librarypunk - 091 - Homosaurus

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

It’s just the crew this week and we’re gonna talk a lot about butt fucking! It’s Homosaurus time.  Media Mentioned https://homosaurus.org/ https://librarynews.lmu.edu/2019/09/building-the-homosaurus-an-international-lgbtq-linked-data-vocabulary/ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2072753  https://journals.ala.org/index.php/lrts/article/view/7985/11110

I'm Justin. I'm a Skalkan library. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they them. And I'm Jay. I'm a music library director and my pronouns are he him. That is one gay ass skeleton. Hey girl. I swear to God, it sounds like me. No guest, but we do have a gay ass skeleton, which is appropriate because that could be a term in the homosaurus, gay ass skeleton. It could be.

Mm-hmm. So we're going to talk about the homosaurus. But first, news. Florida has spread to Canada. So public libraries face accusations of promoting pornography, the word pornography. So, again, we've already been here. We've already been here. They are conflating nudity and sex education with pornography. But this is, it's caught my eye because the books that are being called pornography, pornography, Pornography. Remember, the definition of pornography is something that is explicitly to arouse prurient interests. That's its main purpose is to get you off. Are these three children's books called What Makes a Baby? Sex is a Funny Word. And it's Perfectly Normal, Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health. And they all have bright, colorful children's titles on the front. I have shelved each one of these books at least once, I remember. So parents in southern Manitoba, A, are going to have them banned on account of pornographic content.

They are annoyed that South Central Regional Library, SCRL has declined to remove them. That fall into the category of sexual and gender education. So, okay, not pornography. That's sexual and gender education. I think they probably learn in Canada schools. And they say it's not censorship, but rather have the books removed on the basis that they represent pornography. Okay, so we're back to pornography. You know, one of these books is over 25 years old.

Doesn't seem to have caused any moral collapse. I think that depends on who you're talking to, because if it's perfectly normal, I'm pretty certain that one's been on and off the top attempted bands booked for its entire publishing career. That's true, but it hasn't, you know, caused any changes, unless it did, and I didn't notice. Anyways, one part, this article kind of annoyed me

because one person was like, hey, we got to, you know, get rid of them because children, you know, might come across them and that won't be good. So we've got to get them out of the library. And then the voice of reason, moderation, said, instead of defunding the library for creating an unsafe space for children, they could require the local library board to implement policy changes so the books containing sexual content need to be signed out by an adult.

And then encouragement to do so would come from the council. And so the mayor was like, oh yeah, that's reasonable, which is, you know, these books are for babies. Like, why would you put the many adult section? So then there's just some back and forth of parents who are like, this is fine and other people who are like, we got to get them out, but in a sort of subdued Canadian way. Yeah, she says, their placement in the library is crucial so that children who aren't ready won't be unnecessarily exposed. These books teach one perspective, and it is not one that is accepted by all. I personally want to be able to have open conversations with my kids about

sex and relationships. And I don't want them to read a book like this without being aware first. Okay, then fucking talk to your kid, man. Talk to talk to your stupid kids. Get it over with. I don't know what you're waiting for. You can do that now. I love how much of these sorts of arguments are just like people clearly not wanting to interact with their own fucking kids. And not even just about sex, but about anything. Yeah, truly. Like, like. They still want to talk to their children. They don't think they're people.

They want these books to be in the adult section of the library where an actively curious preteen would still be able to find them but would remove the chance of a child who is not ready to be exposed to them. And I'm like, okay, so you're okay with actively curious preteens being in the adult book section where they are actually more likely to come across something that might be where there's like erotica closer to porn than have a younger child come across something and sex education-wise. Like, the logic just isn't there for me.

Like, it's bodies. There's nothing wrong with people learning about bodies. I just, like, don't get it. Yeah, and I mean, there's one parent here who I agree with. They've got three kids under four years old. It's extremely important for children to learn all parts of the body and know how it functions. These sensitive topics need to be shared with our children so they're aware. It's better they have literature they can understand with the parents.

provided information rather than finding out this information through different channels. Alternative channels do not educate on the relationships and do not provide information on consent and healthy body habits and relationships. Yeah, because these are books for babies. They're books for babies. I swear to God, most of these people, like, they don't want children. They don't want to, like, raise people in this world. They just, like, think they're supposed to, or it's like a vanity thing or a status thing

or like a religion thing just to make sure your seed continues in this world? Honestly, I think a lot of these people think this way, not because they like just feel obligated to have children, but because they actively need to control something else

because they can't actually control their own lives. Like I saw a tweet the other day that was like, I'm just going to start my own mini country where I can be a tyrant. And then somebody had retweeted it with just men starting families like. And I was like, yeah, that's pretty much it. They don't.

It's not just men. It's not just men. And it's not just men. No, that's that that was what the tweet said. But there are a lot of women who do this too. Like a lot of people in my life who have abused me have been like women caretakers who have been like the narcissistic awful ones in my life. Yeah.

