What is the Black Queer Studies Collection?
The Black Queer Studies Collection is a virtual designation added by UT Libraries catalogers to individual records. This means that you’ll see “Black Queer Studies Collection” listed as a “Local Note” in records included in the collection. This local note field, MARC field 590, has been used by the Libraries to designate other virtual collections including gifts to the library and the Curriculum Collection. The Black Queer Studies Collection note is being added to and improves access to records in the UT Libraries Catalog for materials by and about Black Diasporic LGBTQ people; the collection includes works in the circulating and archival collections, multiple formats, and multiple languages. The Black Queer Studies Collection is a groundbreaking project in librarianship in that it addresses standard obstacles posed by the Library of Congress Subject Headings and information retrieval systems to locating materials by and about Black Diasporic LGBTQ people.

Why do we need something like the Black Queer Studies Collection?
Current information organization practice frequently obscures access to materials by and about historically marginalized communities, particularly lesbian, gay, and transgender communities of color (de la tierra, 2008; Olson, 2000; Valentine, 2007). This erasure results in a lack not only of appropriate materials in users’ search results, but also of sufficient context for the incomplete list materials generated by a search.

Current cataloging practice, and the current list of Library of Congress Subject Headings, result in unreliable application of appropriate subject headings to materials about queer people of color. In current cataloging practice, catalogers at the Library of Congress or other institutions (sometimes including UT) use the (generally slow to evolve) Library of Congress Subject Headings list to add subject headings to the record for an item. The catalogers upload these records to the OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) database, and libraries, including the UT Libraries, copy available OCLC records for materials they add to the collections. Sometimes UT Libraries catalogers update the records, but this is not always possible.

As a result of this process, current subject headings insufficiently describe the subjects of African and African American lesbian, gay, and transgender materials (Valentine; Olson, 2007). For example, What We All Long For (Knopf Canada, 2008), a book including a central Asian lesbian character and written by well-known Black lesbian author Dionne Brand, features the four subject headings:
Toronto (Ont.) — Fiction
Vietnamese — Ontario — Toronto — Fiction
Female Friendship — Fiction
Refugees — Fiction
A keyword search in the catalog for “Black lesbian fiction” or “lesbian fiction” or even “lesbian” would not retrieve What We All Long For. Also, current U.S. cataloging practice does not consider the identity of the author as a subject; therefore, the author’s identity does not affect subject headings assigned to their material.

Such obstacles to locating material about and by queer people, and especially about and by queer people of color, are pervasive, as librarian and author tatiana de la tierra points out: bibliographic records without possible or known search terms in their bibliographic record “are effectively erased from catalogs. To not name is to eradicate, to make invisible. It is like banning a book that no one ever knew existed to begin with” (de la tierra, p. 100). When, as a result of inadequate cataloging innovation, search terms generate too few results, the meager results list lacks the complexity of a full context for that search or field and the false indication that there is not much material available is detrimental to researchers seeking personal and/or academic validation (Furner, 2009; de la tierra).
With the introduction of the Black Queer Studies Collection, the UT Libraries acknowledge that a catalog is not neutral. The virtual collection begins to redress the erasure of Black diasporic lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender materials by the current absence of information organization tools, and this practice models a way for library professionals to counteract anti-professional claims to objectivity and take a rightful role in critical engagement with knowledge organization’s production of meaning (Andersen, 2006; Dunbar, 2006; Furner, 2009; Olson & Schlegl).

How can we use the Black Queer Studies Collection?
You can use the UT Library Catalog to browse or search within the Black Queer Studies Collection.
To browse the collection: in the catalog (catalog.lib.utexas.edu), you can perform a keyword search for “Black Queer Studies Collection” (using quotation marks); this search will return all of the materials currently designated as part of this collection-in-process. You can also visit the shortcut link to this search.

To search within the collection: in the catalog, perform a keyword search for “Black Queer Studies Collection” and [enter your search terms here].

Is the Black Queer Studies Collection complete?
This is a collection in process, and it is only one tool to facilitate research with Black queer materials. The collection started as 50 items; the second phase of the collection will add in all of the materials listed in Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books (RedBone Press/Vintage Entity Press, 2007) and currently owned by the UT Libraries. Throughout this process, UT Libraries catalogers have also been revising some of the subject headings, thus further improving access to these materials. This collection would not have been as powerful without the vital resource Carry the Word, edited by Lisa C. Moore, Steven G. Fullwood, and Reginald Harris; the book is evidence of the significance of small presses and bibliography projects to queer visibility. In the ongoing third phase of the collection, faculty will add currently-owned and new titles to the collection through an annual review process.

