LGBTQIA+ Issues Discussion #1: Allyship
29 June 2024
The concept of allyship is important to library and academic jobs. We are, every day, put in a position to provide support to multiple marginalized groups, though the training provided in our programs may not always cover this aspect of the job. In what ways do you think your program (either the LIS program or another) or on-the-job training (if applicable) have prepared you to provide this support? Have they prepared you at all? What particular types of training in this area would be most useful for your future career? And what do you think being an ally means in terms of librarianship for the LGBTQIA+ community?
I'm not gonna sugarcoat things, when I initially read the description for this discussion, my head drew a complete blank. One could maybe consider the various gestures towards acquiring more diverse books in my MLIS journey so far as touching on it, but in practice I feel the authenticity is disputable, being something that can be done by following corporate press releases without ever interacting with a living, breathing person.
On the job front, it took typing out this sentence to remember that the closest thing that could count at work was a presentation-based diversity training held a shortly after I was first hired. For a relatively large, predominantly white public library system, this was organized more or less how you'd expect: guidance on racist biases and avoid interpersonal conflicts, little mention of how anything might apply to the specifics of library work if at all, and absolutely nothing specifically about queer folks. In fact, there's practically nothing that directly mentions LGBTQIA+ people in any of the system's official documents. The full text of library policies are searchable on an internal website, so I tried some just to be sure: "diverse" pulls up 10 results, "ally" retrieved a single result, while searches for "queer" and "lgbt" both return zero results. To their credit, there is an IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility) committee comprised of staff thinking up some best practices—but ultimately, any policies they develop can only be presented as prioritized recommendations to admin, so whether concrete and specific training for queer allyship will be organized is anyone's guess.
The thing is, I doubt that training staff behind closed doors is nearly as useful than just getting in direct contact with the people the library is trying to serve and asking: "What would you most like to see from us?" Simply gathering everyone in a room for a few hours and calling it a year or two falls woefully short of what allyship should be. A serious commitment to allyship would mean outreach, finding ways to get more queers into branch doors with the books and resources they might need, feeling safe when they're inside—and, most importantly, consulting with those selfsame queers every step of the way. This will, of course, probably still necessitate these primers for staff doing that outreach if they lack the knowledge; but this would be just the starting point of a process with no end.