So like it's a thing. They don't want kids because they want the experience of the wonder of race. raising a child and seeing who they become. They want children so they have a small army that they can command. And when they can't actually control them, they lose their fucking minds and take it out on the rest of us. Yeah. Another thing that stood out to me about this article, something Sean pointed out, is no children were quoted in this entire article, even though they seem to be just like right off screen. Because it's like, parent has kids who are 11 and 14.

has three kids who's under four, has 10 kids under 50, and, you know, not one of them got, got quoted, so. Let them, let them speak. Yeah, what do they think? From Portlandia, let them speak. So that was news. Your turn, Canada, right in your country. They're probably doing some bullshit. We'll do them next.

I see, we've done Ireland. We've done Ireland. we're going to have to do all 50 states. Yeah. I've done Canada. I don't think we've, I mean, we've had whole episodes about the UK's fucked library systems, but not this issue. Not this specific issue, but it's got to be happening.

I'm sure it is. And the turf's getting mad about the little non-binary alien at the library. Oh, they must be. Yeah, that was the little non-binary alien that the one turf got mad at, that was at for a library, I think. Yeah. We'll get to you, Britain. Yeah.

Turf Island. Just wait. That's a threat. Your king won't save you now. So funny, they got a king again. The king of England could come right to your door and start pushing you around. He's going to die in like two days anyway. Going to pop him like a tick.

It's funny they're doing all this and like everyone's thinking like, we're going to have to do this again in like eight years. Although who knows? Maybe he's got like 20 in them. So we're going to talk about the homosaurus. We're going to talk about identity, metadata, and constructing identity. We're going to talk a little bit about language. I think linguistics is going to come up tangentially, simply because when you define a thing,

you start to define the limits of what that thing is. This is why half of my master's thesis was just me talking about, like, linguistic theory. Yeah. So, Jay, can you take it away for a little bit so I can step away? But just let us know about the history of homosaurus and how you got there. Yeah, so the homosaurus, which all this info is up on the homosaurus is website. But if you don't know for some reason, the homosaurus is an international LGBTQ linked data thesaurus. That's where the name comes from. It's a, it's a homo

thesaurus. It's a homoaurus. Get it. We're very clever. But it actually is its origins in Amsterdam in that it started as the like in-house thesaurus for what's called Ilya. and I can I'm awful. I can never remember what the hell Ilya stands for because like a typical librarian, I know all the acronyms without remembering what they mean.

The Ilya LGBT Heritage is the international gay lesbian information center and archive. It started as it's thesaurus in like the 90s. And I actually got to look at the physical copy of it like through Interlibrary alone when I was writing my master's thesis. That's fucking awesome. Yeah, it was cool. But yeah, like, I know like the International Museum of Sex and then also the like, you know, Iliad are both in the Netherlands, like in Amsterdam. So they got cool museums and libraries and shit over there. But it started out there with Jack Vanderwell and Jack is still on the editorial board today. Jack's very fun. And then and it was like it was the vocabulary for this institution. But it meant that it like it was kind of also kind of like, a more comprehensive vocabulary.

And then it had like the queer terms, but also had stuff just to describe things in the collection, right? And then we move forward and we work with Ellen Greenblatt, who is another big name in like queer and feminist metadata, specifically like subject vocabulary. And they both make the vocabulary more inclusive in the like, you know, expanding not just lesbian and gay anymore, but like bisexual and trans and all this stuff,

while also putting more traditional, like genealogical style hierarchy in the, the Saurus, so that it's much more structured like the Library of Congress subject heading. So you'll have like a term and then narrower terms, and those narrower terms are related terms, you know, where you get your family tree shape going.

And it was still just like for that institution and physical. And then we moved to like the, late 2000s and like the 20 teens and stuff. And KJ. Rosson and like the digital transgender archive get involved. And let's move this online. Let's make this a link data vocabulary. And also let's make it more not a comprehensive vocabulary, but more of a complementary vocabulary.

So let's actually narrow the scope to just queer shit and not have everything else in existence so that it is meant to be used alongside other subject vocabularies. This is why I'm one of those people that's anti having the Library of Congress subject headings as the end-all be-all, not because I'm against a like mono, like everyone having the same consistent standards. I actually think everyone having the same consistent standards is good. But the homoosaurus, because it's so specialized, it can, you can like have your Library of Congress subject headings and then complement them with homosaurus subject headings, even on the same term. Like, you could have the Library of Congress version of that term and then the homosaurus version of that term and like synonyms and stuff.

So you can get like way more specialized, basically. Right. Yeah. So you would never use homosaurus on its own, really. It's always meant to be used alongside other vocabularies. And it's like when I was in grad school, it wasn't online yet. And it was still living on like a word documenting on like KJ Roberto's like laptop. Yikes. All the trans guys are named KJ, by the way. Because like KJ Rossin, who's like the main person of the editorial board, he's also a trans guy.