How did the Black Queer Studies Collection happen?
This proposal began in 2009 when UT professor Matt Richardson, faculty in the English Department, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, asked UT subject specialist Lindsey Schell whether it would be possible to improve catalog access to and representation of Black Diasporic LGBT materials at the UT Libraries. Kristen Hogan, a PhD graduate from UT’s English Department, had recently returned to UT as an MSIS student in the School of Information; she was interested in the challenges of cataloging and accessibility, particularly for LGBTQ materials. She joined discussions between Matt Richardson and Lindsey Schell and drafted a proposal arguing that practicing critical librarianship could support interdisciplinary scholarship and intersectional identities. In order to devote time to the proposal, Hogan developed an independent study with information organization scholar and UT School of Information professor Melanie Feinberg. The Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS) and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CWGS) supported the proposal and pledge a small annual support for the collection. The CAAAS Executive Committee determined the name for the collection. In 2010, Schell presented the proposal for the collection to Jee-Hyun Davis, Assistant Department Head, Cataloging and Metadata Services, and Robin Fradenburgh, Associate Director, Technical Services. Davis and Fradenburgh approved the proposal, and Davis is carrying out the proposal. Richardson will serve as liaison with Schell to continue additions to the collection.

References:
1. Andersen, Jack. (2006). “The Public sphere and discursive activities: information literacy as sociopolitical skills.” Journal of Documentation, 62(2), 213-238.
2. de la tierra, tatiana. (2008). “Latina lesbian subject headings: the power of naming.” In K. R. Roberto (Ed.), Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc.
3. Dunbar, Anthony. (2006). “Introducing Critical Race Theory to Archival Discourse: Getting the Conversation Started.” Archival Science, 6(1), 109-129.
4. Fullwood, Steven G., Reginald Harris, and Lisa C. Moore. (2007). Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books. Washington, D.C. and New York: Redbone Press and Vintage Entity Press.
5. Furner, Jonathan. (2009). “Interrogating ‘identity’: a philosophical approach to an enduring issue in knowledge organization.” Knowledge Organization, 36(1), 3-16.
6.Olson, Hope A. (2000). “Difference, culture and change: the untapped potential of LCSH.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 29(1-2), 53-71.
7. Olson, Hope A. (2007). “How we construct subjects: a feminist analysis.” Library Trends, 56(2), 509-541.
8. Olson, Hope A. and Rose Schlegl. (2001). “Standardization, objectivity, and user focus: a meta analysis of subject access critiques.” Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, 32(2), 61-80.
9. Valentine, David. (2007). Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

A couple of weeks ago UT Austin’s Gender and Sexuality Center started off their Queer Student Conference with a keynote by Faisal Alam, a self-defined queer Muslim activist who writes, organizes, and speaks about and with LGBTQ Muslim communities. His website emphasizes the significance of safe space: “Faisal began the first internet-based email discussion group (listserv) for LGBT Muslims in November of 1997 (when he was 19 years old) which marked the first time that LGBT Muslims could discuss issues of common concern in a safe environment. This listserv eventually led to the First International Retreat for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Muslims.” That gathering generated the organization Al-Fatiha, a support network and advocacy group by and for LGBT Muslims. Alam’s visit, in turn, offers safe space for discussion and emphasizes the connections between heterosexual and white privilege and the frequent (often hidden) claims to “securing” those identities.

Also a part of this conversation is AQSAZINE, the Toronto-based self-publication by and for feminist Muslim women. AQSAZINE also emphasizes the need for feminists and queer activists of all religious and ethnic identities to collaborate with progressive Muslims. “Resistance + Self Defense” was the theme of the zine’s first issue, of which the editors distributed over 200 copies throughout Canada, the US, Denmark, and Lebanon. The piles of submissions for second issue resulted in a double-issue and attest to the growing need for the published space. The issue #2 theme “love/sex/marriage + immigration/migration” functions as both a double-theme and as a commentary on the borders created by nations and by heterosexual ritual (and other institutions and histories). Including autobiographical essay, photography, poetry, and reclaimed images (from Virginity herbal soap to an immigration decision document) from international contributors, the zine connects daily life with transnational policy resulting in an engaging critique of political rhetoric. The zine also serves as a resource center by publishing lists of information and advocates around health and citizenship. The issue came out in December 2009, and you can check out the launch announcement for info on how to contact the zine distributors/editors/creators.

While you’re waiting for your copy to arrive, think about the (literary) spaces you can’t live without and how to support them.

The new bookstore site is in the Albina district, the historically Black (and historically purposefully segregated outside the city limits) area of Portland, an area now stretched between sustaining a vibrant community history and the vagaries of gentrification. Wildly expensive clothing stores and freshly washed condos cast shadows over some central throughways. Last I had heard, In Other Words staff were struggling with whether their move would participate in or interrupt gentrification. Certainly, Portland’s cache as grunge-capitol-of-the-world (or at least this side of Amsterdam) complicates class dynamics, but, still, white grungers maintain all the unearned privileges whiteness bestows. Founded with an ethnically-diverse non-profit board (under the name Women’s Community Education Project), the bookstore history (if not the problematically largely white bookstore staff) suggested it would build coalitions.

