The Greatest Taboo and the HBCU

Abstract

This article investigates how well the historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) libraries are meeting the challenge of developing collections that both reflect and support ongoing work in the field of gay and lesbian studies. It attempts to assess the amount of material on homosexuality collected by those libraries, the quality of that material and the relevance of that material to contemporary scholarship. The research design was based mainly on list checking, with only monographs considered. HBCU are libraries that historically have emphasized African-American studies in building their collections. To gauge the quality of the material actually held by these libraries, a list was compiled of the eleven non-fiction titles designated winners of the Stonewall Book Award of the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Round Table. The results of the keyword searching made it clear that all of the HBCU libraries offer some materials dealing with homosexuality. The findings reported suggest that developing collections in gay and lesbian studies has posed a particular challenge for HBCU libraries. The libraries serving U.S. HBCU are probably doing, at best, a barely adequate job of providing high-quality information to their constituents with an interest in or need for material highly relevant to gay and lesbian studies.