LGBTQ+ discrimination in libraries: a review of the current state of play
A feature article by David E Bennett.
Preface
I feel I should warn you upfront that this is a somewhat darker and bleaker feature article than most. While there is much to celebrate in libraries and our uklibchat last year celebrated the many wonderful inclusive library initiatives and activities, focusing in on libraries’ ongoing role in perpetuating discrimination reveals darker international patterns of organisational behaviour and some worrying trends in the USA that risk being exported. While there are initiatives and projects that demonstrate progress, the published evidence of the perceptions and inclusive performance of libraries around the world is not comforting.
There is a distinct US-bias in the scholarly literature, with most of the evidence from the UK being around 8-9 years old, which has forced me to review the international library situation across the US, Canada, Australia and the UK but there feels to be common threads and challenges running through libraries in each country, albeit trends in the US in the post-Trump era are by far the most concerning.
How far, how fast?
Health and safety was a twentieth century success story. The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 established employer responsibility for all adverse events occurring in the workplace and subsequent case law established a sustained and credible threat to the bottom line of organisations unconcerned with workplace safety coupled with the threat of severe reputational damage sufficient to coerce employers everywhere to invest in maintaining the safety of everyone as an organisational priority. This combination of powerful forces compels the vast majority of organisations to maintain an effective ‘safety first’ culture.
Compare this to the culture of tolerance experienced by LGBTQ+ staff and other minority groups, particularly those with intersectional identities in organisations everywhere. Drawing on the wider national culture, organisations and their employees feel compelled only to refrain from the worst excesses of obvious, demonstrable discrimination and direct hate speech. There is still frequently little to no protection even in comparatively progressive organisations against microaggressions, malicious remarks designed to emotionally undermine, harass and provoke persist under the guise of humour, while organisational power politics has responded to the increasingly successful claims for equity by certain minority groups, such as homosexual men (though not yet lesbians, bi, trans or nonbinary people, and especially not those who transition to begin to identify as female because of their intersectional oppression from also now being women) by seeking to divide and conquer LGBTQ+ minority groups through tolerating, and in in some cases even offering comparative equity to those individuals both able and willing to conceal their queer identities and/or are able to submerge the one divergent aspect of their identity behind the many other privileged facets, such as white, cis-gendered, ‘straight-acting’ men, while maintaining ubiquitous though unprovable discrimination against others (Wagner & Kitzie, 2021).
There is evidence that openly LGBTQ+ employees enjoy reduced career development opportunities (Mehra, 2019). While LGBTQ+ leaders also often feel a duty to come out in order to visibly champion their LGBTQ+ colleagues elsewhere in the organisation and serve as much needed role models (Wagner & Kitzie, 2021) this may conceal the lengths to which they may have had to go to conceal their divergent identities in order to secure promotion to a leadership role. Even in organisations that are moving towards trans inclusion “these moves rarely attend to how such systems remain racist, classist and ableist” (Wagner & Kitzie, 2021, p. 3).
Structural barriers to equity
Criticising public libraries in Tennessee, Movius (2018) highlighted unrepresentative collections, microaggressions from staff, a lack of gender-neutral bathrooms, and circulation policies preventing remote name changes as structural barriers to LGBTQ+ equity. While a previous uklibchat highlighted the efforts many UK public libraries have made to improve collections and train staff to promote LGBTQ+ inclusion, I could not find a recent appraisal of how well they have overcome structural and technical problems, such as gender-neutral space provision in older buildings designed sometimes before even wheelchair accessible access was considered necessary. This also raises questions over the extent to which systems of practice surrounding name changes for trans people undergoing gender reassignment are efficient, remote, and guarantee the privacy and dignity of individuals involved and prevent any risk of dead-naming, particularly where multiple systems intersect and interact.
Collection management
There is a clear need for libraries to offer better information support targeting LGBTQ+ groups. For example, 56% of respondents to a Stonewall survey identified a lack of information and support on starting a family as a barrier to becoming a parent (Guasp, 2013). While targeting minority groups with information risks drawing attention to difference, more comprehensive, balanced, and intersectionality representative information provision promoted both across both specialised health library services, and arguably public libraries, has a role to play in ensuring both equity of access to information and normalising LGBTQ+ parenting. This intersects with the digital divide, which exacerbates information poverty and further debilitates minority groups. Similar arguments may be made across areas where LGBTQ+ and other minority groups exhibit information poverty and disparately worse health outcomes than wealthy, ‘able’, cis-gendered, heterosexual, white people.