This is a blog post about the place of feminist bookstores. The problem is, place can only be in, well, one place. And city geographies are also geographies of race and racism. As Johanna Brenner, co-founder and Portland State University professor of women’s and gender studies, described their previous location when I talked with her by phone in 2003:

“I think our, our biggest problem, really, is where we’re located. Our town is somewhat segregated. We’re really far away from what was historically the Black area of town, and the areas that are becoming more Latino tend to be in other areas. Hawthorne is relatively diverse compared to a lot of other places; people come up and down the street, but it’s overwhelmingly a white crowd there. So, so I would say the main thing was [to] try to, from the beginning, develop relationships and then maintain relationships with women of color in the community who saw themselves as having support inside the bookstore.”

Women of color have been founders and central members of a number of feminist bookstores in the US and internationally. Some feminist bookstores, though, persist in a homogenous white staff; it takes work, self-challenge, and recognizing and giving up privilege to challenge the city grid and construct a feminist bookstore as an antiracist space. Even then, place is never perfect.

There’s geographic place – and there’s literary place (and, as Katherine McKittrick argues, they inform and can change each other). We parked our rental car behind a Subaru with an HRC sticker on it (thinking, of course, of Kate Clinton’s quip that the equal sign asserting LGBT acceptability should really be a greater-than sign), and we gratefully watched a dyke in shorts run across the street and duck out of the rain into the bookstore. We held hands and went in, joining the other, as far as I could tell, white lesbians browsing books.

There, my lover waved me over, on the sale shelf, sandwiched among persistent Naiad books (we bought a couple and devoured them on the plane home to Texas), was conditions: five, the black women’s issue, the iconic issue of the feminist magazine. The price printed on the back confirmed that I could buy it for its original 1979 price, $3. I did buy it.

Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel, the guest editors, constructed the issue to make visible the then long-ongoing work of Black feminists and lesbians. The issue on the sale rack staked out a space for that conversation about race, visibility, and geography, the conversation that we need to have again (and again).

“This issue, however, clearly disproves the ‘non-existence’ of Black feminist and Black lesbian writers and challenges forever our invisibility, particularly in the feminist press” (11).

Yes. Document the histories that challenge the easy stories. In 1975, Fabi Romero Oak co-founded WomanBooks in New York with Karen London and Eleanor Olds Batchelder; in 1970 Pat Parker co-founded the first feminist press, the Oakland Women’s Press Collective, with Judy Grahn; the history of women of color in early feminism goes on and on (and on) and has been well documented by Kimberly Springer, Anna Enke, Barbara Smith, Gloria Anzaldúa, and (many) others.

“It is important to share how we made contact with our contributors. Of course we used our own extensive networks of personal contacts, but we also distributed flyers announcing the issue and soliciting manuscripts from all over the country. These flyers were sent not only to other feminist publications, but to Black publications that Black women read. Flyers also went to bookstores, women’s centers, organizations, and individuals. In other words, we and the ongoing editors of CONDITIONS made a huge effort to locate Black women outside of the usual ‘feminist’ networks.” (11)

This outreach and this issue, in turn, took part in “motivating new Black women writers” (12). That is the power of making literary space. And here, in this anthology, the editors map the connections between feminist bookstores and specifically Black literary and movement spaces through the pathways of flyers that went to “feminist publications” and to “Black publications that Black women read.” Imagine that circulation, in turn, of this anthology.

And here, on the shelf in Portland, 31 years later, I am touching this living literary gathering that talks about reaching across segregated spaces, about remaking feminist discourse, just as Barbara Smith had done in conditions: two, two years earlier, with her essay “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” All this to say, you can trace feminist genealogies on feminist bookstore shelves, and I love them for it. Even when they are problematic (as every organization is problematic), they provide the tools we can use to create necessary change. Browse the sale rack and find your history. Don’t be fooled – it’s no easy task, and I’m not tying this up with a bow. This is a radical challenge to remember together and demand, always, antiracist feminism.

7 o’clock Thursday morning in Portland was 5am Austin time, but I struggled out of our friends’ flannel-sheeted guest bed anyway. My partner generously accompanied me over to the Oregon Convention Center, and under the glass-windowed spires, we found our way to “Spanning the Generations: Serving the GLBTIQ Community of ALL Ages.”

In all my eagerness for radicalism, I had emailed K. R. Roberto, editor of Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front (McFarland, 2008) and co-editor with Jessamyn West of the updated and revised reissue of Celeste West’s classic, Revolting Librarians Redux: Radical Librarians Speak Out (McFarland, 2003), in hopes of talking at the conference. So, I knew ahead of time that Roberto wasn’t able to make it to the conference, and I’m still looking forward to meeting! Turns out, Allan Kleiman and Angie Manfredi ran the show by themselves, addressing elderly and youth issues, respectively.

My favorite part, of course, was when Manfredi urged attendees to talk with the publishers reps and distributors in the exhibit hall. Tell them, she said, that we want to see more books like this one, like Sissy Duckling (Simon & Schuster, 2005) by Harvey Fierstein or Ash (Little, Brown, 2009) by Malinda Lo (. Tell them, she said, that we need more books for LGBTIQA youth. Here’s Manfredi’s delicious list of resources.

