Tracy Nectoux

This book was much more academic than I had anticipated, with most of the contributions sounding exactly like scholarly papers. Unsurprisingly, the essays I liked best were the ones written so as to be interesting to the audience rather than just informative or persuasive. My favorites included "Out of the Frying Pan: Coming out as a Culinary Librarian", because it was so interesting to learn about a type of library that I never even knew existed, and "The Secret Life of Bis: On Not Quite Being Out and Not Quite Fitting In", because it brought up the interesting situation of being a bisexual woman who is married to a man - how out do you want to be, do you need to be, when you can "pass" at work?

I also enjoyed the essay "Patricia's Child, Patrick's Penis & the Sex of Reference: A Lesbian Librarian's Log of Perverse Patronage". The premis of her essay is that as a young, Black-Carib, lesbian she was sexually harassed at the reference desk more than librarians of other demographics. Whether her premise is correct isn't really the point for me, it's the idea that the reference desk is a sexualized space because of the very nature of the work that is done there (service) and how it's done (with a smile and request for more). Harassment by patrons was never addressed in my reference classes, and judging from the information in this article it is a topic that should absolutely be discussed with future librarians.… (mais)

I really, really wanted to love this book. After reading, however, I barely thought it was worth my time as a lesbian librarian. The collection was extremely hit-and-miss and suffered from poor editing.

Half the essays felt like the authors were just navel-gazing. Too many essays were personal coming out stories, without explicit links to issues in librarianship other than the person happened to work in a library. I get that coming out is important and we should talk about it, but can we not talk about issues beyond coming out and collection development? This anthology seemed like it fits more in the 90s, not 2011.

The other thing that let me down about this collection is that the essays of 16 men are included and only 11 women (note = some of the people would call themselves genderqueer instead, but I'm basing this on the pronouns they use in the text for simplicity's sake). In a profession dominated by women, I'd like to see at least an equal number of women writers as guys, if not more. I was also disappointed that these were all American librarians, and that there wasn't more of an intersectional analysis undertaken by many of the writers.

There are a couple of essays that are absolutely worth reading, including Patricia's Child, Patrick's Penis & the Sex of Reference: A Lesbian Librarian's Log of Perverse Patronage by Shawn(ta) D. Smith. While a bit on the edgier side (does she really need to mention "sex club" every third sentence?!?), Smith brings up excellent points about how lesbians do not have the same level of expertise in working with straight guys, and the problems this can cause. This is the quality of essay I'd hoped to see throughout the collection, not just rarely.

Overall, 2.5 stars. I don't regret reading it, since it's rare there's a collection of queer librarian essays published and I feel it my duty, but it didn't meet my expectations.

If you're a lesbian academic librarian, I recommend "Lesbians in Academia: Degrees of Freedom" (Mintz and Rothblum, 1997) instead of this collection.… (mais)