There's a really strong tradition of radical librarianship going back decades; public librarians are some of the most hardcore professionals around. One of my heroes is Zoia Horn, who went to jail for refusing to provide circulation records for a Vietnam war activist, and who was an anti-Patriot Act activist in the 2000s.
Public librarians are great. Be like public librarians.
One of the mothers of the gay rights movement in America is Barbara Gittings. She organized with early homophile rights organizations, like the Daughters of Billitis, in the 1950s and 60s around the country (yes, before Stonewall.) She famously coined the slogan "gay is good" and protested outside of the white house, the state department, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 1965. She organized actions against the Philadelphia chief of police in response to raids on the local lesbian bar.
And she was a librarian! In 1970, yes, 1970, she founded the gay caucus in the American Library Association, the first LGBT professional association, and which lives on today as the ALA Rainbow Round Table. She organized gay rights stunts at ALA national conventions like the gay kissing booth stunt in 1971. She also used her position within the ALA to pushed the American Psychiatric Association to drop homosexuality as a mental illness in 1972. This is like, only the briefest tastes of biographical information on Barbara Gittings. There's a good reason there's so many things in libraries and literature named after her. She dedicated her whole life to getting gay books into public libraries and breaking the mass closeting of gay life.
I also wanna call out the work that a lot of public librarians have been doing to push back against mass-surveillance. Since the beginning of the PATRIOT ACT era, librarians have fought to keep library records safe. These days, most libraries won't even store a lending history for patrons after titles have been returned, so that it is digitally impossible for those records to be subpoenaed by the state, as no such records exist.
Also, we're wicked into labor organizing.
So, you know, please help support us in fighting right-wing efforts to censor our collections and programs. It's only with the backing of the community that we can make big stands like this. We are powered entirely by the fact that the community fights for us as much as we fight for them.