I'm a trans guy. There's like multiple trans masks on the board. There's multiple trans femmes on the board. I think like a good like 70% of the editorial board of the homosaurus is trans. Nice. Yeah, which is cool. A lot of us are trans. Yeah.

So and then in like, right. as I'm leaving grad school is when it starts going to put online and stuff. And then I become friends with Brie Watson. And I go, man, it'd be cool to be on the homoosaurus. And Brie was like, wait, why have we never asked you to be on the homosaurus, not to shoot my own horn listeners of this podcast. But maybe you're a library school student and you don't know who I am yet. And also these were published under my dead name.

And so sometimes people go, wait, that was you? I was like, yes, that was me. but I'm still the only person in this field, to my knowledge, who has published the kind of study that I have done on, like, actually interviewing people about the terms that they use to describe, like, queer topics and then, like, doing, like, comparisons of that to subject vocabularies. And I published a very influential article about it in, in the library with the lip pipe. Plus, it's like what my master's thesis was. And basically, I took my master's thesis and I made two articles out of it. And library school students do that. Take your master's thesis and then take your methods section and turn that into an article and then everything else and turn that into another article.

That's what my advisors told me to do. Works every time. You just got to like rewrite it and shit. You know, don't plagiarize yourself. Like restructure some stuff. But it works. But that's what I did. And like I got to like, and this was before the homeless horse was online was when I published my master's thesis and like got to see the word doc on K.

No, it's not KJ Roberto's, like, laptop. Like, it got, you know, sent to me through box, right? And so, Brie was like, hey, wait a minute. Why have we not asked you to be on the homo sorrows? I was like, that's a very good question, Bree. Why having you? And so I got asked, I got, like, grilled a little bit, got interviewed, like, to be, like, you know, got vetted a bit.

And then I, and it was, like, during the pandemic, like, right at the beginning. when I joined the board and I've been on ever since. And some recent developments in the homosaurus is that we redid all of our, like our URL and our URI structures. It used to be like the term, but because we now go back and like change terms and stuff, we've made it alpha numerical so that we can change terms more easily without messing with like people if they use the URIs. and stuff and like linking and whatnot.

So that's that's a fun new development within the past like year or two. That's the history. So you're not connecting terms to URIs so that you can change them quicker or you, does every term have a URI? Yes. It's just that the term URI used to be the term. And now it's like a string of numbers. So if you want to change the term, you can change the term without having to change the URI.

Right. This is why they say never put semantic information. in DOIs. Yep. Because, like, if you put the journal's name in the DOI, what if the journal's name changes? Yep, yep. So that's what we did is we did, like, a complete overhaul of our, like, link data structure. Okay.

Yeah, that makes total sense. Mm-hmm. I'm trying to finish up this article that I started and didn't finish while you were doing the history. So being on the homeless horse, though, I mean, you've been working on it the past few years. Like, I just wanted to do, like, some fun stuff. Like, what you've enjoyed about it. Have you found any funny things, funny words, funny variations, funny arguments or intense arguments.

But I mean, like, I'm trying to get at the fun angle. Like, what have you enjoyed about doing this work? Well, the very first thing that I did and took like a year doing was I created like hundreds of terms related to like slash fiction. And so now like yiffing is in the homoosaurus. Incredible. You're in like Omegaverse ADO It's in there baby

Well and like And my argument for that was that like There is like a journal of for transformative works And there are like fan fiction archives Like Kirk slash Spock is a term in the homosaurus now And when I was worried I was like Is this necessary? Bree was like oh my God no

Please we need to use that one because like seriously There's like whole fields of study Like if this had existed like two months ago when I was writing this one article, I would have used it. Right? So that was really fun. Yeah. I also really like anytime I've like shown it to colleagues or done demonstrations of it and like

it's not as much of a problem now because we've added a lot of terms, but used to you'd like open it up and like right up near the top would be like anal fisting and ass fucking and whatnot because those are in the A's. And so you go to like demonstrate it. You have to like scroll real quick. I haven't had to deal with it as much now. But like apparently before I joined and before the pandemic, like, you know, not everyone has their own office at work.

Not everyone works from home. And so when I heard stories about like people on the board who maybe didn't have offices and were like just in like a cubicle or something and we were and they would be discussing because like our board meetings are basically we just like discuss, you know, different things. But then we go over like term. or we workshop terms or or whatnot and it'd be like have to like whisper or like refer to the line in the spreadsheet because you couldn't say like nipple play or something.

