GLBT Library Collection comes to OU

I have always had mixed feelings about Oakland University, a mid-sized public university in suburban Detroit. I received my BS in Political Science from there in 1998 and was very active as a student organizer there. I believed the student body to be pretty neutral on the issue of GLBT rights and most of the faculty and staff seemed pretty supportive.

But something kept me from having a lot of school pride. I never really felt "proud" of OU.

Well, I do today.

A few weeks ago I attended the opening of the Robert G. Gaylor Collection at OU's Kresge Library. It is widely considered to be one of, if not the finest, GLBT Collection in Oakland County (one of Michigan's most populous counties). The event left me speechless. The standing room only event showed me that there were many people in the OU community and alumni who were excited about OU making history.

The collection included hundreds and hundreds of titles including many back issues of magazines, newspapers and publications from the 1970's and 1980's. The room holding the collection was nice and everything was in good shape. I was most impressed with the fact that the Kresge Library hosted an entire event to brag to the world about the Collection.

I strongly encourage everyone to check out the collection. It does make me proud that a place like OU which doesn't exactly have the reputation for being a bustling center for diversity.

The following are the remarks that were given by Julie Voelck, Dean of the Kresge Library:

On behalf of Kresge Library and Bob Gaylor, welcome and thank you for joining us
for the opening of the GLBT Literature and Resource Center, featuring the Robert
G. Gaylor Collection.

Over the past few months I have been asked
by a few people: (1) Why do we need this Center? (2) Is this an
appropriate collection for Kresge Library, and for OU? Today I would like
to share my response.

As you may be aware, the literature,
history, art, and culture of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are
often overlooked in library collections, and sometimes even more generally in
academic studies. Our GLBT Literature and Resource Center is one very
positive way that we can respond to that oversight.

The foundation of the Resource Center, the Gaylor collection, provides decades of publications and a rich repository for researchers in LGBT studies. To illustrate, I
will describe two of the books you will find there.
On one end of the continuum we have:
Sexual Anomalies and Perversions by Prof. Dr. Magnus Hirschfield, first published in 1938, reprinted several times up through the 1960s—
Presumably it was considered an authoritative text for several decades. Each chapter discusses a different perversion, and—you guessed
it—there is an entire chapter devoted to the “perversion” of
homosexuality.

In contrast: The Big Gay Book, published in 1991—On the front cover the contents are described as: A compendium of gay travel, health, sports, and more!
As you can see from just these titles, this is an amazing research collection.

In my response to the question of why we need this Resource Center, I feel I must also refer to the unfortunate acts of vandalism that have occurred in many U.S. libraries.

Here are a couple of examples from my own experience:

In the late-1980s, at one university library in which I served, the pages of the national gay news magazine, The Advocate, were routinely torn, crumbled up, and thrown on the floor. This happened so frequently that we had no choice but to remove the issues from the open stacks, just so that we could preserve it. Of course, this automatically limited access to the publication, which probably pleased the
persons responsible for destroying it.

Before I came to OU, I was at CMU. While I was there, in 1996 vandals searched the catalog for gay studies books, pulled a number of them from the shelves throughout the main library, took them into one of the public restrooms, and dumped them into the toilets. This happened on two separate occasions/on two different days, and some of the books that were destroyed were irreplaceable.

You may say, yes but that was 10 years ago. Do these sorts of things still happen
today? Sad to say, they do. A recent example occurred just a year
ago in a branch of the Chicago Public Library. About 100 LGBT books were
destroyed after someone set fire to them.

But now let me share the good news of the library profession’s response to such censorship and hate crime. Our national association –the American Library Association—adopted a statement titled


[ALA statement: Adopted in 1993, amended in 2000, amended in 2004]

Access to Library Resources and Services
Regardless of Sex, Gender Identity, or Sexual Orientation:
An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights


Framed copy in Resource Center (KL 106)
Excerpts:

“American libraries exist and function within the context of a body of laws derived from the United States Constitution and the First Amendment. The Library Bill of Rights embodies the basic policies that guide libraries in the provision of services, materials, and programs.

In the preamble to its Library Bill of Rights, the American Library Association affirms that all ... libraries are forums for information and ideas.

... [As such,] the American Library Association stringently and unequivocally maintains that libraries ... have an obligation to resist efforts that systematically exclude materials dealing with any subject matter, including sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation.

... The Association affirms that books and other materials coming from gay, lesbian bisexual, and/or transgendered presses, gay, lesbian, bisexual and/or transgendered authors, ... and materials regardless of format or services dealing with gay, lesbian, bisexual and/or transgendered life are protected by the Library Bill of Rights ...

... The Association affirms that attempts to proscribe or remove materials dealing with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgendered life ... constitute censorship ... [T]he Association strongly opposes any effort to limit access to information and ideas
[and] ... encourages librarians to proactively support the First Amendment
rights of all library users, regardless of sex, gender identity, or sexual
orientation.”

Now I’m delighted to take this opportunity to recognize a number of people for their contributions to creating the GLBT Literature and Resource Center:

§ We are very grateful to the HOPE Fund of the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan for awarding us a generous grant to furnish the Center with furniture and shelving. Thanks to this funding we now have a beautiful room in which to read, study, hold meetings, and conduct research. Also, for submitting formal letters of support to include with the grant proposal, I would like to
thank:
o Executive Director of the Triangle Foundation, Jeffrey Montgomery
o Executive Director of the Affirmations Community
Center for LGBT People & Their Allies, Leslie Ann Thompson
o OU’s Assistant Director of Admissions (and the Founder of S.A.F.E. on Campus),
Sara Webb

§ Thank you to the staff in Kresge Library’s Technical Services for cataloging and classifying the materials in such a timely manner, so that anyone searching our catalog on the Web from anywhere in the world can learn about our collection.

§ A very special thank you to KL Acquisitions Supervisor Nicole Artanowitz, who worked countless hours on the Center and the collection. Also thank you to our
Development Officer, Rebecca Sellers, and our executive secretary, Kath Borg for
coordinating this event.

§ And for his strong, unwavering support of Kresge Library all along the way, I’m very grateful to Provost Virinder Moudgil.

§ Let me also express our heartfelt gratitude in advance to many of you here today who I understand are planning donations to help us sustain the Resource Center. It is such a worthy cause, and your contributions are truly appreciated.

Last but not least, I’m very happy to introduce the generous donor of the Gaylor Collection, Prof. Emeritus of the Oakland University Library, Robert Gaylor. Many of you know that Bob served as an OU librarian for 37 years, from 1965 to 2003, and his contributions during that time were many. However, for Bob, 37 years of
service is not enough—His commitment to OU continues through the donation of an
invaluable literature collection—one that he has painstakingly brought together
over the course of many decades. It is a collection which, to my
knowledge, is unduplicated and unsurpassed in all of Oakland County and will be
available for use by not only our students and faculty, but members of the
community in southeastern Michigan, as well. It is my honor to
introduce Bob Gaylor.