June 2019: Gay Book Buff
When this photo was printed in the Philadelphia Gay News, I was negative three months old. Which is to say that there is a realm of possibility that my mother, pregnant, walking the humid streets of Philadelphia on her way to her job at a catalog library company, could have at least crossed by one of the corners where the PGN was carried, on July 23, 1982. The photo is from the American Library Association celebration and Social Responsibilities Roundtable Award for Barbara Gittings. I wasn’t even yet in the world, but Barbara Gittings was meeting with librarians to talk about the importance of positive queer representation in literature, making space on public library shelves and bookstores and in people’s minds for good gay books, the same books that I would nervously look up in a card catalog system sixteen years in the future when I needed them the most.
Barbara Gittings, when she recognized the feelings in her heart of loving women, turned to books to try and understand what was happening to her. It was a bleak landscape—in literature, homosexuality was a curse, a crime, a death sentence. We were described as broken, defective, degenerates. As a young woman, there was a time when Barbara Gittings sought out a therapist who would “cure” her—that seemed her only option with this new revelation of her heart. In high school, in Wilmington, DE, Barbara Gittings was admitted to the National Honors Society, but then someone sent an anonymous letter to the principal outing her as a young woman with “homosexual tendencies.” She was kicked out.
When I was in high school and the same feelings for girls tickled my heart, I turned to books. I stood in my Doc Martens with my purple Jansport backpack covered in patches and pins and threw the word “lesbian” into the card catalog system at the Chester County Public Library. It was how I found Annie on My Mind, and Rubyfruit Jungle, and any narrative that showed two women in love. I needed the books to tell me I was okay before I could even consider that I was okay. My senior year, I joined the National Honors Society, and scant anyone knew what was true of me. I had kissed three girls - one first kiss, one city kiss, and one kiss in Angela Giaccini’s driveway, in the cold March air, trying to create a map of my heart for her to follow. In National Honors Society, everyone had to take a service commitment. Mine was one period a week in the office of my high school, the one in the lobby where the secretaries made announcements and typed detention slips, chided students who came in late, took phone calls about field trips and transcripts and absences. I tried to make myself small. I sorted the mail into the teacher’s cubbies. I answered the phone with the name of our high school and directed the call. And I watched through the glass windows of the office as everyone scattered when the bell rang, shrieking with laughter, or running so that their backpacks thumped on their backs, the shape of notebooks and textbooks under canvas. After the first kiss with Angela, I looked up from sorting mail in the office during my National Honors Society service to see her standing there. She had a shaved head and wore a black leather jacket every day. We were both trying to make our way through this place that we were not sure could hold us. I walked to the office counter and she slide a soft square of folded notebook paper towards me before quickly turning to leave. I remember being young and unfolding the paper while the phone rang beside me and the late bell chimed. In the note, in Angela’s tight, neat, capital letter handwriting, she had written a single sentence in the center of the page: I crave your lips and dream of the night ours met. It was signed with a single heart drawn with a red felt tip pen. In English class, we had discussed metaphor, euphemisms, and I had always assumed that “weak in the knees” was just an expression, until I felt it that afternoon my senior year. I leaned on the heavy counter and tucked my blushing face to my neck. I allowed myself to read the note again, just twice, before refolding it into its perfect shape and slipping it into the pocket of my jeans.
Last week Emily came home from the library wearing a replica of the Gay Book Buff shirt, which they are selling for the Stonewall 50. We had found our way to one another, to ourselves, to the truth of a queer heart, through books, through libraries, through the conversations that Barbara Gittings had over and over again, as if she could imagine us in the future, a diorama of future domestic lesbian life, where her cheeky t-shirt would be beloved, celebrated, important. Would she have known the weak in the knees swoon of queer love in her life, even if she was denied it so young? I say yes, because of the joy on her face in this photo, and the books she championed, and her sense of humor. I like to think of her, when she left home at 18 and moved to Philadelphia, and how her presence was just waiting for me, right when I needed a light to guide my own queer heart.
xo,
c