I've actually had issues where like I've had internet filter, the internet filters at work, like block my ability to work on the homosaurus because I'll have to like look something up and it's like, sorry, you can't look up whatever pervert shit you were about. to look up because it's like one of the things I love about the homosaurus is that so the thing about Library of Congress and one of the reasons it works so well is that like okay can I get into linguistic theory real quick I want to hear it okay yeah we're gonna have to touch it on it yeah so and this is like what most of my master's thesis is about anyway so in linguistics you have semiotics right and you have like something called like sign theory so in like listener out loud I want you

to say the word apple. That utterance that you just made, Apple, is what's called a sign. And what a sign is, is it's a combination of a signifier, the sound apple, and the signified, which is the concept that it's referring to. And those two things together make the sign. And so in the Library of Congress subject headings, there can only be like one sign for, like, there can only be one signifier for a signified, you don't get synonyms in the Library of Congress subject headings. There's only one term that represents each concept, right? And it normally comes from the literary warrant that showed up first. So if something might exist and have terms in both like medical language, but also cultural or slang or identity language, normally like the medical would come first or something, right?

But not so. In the homosaurus, in the homosaurus, we let slang and like intra-community language live alongside medicalized or otherwise specialized language. So I find that really fun actually. And it shows that like our indexes are not as precious as we make them out to be. You know, like we can let like we can have tension in our indices and we can have like multiple words to represent concepts because even if they're representing similar concepts, it's still referring to a different thing because of just the context around it, right? But yeah, so that was always fun.

There's some other fun things. Well, on that, on that topic before we run off to it, because I had this later in the notes, but preferred terms in classification, this comes up as like, if there are synonyms, there's a preferred term, right? So in like classification, you would say the preferred term would be anal sex and not butt-fucking, right? But the question in this article that I'm reading about homosaurus is, who's preferred? Like, whose preference is this? Because it assumes that there is, like, one that's better than the other.

But if you're looking for butt-fucking, like, you don't need the synonym. You just, you need to know that the terms are connected. And they are, they also, like, are used in different realms as well. And in that sense, almost do refer to different things because, like, anal sex, like, as a sex act. you know, that refers to something, but like, but fucking, like, has a different cultural connotation than anal sex does. And so you would use it in different ways. Like, you wouldn't, something that was, like, about anal sex, you wouldn't really use butt fucking for. And something that was about butt fucking, you wouldn't use anal sex for.

You could, because they are kind of, kind of referring to the same thing. But, like, the cultural context around them and why you might use them is. It's different. You know, like, that's a thing we have a lot in the homoaurus. We'll have, like, the sort of, like, medicalized or detached, like, name for a sex act. And then we'll have the, like, horny pervert version of that act in there as well. Like, we're actually working with the leather archives right now to improve our kink vocabulary, for example. Some other things are, like, we have really interesting blind spots and not necessarily, like,

obviously there are blind spots due to the fact that the majority of the people on the board are white. Also, the majority are from North America, even though we're in international thesaurus, right? So there's obviously blind spots there. But like, I'm talking about like, I think it wasn't until right before I joined that marriage or like husbands or like wives or like some like basic concept like was not in the homoosaurus because like they just hadn't thought to put it in. Or like, I was the one who added homoeroticism into. the vocabulary because it hadn't been in there. I have a question about that, though, because if the term, one of the things is if the term exists in another vocabulary, do you need to add it? So was there a previous

argument that marriage didn't need to be in the homosaurus because it's in Library of Congress? That's a really good question. That depends. We do have a lot of overlap with Library of Congress, actually. Sometimes we use the same exact term as LOC. And often that's because if you go to ID.LOC.gov, and find a term, it will show you if there are similar or exact matches and other linked data vocabularies. And the homosaurus is one of those. And so in this way, we're building that like link data, right? You know, glorious link data universe, right? Um, where you can, like, are telling the computers, these all mean the same thing. And so you could like use one from one vocabulary in it, like linked to the other one. And sometimes the, honestly, the term that LOC uses is fine. Like,

they're not the worst. They're not the worst and they're getting a lot better. Sometimes we will have a word that LLC does because it fits in with another term that maybe we're trying to build out. So like when we add terms, we don't just add that term. We also think about would it have necessarily any broader terms? Would it have any related terms? Would it have any narrower terms? We don't have, we don't always stick to a strict family tree structure anymore. things can be related terms without having the same narrower term, which was a freedom to me, to be honest. I was like, well, these things are related, but they don't share the same narrower term. They're like, they don't need to.

And I was like, whoa. They're not monophyletic. They don't only come through like one family tree, this term, gaper to this term, gaper to this term. It's like, no, this language doesn't reproduce biologically. Language reproduces differently, so it can be polyphaletic, which is. It means multiple trees. That's a fancy word. It means multiple branches.

Right. We're getting arborescent. Deliz alarm. So that's one reason. It's like if we're like building at a term and like we need maybe another term to connect to that one and it just happens to be a library of Congress one. Or it's like if people maybe don't want to use Library of Congress and they want to use ours and maybe they're using another vocabulary that's not Library of Congress and are using R. So maybe they're using like AAT and Homoosaurus, right? There's that.