Garofalo (2021) warns that in an age where an increasing proportion of library resources are delivered electronically, eresource diversity is as or more important than the diversity of print collections and potentially even more challenging to assess and enhance. With such vast collections, even monitoring the visibility and inclusion of LGBTQ+ and intersectional authors across an ever-changing ebook collection is a formidable proposition. As Conner-Gaten et al. (2017) describe in their article deconstructing racism in library collections, rebalancing library collections to become inclusive of any minority requires considerable effort to expose the full extent of the invisible and often unconscious personal, institutional, and industrial-scale biases operating against minorities. Librarians must not only identify and accept the breadth and depth of their own unacknowledged prejudices, which is a far from comfortable process, but they must seek to overcome the systematic bias inherent in subjects built around a celebrated canon of works authored almost entirely by cis-gendered, heterosexual, white men, and the influence of a publishing industry that has since its inception systematically excluded LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and women authors, forcing them to explore minority publishers often not available through the main library supplier.
Information organisation
The organisation of information is also important, a balance being needed between the visibility of LGBTQ+ materials and a need to avoid ghettoising materials about diverse communities and avoid any risk of library users who must conceal their sexual identity for their own safety being identified as LGBTQ+ after being observed browsing the dedicated LGBTQ+ library section (Chapman, 2013). The lack of visible LGBTQ+ materials remains a systematic problem in many public library collections, Bain & Podmore (2020) concluding that LGBTQ+ patrons of suburban public libraries surrounding Vancouver, Canada, were excluded by the systematic invisibility of LGBTQ+ materials, and that this was a systematic problem across the library service, with the promise of social inclusion being carried forward almost entirely by a handful of LGBTQ+ activists and allies instigating local political change within library systems and specific branches by creating queer-friendly spaces, collections and programmes. Comparative studies in the UK have sadly proven elusive.
LGBTQ+ librarians and library users have long complained about how slowly and unwillingly many classification schemes, particularly Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), have responded to the increased understanding and nuance with which sexuality and race and intersectionality are organised, and therefore discovered and associated. While many public libraries have abandoned DDC in favour of more modern organisation schemes (Robinson, 2020), ensuring that only modern and fair information about LGBTQ+ people, other minorities and intersectional groups is provided, that older and prejudicial content is weeded or clearly relegated to a classification for outdated historical perspectives on the topic, and organised in ways that make information both easy to find and identity affirming for the groups concerned remains a priority for all libraries.
As George Orwell demonstrated in his novel “1984”, controlling the language and language structures available to people ultimately threatens to control their ability to think. In light of this, subject heading schemas and other controlled vocabularies are revealed to be important tools determining how individuals and communities are understood, particularly in the US, where subject heading searches are more heavily in research than they are in the UK. Subject heading schemes and other controlled metadata schemas typically use archaic terms and heading structures determined by privileged people from outside of minority groups being described that help perpetuate old prejudices and conceits about the groups being described. Happily, library cataloguers have a long and proud tradition of sidestepping historical prejudices by introducing innovative local classification schemes and thesauri to better expose materials by and about minority groups (Hardesty & Nolan, 2021). Following in this tradition, Hardesty & Nolan have introduced a “homosaurus” – a thesaurus of controlled queer indexing terms – to library catalogues in response to the inflexibility and outdated language and structure of existing controlled vocabularies and demonstrated that it could be incorporated into library catalogues as an alternative point of entry to existing indexing terms. These homosaural tags are variously mapped to Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) terms where they match or searched as free-text keywords when selected where they diverge from existing LCSH headings. The system has passed the proof-of-concept stage and demonstrates “the possibility of centering systemically marginalized voices by … making linked data work to connect and update the terminology and search terms available for research” (Hardesty & Nolan, 2021, p. 11).
Teaching inequality
A social stigma pertains to all experiences to which a person is not exposed, and the lack of accurate information and vicarious experience through reading in schools threatens to maintain a knowledge gap in educational establishments of all levels, from schools (Montague, 2020) to colleges and universities (Mehra, 2019; Wagner & Crowley, 2020). Montague (2020) argues that school librarians have a critical role to play in countering the climate of misinformation and ‘fake news’, supporting students who seek to form and extend queer-inclusive groups, and taking on opportunities to work with faculty and administration to establish library and school policies that do not discriminate.
It has been well established that university students from minority groups who cannot find themselves reflected in their courses and library materials are at increased risk of experiencing low self-esteem, reduced academic success and drop-out at university (e.g. Waling & Roffee, 2018). Stewart & Kendrick (2019) reported that LGBTQ+ students, and in particular bi students, found that the lack of information that they felt they could relate to in their university libraries had created a barrier to their engagement. From personal experience, I can testify that LGBTQ+ content of university collections is often very limited, distributed across obscure subjects, difficult to find, and that the content shelved at the most easily discovered shelfmarks (in DDC encoding Sociology: relationships) often reflect hostile, historical perspectives on sexuality without any additional warnings for the unassuming ‘lay reader’ that the content has been retained to show how attitudes have changed over time.While considerable progress has been made in establishing that LGBTQ+ people and other minority groups have rights in life and the workplace, including the Equality Act 2010 that makes direct and indirect discrimination unlawful, there remains a huge gap in both the effort invested in designing out discrimination and harassment and establishing an equitable lived experience for different and intersectional minority groups in organisations compared to established cultural norms, such as the right to a safe working environment.