I had learned about this advocacy strategy when interviewing feminist bookwomen, so I knew that feminist bookstore women had done this at American Booksellers Association meetings throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. The Feminist Bookstore Network coordinated the effort and made the push more visible. Without this activism, we wouldn’t have the books we have today – no kidding.

In a 2003 interview, Carol Seajay told me the story of how feminist bookstores, as sites of distribution (notice here the problem with big-box stores), served as active influences on getting women’s books into print: “I remember, real early on, one of the sales reps did us the courtesy of coming in, but he said, ‘I really don’t have anything for you because, you know, the women’s thing is kind of, over. We don’t think there’s a market anymore.’ And I just looked at him, and I said, ‘My sales have doubled in the last eight months.’ And, next season, they’d have books for us.” Without the feminist bookwomen developing a readership, cultivating a community literacy, and then demonstrating that need back to big publishers, we would have had one season of feminist books.

So, who’s doing that activism now? Small presses, librarians, authors, readers, bloggers – you tell me. I’m looking for it and fascinated.

In that panel on Thursday morning I loved hearing the invitation to talk with publishers, and I did. I talked with small publishers, too, and I wanted the panelists to emphasize the importance of small presses for getting the important books out. Small presses take the risk on books later picked up by large presses (or ignored entirely), and they offer great tools for readers and librarians looking for great books by and for historically marginalized communities. Like queer people.

Well, at this panel, Q stood for questioning, which is a great naming tool for those working with youth. But, in that case, you need two Q’s, one for queer. I can’t live without queer literature – the work that challenges heteronormativity, the work that models a different life, a lesbian, gay, trans, and genderqueer life that interrupts capitalism, refuses the oppressive institution of marriage (see Marlon M. Bailey, Priya Kandaswamy, and Matt Richardson’s conversation “Is Gay Marriage Racist?” printed in the collection That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Softskull Press, 2004)) and rejects the reproduction of the nuclear family of consumers that follows in tow.

“Queer books save queer lives,” author Nicola Griffith reminds us in her recent blog post, circulated in the Lambda Literary Foundation e-newsletter. In the literal sense, in order to prevent the still-soaring rates of LGBT teen suicide, we need books that validate all LGBT lives. This goes beyond a singular identity, though, as Eli Clare points out. LGBT teens also face racism, classism, ableism. We need books by and about queer people of color, working class queer people, queer people with disabilities, books that recognize and interweave all of these identities.

In a less immediate, but no less vital, sense, queer books can save our lives by offering us a vision of a different way of living, can save us from the deadly consumerist paths of corporate heteronormativity. But they can also save us from well-meaning leftists whose single-issue advocacy turns out to be a call for violent assimilation. Just as librarians should resist the assimilation of libraries into the business model of management and value, so should librarians resist the assimilation of LGBT literature into its mainstream doppelganger.

Librarians are educators, so let’s educate ourselves, each other, and then readers and publishers about the power of queerness. I revel in the promise of John D’Emilio in “Capitalism and Gay Identity” (1980) that lesbian and gay people are a threat, that we can change the structure of society by remaking families into “affectional communities.” The future of libraries depends on it!

In the meantime, I waited my turn in the line for the question microphone at the end of the session. I mentioned the connection between librarians’ activism and feminist bookstores’ literary activism, and I suggested people make their way over to In Other Words, Portland’s feminist bookstore open since 1993. I also shared the impressive and groundbreaking resource, Carry the Word: A Bibliography of Black LGBTQ Books, published in 2007 jointly by Redbone Press and Vintage Entity Press and coming out soon in a new edition; libraries should carry all of the books listed – and that’s just a (very good) start. When I returned to my seat, a Chicago librarian sitting behind me leaned in to confirm the title; she’s working on a series of events about African American LGBT histories and identities. Yes, this deep, long-providing groundswell of queer resources should remind librarians of their own place advocating on the margins.

Now big box and megaonline stores have changed the market structure, broken up independent bookstore blocs, and even suppressed literature (remember #amazonfail). At the same time, online writing and publishing has been on the rise – at Fire & Ink Steven Fullwood remarked that Black queer publishers are in their heydey; this writing and publishing, though, is not based on sales, it’s based on need and advocacy. So, how is a public site of community culture and advocacy to survive?

Among some of the most recent news from the feminist literary activist scene is
Toronto Women’s Bookstore’s announcement that it’s looking to sell (and transform to an ownership model) by April 15. In 2006-2007, I was co-manager and book buyer at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore. Just out of graduate school, I took a 14-month contract position there and became part of what the recent press release calls “an unsustainably high turnover in managers and board members.” It was heady and challenging to be a part of a 10-member team of literary activists every day. Part of the challenge has been the speedily changing book market, so when a friend at the bookstore asked my perspective on the current state of the feminist literary organization scene, I was surprised to be able to offer some optimism from this side of the border (that morbidly convincing fantasy of the nation-state).

new strategies
New Words, Cambridge, Massachusetts’ feminist bookstore, opened in 1973 as a partnership of four women. In 2000, they wrote a Ford Foundation grant and received funding to examine whether we still need feminist bookstores. After focus groups and media research, they answered, YES. While this answer may have been predictable (I am no less grateful for it), their innovative projects since then have not been. They created Women Action & the Media, or WAM!, closed the bookstore, and generated an exciting roster of interactive and transnational events focused on increasing women’s media literacy and agency. Their new project, WAM! It Yourself, guides activists to create collaborations in various cities, challenging the single-place of the bookstore model.

