Public library and private space ifla 2018

Public library and private space
Homeless queer youth navigating information access and identity in Toronto
Benjamin Walsh
University of Toronto Libraries
IFLA 2018 - Kuala Lumpur

Public Library:
Stadtbibliothek
Stuttgart, Germany

Public Library: 
Starfield Library
Seoul, Korea

Queer and trans youth are hard to identify in street contexts.

Queer and trans youth are disproportionally represented
in the homeless youth population.
Should be: 3-5%
Is actually: 20-40%

Intersection of library research and homeless queer and
trans youth is exceedingly rare.
All of it

The lived experience of homeless queer and trans youth is
far more dangerous than that of their straight and/or cis-
gendered peers.

Queer and trans you often hide sexual and/or gender
identity to reduce the risk they face.

It is difficult to build services and spaces for people who
hide their needs.

Methodology
• Year-long ethnographic investigation
• Participant observation
• Semi-structured interviews 
• Literature review
• Library literature
• Queer theory
• Performance theory

Homeless LGBTQ+ youth
navigating information access and identity

A public library is a "... local centre of information, [that makes] all kinds of
knowledge and information readily available to its users."
- IFLA/UNESCO Public Library Manifesto, 1993
- OED Online, 2007
Experience that is "public" is "open to general observation, view, or
knowledge; existing, performed, or carried out without concealment, so
that all may see or hear.”

LGBTQ youth living in street contexts must hide any information seeking,
sharing, and use that might lead to their identity being discovered.
Elfreda Chatman identified something similar while working with the
elderly women residents of a retirement home. She called their adaptive
practice “deception.”
- The Information World of Retired Women (1992)

To “engage in self-protective behaviours to keep others from sensing
need [all in] an effort to appear normal...”
Deception
“Deception” mitigates some danger but leads to chronic and/or
critical information poverty.

What homeless queer and trans youth (and
elderly women in retirement homes) need is
private space in which to seek, share, and
use information.
Privacy

Making and finding privacy
In their failure to find private space in public libraries, homeless queer and trans youth
cleverly turn to semi-public or privately controlled “public” spaces where they are able
to perform a more useful, if not more authentic, identity.

1. The Apple Store
Sociologist Sam Perry describes coffeeshops and other businesses where homeless
people hang out as “urban hybrid spaces”
Youth participants in my study identified the
Apple Store as their preferred information space
Here they become powerful consumers of
information
And here they access the privacy of a dream
5 minutes to 5 hours of shrugging off the street
Urban Hybrid Spaces

In public space, “imagining
existing alternatives to
hegemonic systems,” not
some “fantasy of an
elsewhere,” is difficult.
Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
Homeless queer and trans youth
navigate towards a privacy that
allows them to pass unnoticed or to
be invisible in the spaces that those
who embrace failure or succeed in
their “disorientation” could never be.
Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology

2. The Academic Library
Sociologist Sam Perry describes coffeeshops and other businesses where homeless
people hang out as “urban hybrid spaces”
Youth participants in my study identified urban
academic libraries as another preferred
information space
Here they blend into a crowd where sleeping,
loud conversations, relatively poor hygiene, even
substance intoxication, may not stand out in a
busy and vibrant youth space
Urban Hybrid Spaces
Homeless queer and trans youth may be students
themselves

The endless work of passing
Passing as a consumer of luxury
information technology at the Apple
Store or passing as a member of a
student body at a large university
library, is easy work for youth who are in
constant negotiation of and/or with the
spaces they pass through each day.
In street contexts queer and trans
youth must work identity unceasingly to
mitigate the dangers they face.

Public library as sanctuary
“I don't just go to the library for the computers. I'll go there sometimes on a Friday night
if I'm not doing anything. I'll read a magazine. I'll read a book. I'll listen to music. I find
that my library is my escape from my girlfriend. I can't get myself into trouble and she's
not worried about me cheating on her.” - Luther
“He talked about spending much of [that day] at the library at Young and Bloor. Five
hours in total. He [said] that the Toronto Reference Library is one of the main places he
goes during the day. When I asked what he liked most about this branch he said the
computers, then laughed and added, “It’s also warm in winter and air conditioned in
summer. What’s not to like?”” - Fieldnote

Public library as failure
1997 study demonstrated that the general US population “expresses a
significantly greater social distance” with an individual described as homeless
than with one described as poor.
Homeless LGBTQ youth report a preference for spending time away from other
homeless people, preferring to keep a significantly greater social distance from
the homeless, than the non-homeless.
Homeless LGBTQ youth prefer the Apple Store and academic libraries because
of a perception that the public libraries are where the homeless go.
Public libraries, for them, signify their own failure.

Homeless LGBTQ youth need to step in and out of identities to access
services, to take part in street economies, to make contact with family and old
friends, to build romantic relationships, to gain educational opportunities, to
sleep in public space, to cool down during a heat emergency or to warm up
during an extreme cold weather alert.
And there are a number of ways that public libraries can support this work.
What can we do?

1. Reach out or go out to your local homeless youth community. If, as indicated in
Toronto’s 2013 Street Needs Assessment, 21% of youth in the shelter system of a
large North American city identify as LGBTQ+, outreach to shelters is outreach to
homeless LGBTQ+ youth. 
2. Hire young LGBTQ+ staff to lead that outreach. Homeless LGBTQ+ youth trust
information that has come from peers and queer programming staff. 
3. Build empathy for the experience of homeless LGBTQ+ youth within your organization
through staff development and training. 
4. Think about ways of building private information space in public libraries. 
5. Talk to homeless youth and, in a professional context, become their friends. Homeless
youth are hungry for kindness and few professionals are better suited to demonstrate
interest, respect, and thoughtfulness than librarians and library staff.

Thank you!
benjamin.walsh@utoronto.ca

Public library and private space ifla 2018

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