There's all kinds of things. Right. Other fields are kind of building their own things off of like Getty. Like, yeah. Yeah. So that's another reason why. So it actually does help that we have a lot of overlap with LOC. To be honest, that helps because that helps that link data connection.

Because that also connects us to Wikidata and also to like, I have the IAF, but like the OCLC authorities. as well, that helps us stay connected and, like, overlapped in that ecosystem. But it also allows people to use us when they don't want to use Elsie, is my answer for that. Other maybe not blind spots, but things that I think surprise people, including me,

is we don't do name authorities. So for those of you don't do cataloging your metadata, there's a different set of authority records for the names of people and corporations and groups and sometimes even, like, titles. Those are called NARs, like name authority records. or NAFs, name authority files. And homoosaurus doesn't do those. So that means that some very obvious groups that I was like, well, why don't we have the

Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence or the radical fairies in there? It's like, we don't do name authorities. I'm like, but we need them. But we don't. And so you will have to look somewhere else if you are cataloging something about the sisters of perpetual indulgence. And if you don't know who those are, who those people are, go look them up and have yourself a really fun night because they are awesome. They're these gay demon nuns out in California

who do like HIV activism and stuff. They're really cool. I have like a question like is there what's the reasoning behind not doing the name authority records? I actually have no idea. But I think it might have something to do because like with maybe that's something we do in the future. But I mean, I know at least like LOC like they're structured differently and there's like different rules. for them, so it might have something to do with that. Like, we'd have to kind of start an entirely different vocabulary to go sighted. So it's just easier to keep it out of scope. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. The structures are totally different. Like, when you're talking about a person, it's like, where did they first publish? And then, like, that's a whole thing of, like, where's this name come from? And then most name authority records are also just, like, local and not linked to anything. Unless it's library. Yeah.

That's this Library of Congress. But like most of the interesting stuff is going to be in like local archives. And that's all local dark metadata that's not linked to anything. And so that would just be a whole, it's just a whole new project, it seems. And not that there's not issues with the Library of Congress name authority records. But one of the reasons that we do have homosaurus is because LLC isn't the best about queer subjects. Whereas with names, it's much harder to fuck that up. That makes sense.

Now that they don't. Not that they can't, but. Not that they can't or don't. But it's much harder to fuck that up. So there's that. And like with Justin said, like there was this really interesting name authority project that was created a couple years ago called the Western name authority file.

It came out of the University of Utah with my former colleagues. And it was because of in the Utah digital. archive so many names for both the like Mormon settler colonialists but also the native people that we have information for either like didn't have LC like records or there was no consistent way of referring to them and so they got like an IMLS grant and made an authority file for this like entire collection it's like a really interesting collection too they did a bunch of presentations about it. It was a Jeremy Minty and Anna Nietzrower, where the main people on that. So if you're curious, I highly recommend people looking at that. But yeah, so we don't do name

authority. We also don't do subdivisions, which makes people mad because people want to do topical subdivisions. They want to do like lesbians dash dash fiction, right? And we don't do that. And you also can't use LC subdivisions on homosaurus. So you can't do homosaurus, lesbians, and then subfield the, I think is what it is, LC fiction. No, no, no. You just have to kind of like do like a combo. You have to do like a homosaurus lesbians and then an LC like lesbians dash dash fiction. Or there are some like we have terms for like lesbian fiction. And you could actually use that in a 655 as a genre form term is another thing that, um, you can do. So like these are like little quirks that like a lot of people don't realize in like in how yeah, people like in public libraries and academic libraries are using homosaurus and are kind of, I feel like people view it

like they view LC, but it's a completely different structure than LC and acts differently than LC does, which is very queer of it, TBH, which, yeah, so that's, I think some of been the fun things is just like in how different it is. There have been fun terms. It's mainly just like seeing all like the sex stuff in there. There was this really fun. debacle the the the the bisexual beaches debacle yeah i was i was gonna ask this i saw i saw this in here and i was like i have no idea what this is referring to but i am super curious like yeah so the bisexual beach is debacle and this gets into another thing about the homosaurus is that we don't do literary warrant we don't like so in the library of congress in order to make a subject heading the book has to come

across your desk that would necessitate you creating the heading for it and you don't create a term until you have the literary warrant for it, right? Homosaurus is not like that. Now, if it's like a term related to like identity, we usually wait until we like have seen it in common parlance or have seen it on like more than one forum. Like if some person emails us and is like, hi, can you include the name for my identity specifically that I've created for myself in the homosaurus? We would go, no, because it's just for you. It's not used by anyone else yet. That doesn't mean it's not real. We are not the arbiters of identity, which is the thing I'll get into. But, you know, we don't just do things billy-nilly,

but we don't necessarily wait for something to come across our desk, right? And one of the things that we do with that is that like if there's, I don't know, like, the one I always show is like for Buddhists. There's like gay Buddhists, okay, and there's also lesbian Buddhists and bisexual Buddhists and transgender Buddhists and queer Buddhists and asexual Buddhists and non-binary Buddhists, what we do is often when there's like an identity term is even if there hasn't been a book about like asexual Buddhists, which there probably is, but even if like there hasn't been, we know that those people exist or that there could be works about them or that it's like not out of the road with possibility that like that's a thing.