Bitch magazine relocated to Portland and has a new grassroots fundraising model called the B-Hive.

The Feminist Press, designated by the UN in the early 2000s as an NGO for its work with African feminist publishing projects, continues its work within that structure.

After developing an innovative model for Community Supportive Media, South End Press last year also moved their editorial offices to Medgar Evars College at CUNY. Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly sees this as a part of a growing movement of independent presses into university partnerships.

Last month the LGBT literary advocate Lambda Literary Foundation created a new webzine as a virtual home for its projects (and marketing income), and the literary activist nonprofit Astraea announced it’s hiring a new executive director. (See my post literary advocacy 2.0.)

Even the progressive distributor, a hold-out of its genre, Small Press Distribution, has developed a donation program. It also continues its grant-funded writing project work and has been exploring entrance into the e-book scene.

familiar strategies
When the independent booksellers forced the American Booksellers Association (ABA) to become an advocacy organization for independents (rather than an industry organization bought by chain and online booksellers), the Feminist Bookstore Network used its publication to document and advocate for that change. When I met him in Toronto in 2006, Avin Mark Domnitz, former-president of the ABA, remembered that the Feminist Bookstore Network was a force in the ABA, “pushing for what they believed was right” and doing it “very effectively.” The Feminist Bookstore Network closed in 2000 after the closing of over 40 feminist bookstores in the late 1990s. The Ford Foundation funded a reunion of a few of the bookstores at the National Women’s Studies Association meeting in 2006, and a similar strategy might revive connections among the bookstores. Traditional strategies are still underway at some bookstores.

Some progressive independents, feminist bookstores’ relatives, are surviving with fundraisers, underpaid owners, and volunteer collectives. I’m back in Austin, Texas, where we have MonkeyWrench Books, an anarchist infoshop, part of the network listed, for example, in the Slingshot calendar; the bookstore keeps an active schedule of events and its shelves well-stocked by a volunteer collective.

Resistencia Bookstore, the community-center created by author, publisher, activist, and mentor Raúl Salínas, who died in 2007, now survives through the dedication of a small staff led by activist educator René Valdez.

Our feminist bookstore, BookWoman, open since 1975, held a substantial community-led fundraising effort in 2007/8 and survives on the work of owner Susan Post.

Nationally, the feminist bookstore In Other Words in Portland, Oregon, started in 1993 as a project in connection with Portland State University’s Women’s Studies Program and, in addition to its innovative blog publishing project, continues informal affiliation with that and other programs.

Atlanta, Georgia’s Charis Circle the non-profit arm of feminist bookstore Charis is searching for a new executive director.

In 2005, Chicago feminist bookstore Women & Children First started the Women’s Voices Fund, a fundraising arm to support programming at the bookstore.

Toronto-based peers
On the Toronto scene, as in almost every city, independent bookstores have been closing. The longtime staple Pages closed last year, as did the newcomer Type.

Survivors may offer an important network and useful strategies. A Different Booklist, dedicated to literature of the African Diaspora, is still open on Bathurst. Parentbooks, started by early Toronto Women’s Bookstore staff Patty Kirk, is still open down Harbord Street and sustains connections with educators citywide. The progressive Another Story bookstore also emphasizes institutional services to maintain its browsing collection.

The Toronto Women’s Bookstore offers an vital and unique focus on antiracist feminism as well as an innovative practice of using its space to host exciting events, conversations, courses, and space for browsing an impressive and reliable collection. The call for a new leadership at the bookstore could be a time to reflect on the new strategies on the feminist literary scene, draw on existing strengths, and create something new altogether.

In the meantime, readers can donate to support the Toronto Women’s Bookstore during its transition period.

Last month the Lambda Literary Foundation launched shiny new webzine. The site includes a public space for resources for writers (which seems also to be a site for publishers to get the word out about their work and their searches for new authors), event announcements for readers, and a features page offering interesting discussion points and seeking readers contributions (and analysis). This kind of site model could lay the foundation for literary advocacy in a new era; the funding seems a little shaky, relying on television spots in addition to the standard literary ads. (Time to think about a non-funded model?)

