I was a gay
teenager in the age of date due stamps
I wish being gay
was a Taylor Swift song. In the mid-1990s when I was fifteen and listening to
Alanis Morissette, growing up being gay was hard. I lived in a small western
suburbs town at a time when Pauline Hanson made prejudice popular and my
classmates thought being gay was something to be ashamed of. For me high school
was a miserable little world where I felt like an X-File.
But I wasn’t
rescued by Mulder and Scully. I was saved by my local public library. Their
collection of short story books written for gay teenagers rescued me from an
isolating adolescence and taught me about community. I summoned all the courage
I had in taking those short story books to the loans desk to have them stamped
with their due date. I would hide them between less ‘conspicuous’ items in the
days before self-checkers made it easy to move in and out of the library,
sharing its collections with anonymity. In 1996 at the loans desk of my local public
library I had to face a real person, someone who would know I was reading books
about being gay. And that was terrifying.
As a gay
teenager in the age of date due stamps I found community not only in the books
I read, but in the date due slips glued to their title pages. Those pieces of
white paper stamped with black ink were like proof of life on Mars. They were
how I knew I wasn’t the only one reading books like Hide & Seek: Stories about being young and gay/lesbian or Ready or Not: Stories about young adult
sexuality. Everything I felt was being felt by other young women and other
young men in my community. That is the difference my local public library made
for me.
Our date due
stamps didn’t survive the new millennium but as a gay teenager in the
mid-1990s, before social media or television shows like Glee, the due dates I found stamped inside the covers of my library
books gave me hope I wasn’t an X-File. I was just one due date on a slip stamped
with many. Maybe knowing that was like a Taylor Swift song because knowing
you’re not alone is sweeter than fiction.
-Anne Reddacliff @AMoodiLibrarian
Librarian; Event Officer ALIA Sydney
For more about
LGBTI YA fiction or providing library services to LGBTI youth:
http://www.yalsa.ala.org/thehub/2013/08/06/a-guide-to-ya-novels-with-lgbtq-characters/
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