“Tearing the Shroud of Invisibility”: Communities of Protest Information Practices and the Fight for LGBTQ Rights in US Librarianship

Abstract

Scholarship on LGBTQ rights in library and information science remains lamentably underdeveloped. This research excavates the hidden history of the American Library Association’s Task Force on Gay Liberation (TF) between 1971 and 1986. Despite rampant legal and extralegal discrimination, the TF’s members and their allies refused to remain invisible, second-class citizens; they embraced voluntary, grassroots, democratic action. This article develops the concept of communities of protest information practices (PIPs). It adumbrates a framework comprising four PIPs that distinguished the TF’s work: performative, communal, constructive, and corrective. These practices constituted vital ontological and epistemological interventions in heteronormative librarianship. This research provides a robust conceptual framework to examine not only LGBTQ people but also other marginalized groups’ protest work.