality, and sending a bad image of the profession to the public.
One caller complained that “[p]eople’s sexual preferences don’t belong on the cover of my professional magazine.” For some this was a matter of supposedly meaningless distraction. One Georgia librarian complained that this was an “irrelevant cause” that had “nothing whatsoever to do with the library profession” and the ALA “must maintain a neutral stance” amongst the many positions. A librarian from Regents University touched on this supposed neutrality requirement complaining that conservative Christian librarians were “a minority now, and it is unfair to us for our professional association to be so often contrary to and offensive to our religious belief.” The fact that gay librarians existed within the profession and faced job discrimination not to mention societal hostility did not appear to matter to these critics; this was solely a matter of “opinion” that the ALA must ignore and by default oppose.
Other responses focused on the moral hostility to gay people. One librarian reported that he “wanted to puke!” upon seeing the cover. Another declared that “homosexuality is WRONG—W-R-O-N-G. It is against God’s laws … and if not repented of leads to unhappiness, misery, and destruction.” Simply showing gay and lesbian librarians marching amounted to a decision “to glorify homosexuals.” While most people are able to disagree with gay actions and treat gay people fairly, they naturally resent “having such objectional behavior or those with that predilection literally shoving their activities in your face.” Some objectors worried that this cover would undermine the profession and libraries themselves. One library board member worried that this would “seriously jeopardize[]” the libraries funding and future. One rural librarian opined “that strange sexual behavior is considered acceptable in San Francisco, but this does not play well in rural Kansas.” A library professor worried that the profession was already so dominated by women that men were often stereotyped as gay making and this “perception inhibits many from entering the profession as freely as one enters computer science, statistics, or chemistry.” Presumably a public display of support for a gay activist group would strengthen this stereotype. Many calls and letters declared that they would no longer be a member of an organization working counter to their values. This controversy faded after a few months but it represented a fissure in the evolving queer-inclusive library world.
This is certainly a minor episode and it faded quickly with no evidence that the ALA took it seriously or that there was a massive exodus from the organization. It does, however, suggest that librarians were not immune from the anti-gay backlash of the early 1990s. A 1995 survey in Library Journal** of gay-inclusive holdings in 250 libraries offers some empirical evidence of this hesitancy. 14% reported no books “with gay and lesbian themes or characters. One small college librarian, presumably a member of this 14%, asked “[i]s this really a topic that [Library Journal] should address? ... How about family strengthening topics ... not topics that destroy the family and our cultural fiber at the same time.” Of the 157 libraries that reported both the numbers of their gay-inclusive content and their total collection number, 50% had 30 or fewer titles and 23% had 150 or more holdings. This suggests that actual holdings were slow in adapting to the call of the Task Force. One librarian, who’s library held 55 gay and lesbian titles in a total collection of 40,000 requested that they not be identified because “[o]ur ability to have even these materials must be balanced against too much publicity.” Publicity risked challenges and backlash against the library.
The assumption of many librarians was that only gay people would be interested in gay themes or titles. One South Dakotan librarian justified only having one gay themed book on her shelf saying that “even if I bought more of them, gays would not come here. It’s so small that we know everybody. They would go to a bigger town.” Even supportive libraries made these assumptions. For example, the Kansas City library housed most of its 2000 item collection in a single branch “located at the heart of the openly gay community” in the city. So on one level fear of controversy inhibited collection development along with assumptions that only gay people would be interested to either justify not purchasing material, on the assumption that no gay people live in one’s town, or centering the material in a gay neighborhood where it is assumed that all of the gay patrons would live.
The 1990s were an intense period for anti-gay backlash and the library profession was not immune. While the ALA may have taken a somewhat strong stance in terms of gay and lesbian inclusion through formal policies, changes on the ground were slower in coming. Progress is unfortunately rarely speedy.
*All comments noted here were either included in an editor’s note in September 1992 or letters to the editor of American Libraries from September to November 1992.
**Bryant, Eric. “Pride & Prejudice.” Library Journal 15 June 1995.