Mehra (2019) reflects on their experience as a QTIBIPOC academic in an American library school, where they highlight the difficulties that intersectional minorities face in bringing attention to themselves as entire people while facing alternating invisibility and hypervisibility from each facet of their divergent identity either leads to the value of their work being depreciated or frontlined for political purposes, while they must skillfully navigate microaggressions and discrimination targeted at them because of their various minority characteristics. Mehra describes how many of these microaggressions are deliberately intended to provoke emotional responses that may subsequently be used to undermine them, from direct insults to suggestions masquerading as humour that they are the ‘manager’s favourite’ because of some minority characteristic they both share, rather than (assuming the suggestion has any basis in objective fact) because of the quality of their work or collegiality, remarks intended perhaps to make the individual feel vulnerable, self-conscious and perhaps to provoke a disruption in the collegiate relationship out of jealousy or spite.
A review of American academic libraries by Wagner & Crowley (2020) was damning. It found that trans and gender-nonconforming library users found themselves largely invisible outside of being subjects in the research literature. Absent from library guides, classification schemes, subject labels, and both subject headings and other indexing terms in academic databases were described collectively as “microaggressions”, all serving variously to fetishise, misgender and deadname trans and gender-nonconfirming individuals, shelving transgender identities proximate with other “deviant” forms of sexual expression, sex work and works that focus on surgical gender transition, with the apparent and offensively simplistic implication that switching between binary genders is the logical conclusion of being trans. The authors warn of a resurgence in conservatism in US universities and libraries that they accuse of not even seeking to establish ideological neutrality in their treatment of different gender identities, let alone supporting and promoting acceptance and understanding of vulnerable minority groups. At the same time, right-wing pressure groups are launching coordinated attacks on LGBTQ+-affirmative events in US public libraries (Yorio, 2019). Yorio notes that while such complaints are rarely upheld, they have nonetheless had a chilling effect on the willingness of libraries to host events such as drag queen storytime. Still other libraries are guilty of “soft censorship”, refusing to stock or promote LGBTQ+ fiction to avoid controversy (Yorio, 2020). The Second World War showed us the rewards of appeasement quite clearly, so it is sad to see librarians appeasing the far-right once more across America.
While these events are taking place in US libraries in the post-Trump era, what starts in the US has a habit of being emulated later in the UK and elsewhere, and so librarians everywhere should be watchful of attacks on diverse identities in their US-developed library systems, their parent institutions, the public at large and, as always, everyone should keep a reflexively watchful eye on their own mindset and practice.
Are we all listening yet?
A 2013 Stonewall report in the UK found that, at that time, 88% of LGB people had never been asked for their views by their local government service providers (Guasp, 2013). Whether this included public libraries was unclear but since even eight years ago 67% said they would willingly offer their views and 74% claimed not to be bothered about including their sexual orientation on feedback forms alongside other demographic information such as their age and gender, it seems that opportunities have been missed, at least historically, to build a more nuanced picture of how well LGBTQ+ client needs are being met. This is only reinforced by a 2015 CILIP blog post attempting to persuade librarians that their target audiences included LGBTQ+ users and that they might not have noticed simply because they failed to meet their needs so completely that they had ceased to visit or because they went unnoticed when they did visit (MacDonald, 2015). I can only hope that dramatic progress has somehow been made in the six years since.
Examining trans inclusion in public libraries and trans people sampled from across the UK, Waite (2013) was highly critical of the libraries they surveyed, finding that while trans people used public libraries, the collections in these libraries were sadly lacking materials that were representative of trans people, that mainstream publishers failed to publish fiction that represented trans people favourably or equitably and that libraries therefore needed to engage more with smaller, more specialist publishers to source trans-friendly fiction and nonfiction, that health and other information was absent or severely lacking, and that library staff themselves were ignorant of the trans materials in their collections and perceived by their trans clients to be unapproachable and transphobic. The trans library users surveyed were almost universally unwilling to approach library staff to ask about trans literature collections in public libraries, some because they took the derisory collection of trans-relevant literature in the library to signal a disregard for trans people and others because they knew or feared library staff were transphobic, while those who were not openly trans some feared having their trans identity maliciously or negligently exposed publicly.