The Astraea Foundation has created a new networking tool called Meet the Activist. With call-in reservations, participants join a conference call discussion with Foundation grantees working on LGBT projects. On Monday, March 22, you can join a discussion of with representatives from Political Research Associates (PRA) and Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) about the anti-homosexuality bill coming up for consideration by the Ugandan legislature. These call-in sessions correspond with in-person events at the Astraea Foundation’s NYC offices and take the ephemeral event beyond the borders of the space. This kind of queer marginalia rewrites geographies and reimagines networks. These innovative events, not archived and so as ephemeral as traditional in-person discussions, may begin to generate networks and audience for the Astraea Foundation’s literary initiatives. Queer literature by historically marginalized authors depends on the support of Astraea grants, and with the changeover of Astraea’s executive director in the upcoming months, I hope to see continued overlapping conversations between transnational activist networks and their lesbian literary advocacy.

When the hour was up, I checked this book out – again. I’m holding it now between my breast and the table, holding it open to diligently copy a paragraph. At FIC BEA, on the first floor, all the books with authors whose last names (or, sometimes, LOC’s English transliterations of their last names) start with BEA. Scanning three shelves for the familiar spine, and it doesn’t look worn like I read it twice, but I did, holding it carefully. “Initiation.” Yes, this chapter, listen: “OK, these two Indian women warriors, they walk up the long steps of the _______ Public Library in Eugene, Oregon. It’s a little bit cloudy, and there’s kind of a breeze, but it’s warm for early March. And Cinqala is wearing her favorite blue jacket, the one with the wolf embroidered on the pocket. … Those women warriors, they keep coming, a few at a time, and nobody really notices that they are getting pretty thick back there, on the second floor, behind the stacks of not-much-used periodicals” (114).

At her first (library) sweatlodge, Cinqala delivers her analysis of today’s still white colonial teaching practices, of the inculcation of white youth with an ongoing practice of cultural termination policy: “This happened a few months ago, around Thanksgiving. My art teacher, Diane, she made everybody make Indian heads” (117), Cinqala recalls crying, resisting serving as the teacher’s prop. “There’s so much good stuff in that sweatlodge, that that little girl is probably well armed enough with cultural support to make it all the way through age ten, maybe even eleven” (118). Closing the narrative with a dreamt-of reparation of the teacher’s apology and understanding and change, Cinqala emphasizes, “I’d check in on her occasionally, around Thanksgiving” (119).

The women warriors suggest writing down Cinqala’s story, putting it in a book. “What library is gonna have a book about Cinqala’s story?” “How about all the libraries?” (120).

Author Lois Beardslee offers this brilliant reappropriation of institutional space in her book The Women’s Warrior Society (University of Arizona Press, 2008). The women claim the library as sweatlodge, take it back from white, racist librarians, take it back from the pamphlets and cardboard cutouts of Army recruiters, take it back from unused periodicals where Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing should be, where Cinqala’s story should be, where Lois Beardslee’s story should be.

I’m checking out this book again because I’m collaborating on an article on human rights and librarianship, Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article #27, and Indigenous library space. I want Cinqala to be a librarian, to decide for herself what’s on the shelves in her library. Let’s talk about representation and advocacy.

I’m checking out this book again because when a library weeds its collection – gets rid of books – the books that go are the ones that haven’t been checked out in a year or two. Savvy librarians know that many library readers don’t trust the library enough to get a library card, don’t check out books, but read them just the same, between the shelves. Such librarians count things like how many times a book is reshelved even if it’s not checked out. Why is there such a separation between librarians and a city, like librarians aren’t part of the city and the city isn’t part of the library? Well, the history of libraries’ complicity in oppression is for another entry.

For now, go to your library with a friend, check out some of the books you love just to lay them out on your bed and remember some of those once-read paragraphs.

And through Fire & Ink: A Writers Festival for GLBT People of African Descent. Started in 2002 by Moore, Steven G. Fullwood, and others, Fire & Ink is a literary force for Black LGBTQ writers, publishers, readers, librarians; Fire & Ink is, Moore emphasizes, focused on building “craft,” “standards in publishing,” a quality shaped by grassroots and professional workshops to sustain the literature that white, straight editors continue to refuse to publish – or would sooner appropriate than promote. From the white feminist presses that said no to publishing Does Your Mama Know? (newly published in its second and updated edition) because there’s “no market for it” – to the mainstream (white) publishers who won’t nourish Black young adult literature since, clearly, the “thug” genre has saturated “that market” already.

What they mean, Lisa Moore reminds us, is that they don’t know how to, where to find Black readers, Black LGBTQ readers, readers of Black LGBTQ literature on its own terms. Though I’m a lesbian aching for queer world/word-making, as a white woman I am (gasp!) not the focus of this conference – no doubt this is part of what alarms white publishers. As an ally and literary activist, as a reader committed to working against white privilege, I am grateful for this conference. The smoke and mirrors of white/mainstream publishers don’t obscure their desperate attempts to maintain (straight) white privilege by letting in only a few so-called representative (queer) writers of color. Steven G. Fullwood, archivist and publisher of Vintage Entity Press, excitedly points out that Black queer presses are publishing new work even while the conglomerates bemoan a failing publishing industry.