And so like we often just like fill out the acronym. And so we had gay beaches. We were like, wait, well, we don't have gay beaches. as a term yet and we should because that's like that's a whole last thing right you got peatown i live like 30 miles or something from agunquit you know gay beaches are like a whole ass it's a it's a historic it has a historical significance of nothing else and and gay beaches as parlance doesn't just mean that only gay men go to those beaches tons of straight people go to peatown trust me tons of old straight grandmas go to a gunquit trust

me, but it, we were like, oh, well, we have to fill out the acronym for, for beaches. And I was like, but we don't. Not that like, bisexual people don't go to gay beaches, but I haven't like heard of gay beaches or I haven't heard of bisexual beaches as a concept, right? Yeah, because gay is being used as sort of an umbrella term. So instead of it being a specific, more specific identity. Right. And it's like we, we added bisexual beaches. It is a term. I mean, if, if there are bisexual beaches out there? Could somebody let me know? Because like, I'm cool with that. Right, right. But it made us have the discussion of like, when do we fill out the acronym and when do we sort of create things out of thin air and when do we not? But I just love the bisexual beaches debacle. Because I feel like

it's very indicative of the types of conversations that we have during board meetings. But are there bisexual beaches, though? Debating the validity of bisexual beaches. Like, The board meeting by, bifobic against beaches. But I'm confused, I'm confused because you said the, maybe I missed it because I'm still trying to catch up on this article. When you say beaches, you were saying an acronym. What's an acronym for? Like, like, LGBT. And so like for like, like, identity.

Like, do you do LGBT beaches or do you do lesbian beaches gay beaches? No, as in, like, so we'll have like LGBTQ boot. And then underneath that, we'll have lesbian Buddhists, gay Buddhists, bisexual Buddhists, transgender Buddhists, et cetera. Like, we'll often, like, if there's like an identity where it'd be like where we would use gay or trans or something as like an adjective, like an XYZ term, the gay, whatever this, a trans, whatever that, we usually fill out the acronym there. But we'll have one for each as well as like a top level LGBTQ insert term here. usually that's referring to types of people so we'll have like gay we'll have LGBTQ soccer players lesbian soccer players uh gay soccer players

bisexual soccer you know and you know you get the you get the drift but for beaches because gay beaches came up it was like well do we also need lesbian beaches and bisexual beaches and transgender beaches and non-binary beaches and asexual beaches and LGBT beaches right is gay beaches a term of art right like And I think And like we added bisexual beaches But I think after that we were like wait

And I remember there were some board members That were like you can take bisexual beaches From my cold dead hands Like my cold dead hands And we're like okay But they didn't get lesbian beaches What they probably did Oh Arthur do you got the zoomies pub

You want to come up? You heard about bisexual beaches And you got excited hubub His ears are like Back he's ready to go Me too Arthur I have exciting news Arthur got a job

Arthur is going to be emotional support animal now. I'm very proud of him. Very proud of him. He's going to help me get an apartment in Boston. By my psychiatrist. I didn't buy a certificate online. My psychiatrist is writing a little prescription for my cat. It's very funny when you get one.

You get a little prescription. It says you're allowed to have a cat. Yep. It's a little prescription paper. It's good. Yep. It's good. So, yeah.

So that's been some of the fun things as well as just like, a lot of tension within myself about being on this board, especially with my whole metadata anarchy thing, right? It's like how conservative do I want to be as a taxonomist versus like queerness shouldn't be nailed down or defined. But also this is useful, but also fuck this. Like it like queerness and taxonomy is so antithetical in the first place. Like if you really like think about it. And so it's been a really interesting tension to be someone with both like my political and even like linguistic beliefs and how I exist in this world and how I view queerness. And also the metadata work that I do and like where the tension exists there has been really interesting. Well, that's, I mean, that's also in the notes is, um, there's a little bit I just want to skip over.

But information advocacy as a term. Yeah. Maybe you could have brought this up earlier. but it's information advocacy is advocacy to know about oneself. It's described as a particular focus of late 20th century lesbian and feminist activism. Information advocacy, for instance, and this is my phrasing, is when sex ed teaches children to learn boundaries or when queer children learn about themselves. It's advocacy and we can't ignore that. So putting books like the ones we mentioned earlier in children's sections is advocacy.

