librarypunk - 145 - Queer Liberation Library with Avi and Amber

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

We're talking with QLL about who they are and what they do! Tumblr https://www.tumblr.com/queerliblib  Instagram https://www.instagram.com/queerliblib/?hl=en  Bsky https://bsky.app/profile/queerliblib.bsky.social  Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@queerliblib  Media mentioned https://www.queerliberationlibrary.org https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/queer-liberation-library-offers-free-lgbtq-books-response-wave-school-rcna156463 https://xtramagazine.com/culture/books/queer-libraries-book-bans-activism-255227 https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/library_sp/68/  https://www.gaycity.org/library-information/ Donate: https://givebutter.com/J9nhcW  Preorder The Emperor of Gladness (% of pre-order proceeds go to QLL): https://sites.prh.com/emperor-of-gladness/preorder/  

I'm Justin. I'm a Skalkan librarian. My pronouns are he and they. I'm Citi. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they then. I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian and my pronouns are he, him. And we have guests which like to enter yourselves. Hi, I'm Avi. I use day-them pronouns. I'm a archivist and a librarian with the Career Liberation Library. Hi, I use She Her Pronounds. At the Career Liberation Library, I lead our collections team and I'm also an academic librarian. my day job. Yay, welcome on. All right. So, so this episode kind of came about because Avi, you introduced yourself in the Discord, and I saw that you worked with the Queer Liberation Library, who I follow on Tumblr. And I was like, oh, my God, how did I not think about having them on as a guest? Like, I followed the Tumblr for a while. So welcome to you both. So first of all,

why don't you go ahead and tell us what the Queer Liberation Library is, what its mission and scope is, how it came about that kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. I can get us started here. So the Queer Liberation Library is 100% Digital, queer nonprofit library, by and for the queer community. I think our mission statement does a pretty good job of explaining, like, the rough edges of what we do, which is that we're fighting to build a vibrant, flourishing queer future by connecting LGBTQ people with literature, information, and resources that celebrate the unique and empowering diversity of our community. But what that really boils down to is queer books for free, to as many people nationwide who want or need it. Yeah, that's a good summary. Were you asking,

sorry, oh man, were you asking about how we got started or was that later? Yeah, no, how did queer library like come about? It's largely a passion project that a friend of ours from grad school, We were in library school at UBC and worked at a local community queer library. And then during pandemic times, Kieran, our friend, decided that this was a thing that they wanted to do. And it really, like, came around. We kind of like snowballed with friends of Kieran's with a bunch of people from different areas that ended up being relevant to getting a nonprofit started.

Yeah, when we were students, grad students at UBC together, the library that's there is out on the shelves. And I remember we, yeah, we had like a, just an intro meeting at the very beginning to be like, hey, what is this thing? And the three of us were like the ones who stayed the latest. And I remember we walked into that space together. And all three of us were like, oh my God, this is incredible. This entire room is full of queer books.

It's amazing. Like I've never been in a space like that before. So that was just like, whoa, you don't have to look for it. It's every single one. And in that moment, I think, is the first seed of Quill because I distinctly remember Kieran saying, I want one of these one day. And it ended up not being like a physical space. But hey, we have one. And it's all volunteer and correct. Like you guys all like work beyond your day jobs for this. Yeah, we do have a support person for some tech stuff who we charge for stuff or who charges us for stuff.

but everyone else, all the, all of the Amber, whatever. Steering committee. We're a steering committee. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Everybody on the steering committee is totally volunteer in our spare time. Yeah, we're fiscally sponsored by NOPI, which is a nonprofit incubator.

Basically, working with them, we're able to have 50C3 nonprofit status. So that's super helpful for us because then it means people can donate to us and tax deductible and all that stuff. And I forget where I was going with that piece. That's okay. Sorry, I really had like a through line for that, and it completely left me. Working volunteer? Yeah.

Steering committee. Yeah, oh, right. So because we're technically fiscal, fiscally sponsored, they are the board, and so we're the team. Oh, okay. We do all the, yeah. Yeah. All the work board.