Sitting down, turning off my cell phone, I recognize the woman two seats to my left, her hair pushed into a wave from her neck to her forehead (a look that will send me back to my own mirror, scissors seeking the perfect queer hair), her pen in hand – Ana Maurine Lara. The serendipitous reunion of the best conferences, finding friends and meeting authors. Erzulie’s Skirt, her novel, is a world-making project, an exciting, terrifying, true-imagining of Black queer possibility in the DR, and here, at Fire & Ink: Cotillion, in Austin. This is vital support for literature that matters.

Literacy is, in part, looking at a page, a road map, a store’s name, your own name on a page full of words in a language you use to sing yourself to sleep and being able to say: those are letters I know, spelling a word I can pronounce, making, speaking a world I can use. Also, literacy is gathering together to talk about this book that will change our lives, speaking to each other until we understand each other, until we can reread this book and see a road map, a blueprint, our own names on a page full of words in a language we’ll use to keep each other awake.

Interview One. San Francisco, 2003: In the second-floor kitchen of her row-house walkup, I set up the video camera while she washed up from the day. Carol Seajay, book industry maven and founder of the Feminist Bookstore Network in 1976, re-emerged in shorts and a black tank top gloriously covered in cat hair. Her own gray hair fell almost to her waist. She was a true granola dyke, and I loved her immediately. She sat down; I adjusted the camera. “Make sure you’re in the frame,” she reminded me, “that’s more feminist than having me talking to some disembodied voice.” But I couldn’t manage to tell a story with me in it. The video is of Carol and what seemed like a view of all of San Francisco behind her through her window on the hill.

Carol took pleasure in telling, savoring the satisfying hum of a good story. At fifteen, her group of girl scouts in Kalamazoo found out which of the older girls owned Ann Aldrich’s lesbian classic We, Too Must Love, distracted her, pocketed it, and passed it around in a week, each devouring it in record time before returning it, its travels unnoticed. Later, reading the Kalamazoo Women’s Newspaper and its exchange subscriptions with feminist papers from across the country—The Furies, Ain’t I A Woman—Carol read about the West Coast Lesbian Conference. She told her friends when she got back home: “These are the lesbian books with good endings. These are gonna change our lives. Songs to a Handsome Woman, you have to read these!” Eventually, she rode her motorcycle to San Francisco. With her girlfriend of the time, Paula Wallace, and a Feminist Federal Credit Union loan, she started Old Wives’ Tales bookstore and soon gathered five collective members, including a sixteen-year-old runaway, a friend of her foster daughter’s.

Interview Two. Toronto, 2006: The rumble of the subway shook the seats in the auditorium, and we leaned forward to catch the words of the speakers over the subterranean roar. A young woman wearing a Keffiyeh gave us instructions before we poured onto the streets, 3,500 of us, the Toronto Star reported that evening. Back in Austin, International Women’s Day was about shopping, but on the almost-socialist side of the border, it was about labor. United Steelworkers, Workers United, Multicultural Women against Rape, No One Is Illegal, and on and on.

A block-printed flyer announcing the march hung in the Toronto Women’s Bookstore entryway, where I had stood that morning awaiting my job interview. It had been just a week since they’d called, said the letter I’d sent on a long shot looked good; could I get on a plane? There was hardly room for me and the six-member hiring committee teetering on folding chairs between the rows of textbook storage shelves. I had interviewed Janet Romero, events coordinator and queer artist of language and its complicity in colonization, ran her fingers over a piece of carefully ironed hair: “We’re making hanging signs for the bookstore and we’ve had long discussions about what to call the area that includes the Caribbean, First Nations, Pacific Asian, Southeast Asian, and other identity sections. We’re deciding between ‘Identity & Beyond’ and ‘Indigenous & Diasporic Voices.’ Which would you choose?” (I should have been concerned about the “long discussions,” but I was enticed by a map of the bookstore’s political geography.) Dressing for my flight out the next day, I answered my cell, afraid of getting what I wanted. Alissa Trotz, board member and director of U of T Caribbean Studies, offered me the 14-month position. “We’re choosing ‘Indigenous & Diasporic Voices’ since you picked it, though I wish I’d pressed you to be more specific. It’s important, I think, for the histories of imperialism and colonialism to be specifically marked.” The pieces of bare wood still lying on top of the filing cabinet in the upstairs office aren’t big enough for the signs we need.

Interview Three. Baton Rouge, 2008: It had taken me four years to get an interview with Kit Quan. In 2004 I read her remembrance of Gloria Anzaldúa: “I met Gloria in 1978. I was a sixteen-year-old runaway working at Old Wives’ Tales Bookstore on Valencia at 16th Street in San Francisco. She was attending a Feminist Writer’s Guild meeting in the back of the store and came up to the counter to thank me for keeping the store open.”