We're advocating that children have a right to learn about it. themselves and also that queer people have the right to learn about themselves and we put those books anywhere in the library so i just want to jump over that but to stay on topic with what jay was saying the metadata anarchy the self-definitions this brings us to like the usage of the homisaurus are we and you've got a thing here are we describing people or are we describing objects perhaps related to people can you talk about how the board talks about yeah because like this happens um this comes up a lot when we are thinking of terms or or scope notes related to terms.

And it's like thinking about how we might want to phrase something or how something might get used. And it's always like, are we meaning this vocabulary to describe people? Like, is this a dictionary? Or are we meaning this for someone to like assign to like a photograph in an archive that might have people in it? It might not though, you know? Like that's that's the thing here is, is this meant to describe.

people or is this about like the ephemera related to people and that might sound like a stupid question because it's still at the end of the day it's like it's all about people right because then people will be searching it and looking for it and stuff but it does influence like how you think about scope notes and whether and like you know like i mentioned like there's multiple ways to refer to something which version of that do we use right What is a scope note? Oh, okay, a scope note. So the non-librarian here.

So, baby terms. The scope note. So when you are using a controlled vocabulary, like Library of Congress or like the homoesaurus or any of the rest of them, the scope note is the little paragraph or whatever that accompanies the term that tells the cataloging librarian how to use it. use this to refer to works about, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Do not use to refer to works about X, Y, Z. Use whatever instead.

So it's kind of like a definition and also how do you assign this? Because also you have to assume that not every cataloging librarian is going to know what a butt plug is, maybe, or know what a fairy is in that context, right? And so a scope note is like, here we are, this is how the homosaurus views what this term means and how it should be applied to things. And so as you can see, writing those scope notes and coming up with how we actually phrase the term, the mindset of I am imagining this is going to be applied to objects so that people can then find those objects that maybe describe people are related to people somehow. or I am describing a person and whatever mindset you are in when you are making those scope notes or coming up with how you are phrasing the term. It actually is a shift there because I've noticed that our scope notes sound more like dictionary definitions now, which is not necessarily like how scope notes should be because normally it's like use this or assign this to works about. like that's sort of how scope notes are normally used.

They're not necessarily a dictionary definition, but a lot of ours are kind of dictionary definitions because not everyone's going to know what the hell we're talking about. Can I just really quickly give you a website suggestion? Can I have a random word, like a random subject turn button? Like you know how you do that with Wikipedia? You hit like random to find new things. And you want to?

I want to do that with this. I want to go down a rabbit hole of homosaurus terms with a random button. Just have a little fun to it. Yeah. Yeah. Are you going to get cockering or are you going to get like lesbian parents? You know, it's fun for the whole family. Does stumble upon still have the stumble inside functionality so that we could put

stumble inside on the homosaurus site and you just click it and I'll give you random homosaurus page. Yeah, you can stumble inside. Okay. Sorry, Justin. I, what were you saying? No, it's a fun idea, actually. someone make that, program that.

There's a party game to be had there. Use it in a sentence. Yeah. Kind of thing. Do a spelling B with the homosaurus. Improv, anything. Yeah. Part of the article I was reading was talking about how if you are defining things that is

sort of counter to queering people's identities, you are giving definitions. And then when you, and getting back to the linguistics of it, when you start using words and defining words, we unintentionally. set boundaries for our cognition. We unintentionally, we're trying to give things a word so that we have a concept for it, and that's good. And if you have fewer words, you have fewer concepts. But even as we're expanding our words, we then build those same sort of limitations because even if we're adding more and words, which is good, it still sets the boundaries. And there's also this concern that, well, it's not in the homosaurus, therefore it's not real. And that's been an issue is that people are starting to use it,

We're the identity police now, even though we are not. Oh, no. But so many people are like looking to the homosaurus as like some sort of like gay. Tucker Carlson called us a gay dictionary, right? Like, you know. It's right there. Tucker. You're an idiot.

He is. Talk shit gay hit bitch. But yeah. And like also like the other like half of my thesis was me talking about Jacques Derrida and his term deference, which means that all words are constantly deferring meaning and that they, that meaning is always about like difference, because it's a pun in French deference. It sounds like the French word for difference, but is spelled and looks like defer. It means that like things are defined by what they are not, right? And also that meaning is always deferred. Like when you look up the definition of a

word, there are more words there that you then have to look up and on and on and on and on. That was like the other half of my master's thesis was me just talking about defrance. And it's very applicable with the homosaurus because it's like putting up boundaries, putting up walls. And that's not what queerness is about. Queerness is porous, right? Queerness is fluid. Like, queerness is against borders, right? But the very act of being a thesaurus, of being a controlled vocabulary, even if we do allow the same concept in different semantic,

realms to exist side by side, like anal sex and buffucking. Even if we allowed to do that, there's still, we're still being Victorian taxonomist pinning, you know, a dragonfly down onto a board and studying it and making sure it can't move and giving it a scientific name so that we know exactly what it is, right? That's all in the same lineage. I don't always love that. Inherent tension and creating a taxonomy, right? even it's like it's like a necessary we got to do it but i it's like i it's like i it's like i don't like

like it's like i love the homoaurus and i love the work that i do on it but then i get on my like bullshit about you know how like taxonomy is and like comes from and how it's about pinning things down and studying them and medicalizing the and like it just how it's just like it's fucking evil Victorian bullshit. And then it's like, what am I doing with my life? Yeah, there's a good line from the article I was looking at. It's information infrastructures construct rhetorical arguments that facilitate particular interpretations of their resources.

