The LGBT Community Center has accrued a lot of artifacts in our twenty one-year history. Of these many precious things, none has had more individual donors or collective history than our library. For our younger generations, it may be hard to fathom, but many of these books were the entire source of LGBT knowledge in a pre-Internet era. We want to honor the importance of this collection, as a community resource it belongs to everyone; our goal is to have the library be as useful as possible, by making it 1) well-curated, 2) relevant, and 3) circulating. To achieve our goals for the library, the best place to start is an overview; the collection includes everything from fiction books, like Michelle Tea’s Valencia, to historic non-fiction, such as Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture. The 2000+ books in our collection break down like this: 800 lesbian fiction, 400 gay fiction, 200 health or HIV/AIDS, 150 non-fiction, 120 autobiography, 50 history, and <30 trans-related or for youth. To make the library 1) well-curated and 2) relevant, we need to spend some time and resources updating the collection. We want to add more books by trans* and gender non-conforming authors, queer people, people of color, and local authors. We will improve our non-fiction section with up to date resources and local history books. In order to add these books, and purchase the software to 3) circulate the collection, we need to manage our resources to make the library a priority. If you are interested in participating in the curation of the library, or would like to buy us a book please contact us at info@lgbtccneworleans.org.