These findings are echoed in Scottish school libraries by Guasp (2012), who found that the lack of recognition of LGBTQ+ people and relationships in schools extended to school libraries, with 35% of LGB pupils reporting that their school had no books or information on LGB people and issues and a further 50% of respondents unsure, as well as to computer use, with 34% of respondents reporting they could not use school computers to access information on LGB issues, with a further 36% unsure. This echoes an American study that similarly criticised school library collections for “instilling a heteronormative lens” (Fantus & Newman, 2021, p. 13). Their recommendations included both creating more inclusive library collections to equip young people with the information and vocabulary they need to facilitate open conversations about their sexuality and gender orientation alongside teaching conflict resolution “to mitigate homophobic and transphobic harassment and address the emotional, physical, and social safety concerns of LGBT youth” (Fantus & Newman, 2021, p. 13).
Human libraries
Finishing on a more upbeat note, since 2000, human libraries have augmented print and electronic collections worldwide offering a new way for libraries to close cultural gaps, reflecting innovative new ways that libraries are responding effectively to close the experience gap between enquiring young minds and those with different experiences (Schijf et al., 2020).
Conclusions
While research conducted on UK libraries appears limited, what exists seems to agree with findings from the US, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Libraries are failing to live up to the promises they make in their inclusive strategy statements. Libraries in all sectors are too often heteronormative and cis-normative environments. Trans and gender-nonconforming library users are too often afraid of the consequences of approaching library staff and asking for help finding information about their gender identity. Bisexuality and other minority sexual and gender identities are too often erased by libraries, and a hostile wind has started to blow across America that might find fertile ground as right-wing populism becomes increasingly normalised in British politics. Passionate librarians are working locally to enhance LGBTQ+ inclusion, curate inclusive local collections and drive forward the equity and inclusion agenda but they work against a backdrop of a culture of ambivalence towards LGBTQ+ inclusion and seem increasingly to be fighting increasingly conservative national and organisational cultures to protect progress made in offering LGBTQ+-affirmative events and both ensure and promote libraries and library staff as safe places to seek information about their LGBTQ+ identity and health.
The long shadow cast by Section 28 has taught us that libraries and their users pay for bowing too low before the winds that blow, and that now is the time to anticipate support for the anticipated rise in LGBTQ+ oppression by deliberately mainstreaming all forms of diversity and intersectionality and enshrining their courageous defence in library strategies and activities. Now more than ever, libraries must seek to normalise diversity and to serve their core purpose to help their audiences learn both about themselves and the experiences of those whose experiences are unlike themselves, thereby fostering the understanding, acceptance and mutual respect that exposes and undermines divisive identity politics and helps the world stand united against both tyranny and misery.
~ David E Bennett
References
Bain, A. L., & Podmore, J. A. (2020). Scavenging for LGBTQ2S public library visibility on Vancouver’s periphery. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 111(4), 601-615. https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12396
Chapman, E. L. (2013). No more controversial than a gardening display? Provision of LGBT-related fiction to children and young people in U.K. public libraries. Library Trends , 61(3), 542–568. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/18618866.pdf
Conner-Gaten, A., Caragher, K., Drake, T. (2017, November 3). Collections decoded: Reflections and strategies for anti-racist collection development. [Paper presentation]. Brick & click 2017: An academic library conference, Maryville, Missouri, USA. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED578189.pdf
Fantus, S., & Newman, P. A. (2021). Promoting a positive school climate for sexual and gender minority youth through a systems approach: A theory-informed qualitative study. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 91(1), 9-19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ort0000513
Garofalo, D. A. (2021). Tips from the trenches. Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, 33(3), 212-214. https://doi.org/10.1080/1941126X.2021.1949160
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Guasp, A. (2013). Gay in Britain: Lesbian, gay and bisexual people’s experiences and expectations of discrimination. Stonewall.
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MacDonald, G. (2015, August 25). Improving LGBTQ* provision in your library: why and how to do it. CILIP News & Press: News. https://www.cilip.org.uk/news/475690/Improving-LGBTQ-provision-in-your-library-why-and-how-to-do-it.htm
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Robinson, A. (2020, February 20). Silence in the library: Finding LGBT stories in the library catalogue. Stonewall. https://www.stonewall.org.uk/about-us/news/silence-library-finding-lgbt-stories-library-catalogue
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Yorio, K. (2019). Libraries see anti-LGBTQIA+ trend: “State of America’s Libraries 2019” reveals “extreme tactics” by organized groups. School Library Journal, 65(4), 10. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=136192014&site=eds-live
Yorio, K. (2020). Not quite banned: Soft censorship that makes LGBTQIA+ stories disappear. School Library Journal, 66(2). https://www.slj.com/?detailStory=not-quite-banned-soft-censorship-makes-LGBTQIA-stories-disappear-libraries
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