“What makes a book an LGBT book?” asked Shelley Rosen, the adult and teen services librarian at the Independence branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. That, she believes, is up to the community to decide.
In her current role, Rosen is the steward of the Barbara Gittings Gay & Lesbian Collection — which she described as an underappreciated resource that many library users don’t realize exists until they’re surprised to stumble upon it.
A lack of clear guidelines or goals for the collection has meant that previous librarians haven’t always been sure how to cultivate and leverage it in a way that reflects the wants of the community. This sparked the idea for a different approach to stewardship — a community-based process that Rosen said is coming to a close with an upcoming series of dialogues.
Two community visioning sessions have been scheduled for Oct. 19 and Oct. 22 — but Rosen said there might be more to come. Rosen is leaving the branch for a new position, but she hopes a future librarian will organize Zoom options and a session led by and for people of color. Those who are interested in contributing to these chats but can’t make any of these discussions can reach out to Rosen directly to share feedback and opinions.
“This is actually for people to read. This is for people to borrow,” she emphasized. “It’s a living collection where we weed the old books, we buy the new books — all the things you would expect from any public library collection — so that people can have access to the most popular, high-demand, up-to-date [titles].”
“Not only can the books in the Gittings collection show us a mirror to our present and a window into our history and our past,” she underlined. “But also it allows us to imagine the future.”
She described the collection — which houses approximately 1,400 titles featuring a variety of genres and topics from fantasy to comics to religion and more — as the largest collection of actively circulating LGBTQ+ books east of San Francisco.
But Rosen has also found books with outdated and problematic themes — such as cautionary tales about LGBTQ+ identity — and books written by LGBTQ+ authors with no mentions of the queer community in their content. She also found children’s books — which have their own section.
“Finding a collective vision of this would be meaningful,” Rosen said, noting that she hopes people who are invested in the collection’s future will participate in upcoming conversations to help leaders develop priorities.
The goal is to develop a community vision statement and other components of a reliable, consistent system that will support any librarian who is assigned to manage the collection moving forward.
“The branch isn’t getting bigger, and it’s one of the smallest in the city,” she said, noting that the Independence branch has limited space to store the collection. “So when it comes to our priorities — is it more important that we have historical pieces of classic literature that you want to find, or is it more important that we have the most popular book?”
“What would get you to travel to use this collection? What would make it meaningful to you, and what do you feel belongs in it?” she continued.
Today, every branch has LGBTQ+ materials. But it’s also because the Gittings collection acts as a funnel for getting queer titles into other neighborhoods. Duplicates and other books are frequently weeded from the collection and are rehomed at other branches.
Readers who want to enjoy books from the collection can also visit the Independence branch to browse the collection as a whole, have specific books sent to other branches in Philadelphia County, or use interlibrary loans to borrow titles.
But before the early 2000s, Philadelphians couldn’t find LGBTQ+ books in their local libraries. Rosen explained that readers could purchase those books at specialized stores — like Giovanni’s Room — but they weren’t typically available for lending.
The Gittings collection paved the way for that change.
In the late ’90s, residents of Chinatown and Washington Square West needed to travel about 30 minutes to reach the nearest library — so these neighbors came together to campaign for a new branch that would be closer to their homes. The Independence Branch — located on South 7th St. — eventually opened in 2001, offering the community a closer resource.
The Free Library of Philadelphia, the city’s library system, paid for the building and the staff — but not the books.
“That initial purchase is huge,” said Shelley Rosen — one of the branch’s current librarians — who noted that the library system covers the cost of new books each year but that this large of an investment required fundraising instead.
That coalition of neighbors fundraised to purchase books that reflected their diverse needs and their lived experiences — but Rosen said that John Cunningham, one of the branch’s first librarians, wasn’t immediately ready to rally Gayborhood residents to contribute. Rosen said that Cunningham didn’t believe LGBTQ+ people would give money to a library because they were historically censored there. He wanted to know, “What’s in it for us?”
“Because this is the ’90s — and there weren’t LGBT books really in the library,” she said. “They weren’t collected.”
Cunningham, who had co-founded the AIDS Library at the William Way LGBT Community Center in the late ’80s, agreed to get LGBTQ+ activists and leaders involved in the fundraising if the library would house a dedicated LGBTQ+ collection. Barbara Gittings — a pre-Stonewall activist who co-organized the Annual Reminders protests in Philadelphia — became heavily involved in those efforts, and the collection was later dedicated in her name.
Today, the Barbara Gittings collection is managed by the librarian who oversees all adult and teen collections at the Independence branch. For now, that’s Rosen.
One of the most special experiences she’s had managing the collection has been sharing books that showcase Philadelphia’s LGBTQ+ activists with the people featured on those pages.
“Not only are they seeing photos of their youth,” she said. “They’re doing so surrounded by [LGBTQ+] books in the library. And I always find that really touching.”
The Barbara Gittings Gay & Lesbian Collection Community Visioning Sessions will take place at 2 p.m. on Oct. 19 and at 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 22 at the Independence branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, 18 South 7th St. For more information, visit freelibrary.org.