GLBTQ Book List Goes Live!

Progress report on what my library has done since the ILA conference session on library service to GLBTQ teens:

• We have ordered (but not yet received) Serving Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Teens: A How-to-Do-It Manual for Librarians, by Martin and Murdock (Neal-Schuman, 2006).
• As of today, our list of recommended Gay and Lesbian Books for Young People is available on our website and in the library.
• Modernizing/streamlining catalog headings hasn't happened yet, and I don't think it will for at least another month what with various other things happening. But it's still on my agenda.

So, more about the list. "Gay and Lesbian" is not a very inclusive title, I know. But we were going for transparency, and it was the best title we could think of that wasn't too long, clever, obscure, general, or clinical. We figure that people looking for a GLBTQ list will recognize this as such, and that people serendipitously finding the list will have a good idea of what it includes. The list description spells out the contents further.

As for what's on the list, it's got books about queer youth, children and teens with queer family members and friends, various other queer issues, different types of families, and some other gender identity issues. The books have an intended audience of preschool through high school. All the books are owned by the library at present. It's not comprehensive, but I squeezed in as many titles as I could within our one-sheet, double-sided constraints.

I'm very appreciative of my boss (Hi, boss! Yes, my boss reads my blog), my uber-boss, and my fellow youth librarians, who have been very supportive of this list. (So far, no one has asked why we need this list.) My boss has even suggested we do a display to highlight the list, after our Day of the Dead display comes down. That's really gutsy, but what is a good librarian, if not gutsy? Let's do it!