So just by the nature of creating an information infrastructure, you're sort of inviting people to come in and say, oh, this is how the world is structured. This is how queerness is structured. And that's always going to be in tension with like the porousness of queer aspirations. But I thought that was pretty well phrased. Yeah, like Emily Drabinski's iconic article queering the catalog talks a lot about this, about how like it's like queerness is antithetical to the very project of a subject vocabulary. But that doesn't mean you don't do it.

It's just like how does this work? Yeah, there will be a tension. There will be contradictions. but it's inevitable. Do you want to talk about the future of the project? Yeah. So as Tucker Carlson found out, we are developing a Spanish language version of the homosaurus.

We got a grant, more specifically, Marika on the board, got a grant to do it, to leave it. But we're going to be working on other languages too. I'm not on that task force because I don't necessarily have the time, but there is like a task force on the board right now, that it's about getting the homosaurus into other languages. There have been lots of cool projects where people have taken, not AI, but other like computer language models and translators and like run the homosaurus through them and then ranked the

accuracy of what came out. And some of the results are actually pretty promising. Like it still needs double checking, but it shows a lot of excitement. about what we can do with the homosaurus regarding translation in the future and what people could do independently, like themselves, which we find to be really important. Like, we don't want to be the end-all be-all of queer vocabulary, and we shouldn't be.

And so if it's easy for people to take the homosaurus and do it in different languages or put their own spin on it, then that's good. So that's good. As I mentioned earlier, we're working with the leather archives and museum, but we're also working with other groups. We've been working with some, like, people regarding, like, intersex terms, terms around, like, queer, like, adoption and, like, parenthood and stuff, because that's, like, a spot that needs a lot more build-out with more nuance in it in the vocabulary.

working with various academics and advocates and activists around ethnic and cultural terms that maybe we on the board don't, not that we couldn't, can't describe difference or talk about, you know, terms that don't refer to us, but especially if we're going to be doing like a whole slew of them, it helps. Like we were working with this black scholar around, I believe, around terms related to like, queer African diaspora and like like including like stuff about like the slave trade and stuff like those terms aren't live yet but like that's been a thing that's been happening we really want to build out like our indigenous terms so we also believe that like there should be there are

indigenous subject vocabularies and people should use those too right but we do like to have and like also the idea of like are we is it a colonialist mindset to include indigenous or non-Western ways of doing gender and sexuality as automatically a Western idea of what queer is. Maybe, maybe so. Maybe, maybe not, you know? But so it's like, we like to have some of those terms and stuff and talk about it while also encouraging people to go and seek, like, subject vocabulary specific to, like, specific tribes or, like, I know there's, like, you know, like lots of resources. Like, there's, like, there's Maori subject headings in New Zealand, for example.

That's been like a longstanding project. Great. I think we've got everything. Yeah. I guess I'll close by saying that like if you are interested in getting involved, maybe not like with the homestores, but like if you're like interested in its development or if you're interested in implementing it at your library, we have information on the website about joining a Google group. And also there was this really great article that was published recently that I happened to be one of the peer reviewers for about a consortium in Illinois of public libraries adopting the homosaurus and their process for not just okay how do we put this in our

catalog but also how do you get buy-on for it how do you get funding for it like the whole kit and caboodle I'll I'll find it and it'll be in the in the notes but if people are because we get all the time like well how do I how do I how do I how do I do this at my library you all don't have any documentation yet we're working on it we know but there's that and then also there's been at the university of kentucky uh one of our board members uh who used to be there did did some work on like putting it implementing at the university of kentucky and there's several um like presentations about that um that i can link to as well also buy some swag yeah yo you can totally buy some swag with a gay dinosaur on it i'm totally gonna buy some stuff with a gay with a gay dinosaur in a rainbow

like, hell yeah. Talk Tucker. Yeah, Tucker Carlson found out about the homosaurus if you're confused as to why I keep talking shit about Tucker Carlson in this episode. I'll make it the cover art. Yeah, one of his final broadcast he did was being confused and mad about the homosaurus. And that's why I was on Twitter lockdown for like a couple weeks just in case. But so far none of the board members have received any hate.

It's just the project itself got a lot of hate mail and stuff. But we do all the time anyway. It's fine. All right. Was there any other questions you had for me? No. Okay, cool. Okay.

Good night. Good night.