lower east side librarian

Dear Gay Cataloging Mafia and other concerned parties:

The Lezbrian Yahoo! group is a talkin' about subject headings. Brenda J. Marston wonders why if "Bears (Gay culture)" has been adopted as a Library of Congress Subject Heading, why not "Butch," "Femme (Lesbian culture)," and "Butch and femme." Me, too!

I might argue for "Femme (Queer culture)" though, since the femmes whose zines I catalog use Queer almost exclusively over Lesbian. Brenda tells me that Cornell has a 653 for "Butch and femme (Sexual orientation)."

This week on LCSH Watch:

• Bisexual women
• Dairy barns—Odor control
• Domestics in motion pictures
• Male-to-female transsexuals
• Nationalism
• Nuns on television

• Reproductive rights
• Sexual minority women

My pick for NYC Pride Week is Jessica Max Stein's "The Rainbow Connection" zine reading/release at Bluestockings.

Monday, June 29th @ 7PM - $1 to $5 Suggested
Queer Muppet Pride
Presentation: Jessica Max Stein "The Rainbow Connection"
Miss Piggy, Scooter, Beaker, Janice, Elmo, Statler. Each of these characters was created or performed by gay Muppeteer Richard Hunt. Please come to celebrate the release of "The Rainbow Connection: Gay Muppeteer Richard Hunt," and come prepared to laugh yourself silly as Stein presents the nerdy, gleeful, and gay-as-in-homosexual subtext of the Muppets and the work of Richard Hunt.

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My friend Tracy is editing a book for a series my friend Emily is coordinating:

Out Behind the Desk: Workplace Issues for LGBTQ Librarians (a working title), edited by Tracy Nectoux and published by Library Juice Press as part of the series Gender and Sexuality in Librarianship.

Seeking submissions for an anthology of personal accounts by librarians and library workers relating experiences of being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or queer at work. This volume seeks to represent a broad spectrum of orientations and gender identities, highlighting a range of experiences of being and/or coming out at work. Also welcome are critical and historical perspectives on the challenges of navigating gender and sexuality in the library workplace.

I catalog a lot of zines by writers who identify as queer--not gay, not HOMOSEXUAL, not LESBIAN, not BISEXUAL (though sometimes omnisexual or pansexual)--and I am at a loss for how to represent them in Library of Congressese. SEXUAL MINORITIES seems to be the best the folks at SACO have to offer, but I just have to wonder if persons of the queer persuasion are really happy with that. If the answer is no, what would you like the descriptor to be? I'm addressing this query primarily to queer folk and catalogers.

I share many people's relief that Obama was elected and their disgust that Proposition 8 succeeded in banning same sex marriage in California.

I won't say the two are connected, but I also don't see queer rights near the top of Obama's agenda.

This started as a Facebook update, but I thought it would be worth exploring at greater length here, especially as I hope to have a nice bibliography of queer women's fiction by the time I'm through.

A while ago Anastasia Diamond-Ortiz of the Cleveland Public Library wrote on the Zine Librarians Yahoo Group, "Blogs are immediate, zines are deliberate." And here I am blogging an event that happened three weeks ago now. I think I'm missing the point! Therefore, I'm going to wrap up my GLBT ALMS recap now or never! (And theoretically my next zine will be deliberate, rather than hastily thrown together, poorly proofread, and with weak, nonsensical graphics.)

So, following is my report back on the zine libraries discussion and Alana Kumbier & Christa Orth's Archiving from the Ground Up

Day Two of the GLBT ALMS conference at the CUNY Grad Center.

Susan Stryker talked about how history can be

• a monument to ourselves
• nostalgia
• a tool for future work

She was most interested in the last interpretation, and discussed it mostly through the lens of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, which she directed for five years after being a regular researcher and volunteer there.

Day Two of the GLBT ALMS conference at the CUNY Grad Center. Less Process/Less Privacy: Implications of Minimal Processing for GLBT Collections with Jodi Berkowitz, Laura Micham, Heather Murray, and Minnie Bruce Pratt.