Originally published in Harper’s Bazaar on 6/28/23. Photo by Matthew Leifheit.
I’ve always loved public libraries. They were my refuge as an isolated, nerdy queer kid in the 1980s. They gave me my first jobs, and were the first places I found information about queer history. Limited, sure—but still better than anything I’d gotten from school, or my family, or on television, or anywhere else.
Unfortunately, these days public libraries are embattled spaces. My hometown of New York City is looking to cut $36 million from the library budget this year, a devastating blow to an already overburdened system. Librarians across the country have been attacked as groomers and pedophiles for simply allowing queer books on the shelves. Perhaps most troubling, Republican lawmakers and presidential hopefuls seem intent on driving queer content from the public sphere entirely—out of libraries and off school syllabuses. Somehow, for people who never seem to have set foot in a library in their lives, they understand this crucial truth: Destroying our history is the first step to destroying our present and future. As a result, independent and private queer archives—which may once have seemed quaint, parochial, or no longer necessary in our age of acceptance—now feel like our one essential firewall holding fast against the genocidal ’phobic fantasies of anti-queer bigots.
For decades, long before this current round of attacks started, these indie archives and their dedicated staff have worked to preserve and protect queer history against exactly this kind of threat. You probably don’t know the name Paul Fasana, but read enough LGBTQ history and he pops up in book after book over the last three decades—not in the text itself, but in the acknowledgments: Pink Triangle Legacies (2022);Language Before Stonewall (2019); Greetings From the Gayborhood (2008), Becoming Visible (1998). From 1995 until literally the week he died in April 2021, Fasana volunteered as chief archivist for the Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, one of the oldest and largest independent queer archives in the United States.
As Pink Triangle Legacies author W. Jake Newsome told me, “Fasana has done more to provide access to our queer pasts than anyone else I’ve known … Paul listened patiently as I described my project and then pointed me toward sources that helped me answer questions that I didn’t even know I was asking. He didn’t need a finding aid; it seemed that he knew every document, box, and item by heart.”