After six months in the thick Louisiana humidity that seemed to make time stand still, I still couldn’t find pleasure in navigating Baton Rouge’s hidden spaces for queer transracial organizing, in church pews and classrooms. We were boxing up our belongings for the third time in three years. Relieved that I still remembered where I had packed the phone recorder, I sat in the echo of the empty living room and dialed Kit’s number. We had agreed that, instead of me asking questions, she would tell me a version of her story: “I was younger, I was Asian, I was an immigrant, I had problems with language. And it’s hard for people to understand what that really means. It didn’t mean that I wasn’t there having my opinions or even being articulate at the time. The fact that I never felt understood meant that I really couldn’t be equal to the other people in any decision-making, because they didn’t really understand where I was coming from.” Lifting a decorated box of interview tapes into the U-Haul, I wondered, how do we listen for, how do we tell the stories of missed connections? Moving through these cities, these interviews, I am learning how to read the map of my own body, of our bodies, and of a literature I can’t live without.

A little indie info-shop low-tech style. So, I very occasionally order books for MonkeyWrench bookstore, an anarchist/radical/progressive collectively-owned volunteer-run info-shop/bookstore in Austin, Texas. The inventory system there is all on 3×5” notecards; even though MonkeyWrench just celebrated its seventh year, this throwback recalls the systems of the 70s radical bookstore boom. BookWoman, which started as the Common Woman Bookstore in 1975, started out with a system of pink cards; owner and early collective member Susan Post says she wishes she had kept them, and so do I. I would love to see those palpable signs of books out there in the world, books that had been in one place, like a journal of the life of the bookstore. At MonkeyWrench, which is inching towards computerization, talking with other anarchist infoshops to figure out what kind of open-source, radical-folk-created system can easily house the inventory, the cards live in three long boxes. Alphabetized by title, the cards make it difficult to find a set of books by one author and impossible to find books when you (or a seeking reader) can’t remember the title. This is most of the time. We look online, then, to find out the information, then go back to the cards.

Really, though, I have great affection for the cards, that I can touch them, that people have marked them with layers of meaning, that sometimes there’s no one around who remembers what those layers mean. Like, for instance, the blue highlighter mark in the top left corner of this card. What do you think? Here’s what I do know: the title goes at the top left, the author or editor under that, and below those names appears the list of dates received and copies received and sold. There’s a circle for each copy received and a line through it if it’s been sold. The distributor’s at the top right, the price under that, the publisher (if it’s different from the distributor) under that, and then the ISBN and the store section where you’re most likely (but hardly guaranteed) to find the book if we have it.

I took a bunch of cards home a couple of weeks ago to place a Von Holtzbrink Publishing Services order. I had ordered with them before from BookWoman, and knowing what VHPS stands for made me feel a little like family. That’s the trick of the corporate machine. Come to find out, VHPS changed its name in 2007. This brief naming web is a story of dangerous publishing consolidation and how it, in part, affects independent presses.

The German company VHPS bought Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1985; Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in 1994; Macmillan in 1999. On ABA’s BookWeb newsblog in 2007, VHPS explained why they changed their name, at least in English-language markets, to Macmillan: “This name change is indicative of our growing position as a global media company in an increasingly global media market. By using the Macmillan name for our English language publishing, we will be able to take advantage of the strength of the brand while more fully leveraging our investments in print and digital publishing, and more clearly position ourselves for the future.” A surreptitious attempt to divert us from recognizing the control of a single company.

In 2000, when St. Martin’s Press’s scholarly division joined with Macmillan, the merger created the Palgrave imprint at VHPS, which, presumably, is why “Palgrave” appears, crossed out, at the top right of this card. Are you confused yet? I think this is the point. Who can keep track of what’s happening in the publishing world? You should, librarians, booksellers, writers. Here’s why.

Zed Books is a London-based independent publisher of progressive and radical political literature. In order to sell their books in foreign markets, they have to have distributors. VHPS, now known as Macmillan, is the U.S. distributor for Zed Books. This means that Macmillan is responsible for publicizing, talking up, connecting U.S. readers with these books. But what’s the incentive? Independent presses are sometimes distributed by huge conglomerates; it’s up to us, readers, to be representatives for those books, those publishers, that matter when the book industry creates a system that attempts to silence those books.

The book on this card, Women Resist Globalization: Mobilizing for Livelihood and Rights, edited by Sheila Rowbotham and Stephanie Linkogle, published by Zed Books in 2001, distributed in the U.S. by Macmillan, has gone out of print, as books sometimes do. This book, though, was published pretty recently, so I’m thinking maybe Zed let it go. Maybe low sales. Maybe lack of adequate representation from distributors like Macmillan. Maybe.

So, I called in this order from home, and thought to myself, there’s a deceiving lack of fanfare when a book does go out of print, that is, when its publisher no longer has any copies left, gets rid of the copies it does have left, stops promoting and distributing it. Booksellers and librarians are unique detectives for this information, because we order the books, we’re on the line, reading the ISBN, listening when the person at the publisher or distributor says, maybe for the first time, this book is out of print. “Women Resist Globalization is out of print.” We move on to the next title.

This has been happening lately more often, it seems, than it used to. A few weeks ago, Carlos was placing an order at the bookstore, and found out from Random House that one of Arundhati Roy’s books had gone out of print. The note card provides an important record, I think, of the books gone out of print. A way to visualize the cost of conglomeration. Maybe I’ll create a file for those.