Do the Right Thing

Like many gay men and women growing up in the 1970s, I was starved for information about people like myself. By the time I was a teenager, I was eager to find out if I was the only gay person on the planet. If not, where were those other gay people, and what kind of lives were they living?

I doggedly scanned my high school library for anything with the word “homosexual” or “gay,” never turning up anything in books, just the occasional piece in Time or Newsweek.

Until, that is, I learned about “the cage,” a locked stack separated from the rest of my high school library by a metal fence. Older books, expensive art volumes, photography books with an occasional nude, and books of an even more “questionable nature” were kept there: D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the two Kinsey studies, and—gay gold!—E. M. Forster’s Maurice, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. Suddenly, I was very pleased with my job as a library page.

Today’s world is a very different place. Openly gay men and women now run for public office. Cher’s daughter is a gay activist (Dick Cheney’s daughter isn’t). The Ellen DeGeneres Show is in its third season. And the recent film Brokeback Mountain is a box-office success.

But have things really changed in high school libraries? Not as much as one might hope, according to the 2003 National School Climate Survey, a biannual study by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (see “Out and Ignored,” pp. 46–50). Yes, some high school librarians are doing a terrific job meeting gay and lesbian students’ needs, but nearly 50 percent of the high school students surveyed say they have no access to gay-related resources in their media centers. The cage—now metaphorical—is alive and well.

It’s easy to understand how that could happen. Some of you may say you can’t afford gay-themed materials, that nearly all of your limited materials budget goes toward supporting the curriculum. But as former SLJ Editor-in-Chief Lillian Gerhardt wrote in these pages a decade ago: “Almost any title provided for optional or pleasure reading can be thus casually dismissed as outside the compulsory curriculum goals and objectives.”

It’s easy to say that you’re practicing—in the phrase coined by the late Lester Asheim, famed library educator—“not censorship but selection,” and gay-related books just don’t meet your standards. At a time when some of our very best young adult novels feature gay and lesbian characters, that argument just doesn’t cut it.

It’s easy to claim you’re only reflecting your community’s values. But if your thinking runs that way, revisit the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision in Pico v. Board of Education, in which a school board banned certain books from junior high and high school libraries due to their content. Justice Brennan wrote “that petitioners’ reliance upon that duty [to transmit community values] is misplaced where, as here, they attempt to extend their claim of absolute discretion beyond the compulsory environment of the classroom, into the school library and the regime of voluntary inquiry that there holds sway.”

It’s easy to keep your head down. As it is, libraries are always struggling for support and recognition, so why create an opportunity for negative publicity? The result is a school hostile to free inquiry. It’s also easy to say that there is already plenty of information “out there.” But what you’re really doing is pushing your kids onto the Web, with its risky mishmash of sites, when you could provide them with authoritative nonfiction and first-rate novels.

It takes guts to create libraries that support the needs of all our students. It takes even more guts to support collections that may attract fierce opposition. But that just happens to be our job.