Yeah. That makes sense. It's kind of better that way to have a day job, because then you get to do whatever you want like we do. So I know it sucks not getting paid to do something, but it also is kind of like ring. You can say fuck. Yeah, you can say fuck.

No one can yell you. You absolutely can. I think we joke around a lot like in the group of us doing it that we're just like seven or eight friends in a trench coat, just like doing our best. Like we're all little forest animals. There's a raccoon and a possum and we're all like, wow, who thought we were legitimate?

It's amazing that we get to do this thing. but wow, we're just a couple people. That's how I feel every time the podcast comes up on like somebody posted something about it being on their collection management class. I say faggot too much for that. Stop deciding us in class. No, do it more. And me, you're still by.

You know, Jay, we have some books in our collection. I think a title of one of them is faggotts and their friends between, yeah, faggots and their friends between revolution. the other room. Yes, I think why are faggots so afraid of other faggots is actually in our wish list? We haven't been able to apply it yet. So we're working on it. Yeah. Y'all from

what I've seen are very much feel like the sort of like digital counterpart to something like the Gerber Hart Library in Chicago, which is also like all volunteer run but is a physical space. Yeah. Anybody can become a patron of it there

because it's not like tied to taxes or anything. Like I did my practicum. there in grad school. And so I became a patron of it. And so that's how I watched like personal best and like the bird cage and shit for the very first time as I would just take DVDs home with me every weekend because they're only open on the weekends because they're just volunteers and it's in person. But yeah, I feel like y'all being like a digital counterpart to spaces like the Gerber

heart is like really cool. Yeah, I feel like some of us take experience with more physical spaces like that's kind of into this work. For us it's a lot about out on the shelves, but also just like other community spaces where it's really more based on like collaboration and being comrades than it is about like, yeah, about, yeah, it's just nice to be removed

from those other pressures. And we have, you know, had some interaction and some like collaboration with some of those other spaces. So some people on our team have met with people at Catrifoyle, which is the queer library in Minneapolis. Oh, yeah. We've been talking with the QT Library, which they're trying to...

In Boston, yeah. Yeah, so it's really cool to be in conversation with other people doing like similar but different projects at the same time. I get asked so many times if I'm part of QT and I'm like, no, I'm not. I promise. They're cool, though. They were at the anarchist book fair. So I got to meet them there. Yeah, it was really fun.

I know that at one point Seattle had, it was the gay, it was gay city library. It was part of their gay community center. Hold on. I'm trying to find it. And it was very much like what you guys talked about without on the shelves like the first time I went there. It was just a tiny little volunteer library tacked onto their community center next to a coffee shop. And it was just like stacked all the way up to the ceiling with just only queer books. And I was like, it was in mid-2000 or like 2010 too. So it was just like mind-blowing to me that a space like that existed. So, but I think that they have a brand new one now too. Oh, yeah. So, wow. That's how on the shelves started too, is that the quote. Community Center. Downtown and Kweger. Very cool. So I'm really curious about like what the day-to-day running of like Quill looks like

and like how many hours a week do, does each person like put into it, that sort of thing? Because I know I know at least at one point in time we did get a question in the Discord about how to start a library. And so I'm kind of kind of curious if people find it really intimidating. Like you said like, oh my God, we're legitimate. How did that happen? So like what does it look like the sort of day-to-day running of quill? Yeah, Amber does a lot.

Amber's probably on the high end of how many hours are people putting in. You know, I like to pull open my personal computer at my lunch breaks and be like, hmm, what cool things are happening right now that are way more interesting than what's happening at my real work. I don't want to think about teaching information literacy. I want to think about gay books. So there's definitely that. And I know we joke about like, oh, how did we get serious?

But it did take like a substantial amount of planning and active work to be in that space. It's just kind of wild to be there. I think a lot of the day-to-day stuff now we have a discord for the team. So a lot of work we can do a little bit asynchronously. We can pitch in when we need to. We do have regular like steering committee meetings. And honestly, I think I've probably been spending a little bit more time lately on this than I should have. have to have a regular work-life balance, but that's also because doing this work at this time

feels really good. It feels like it's like concrete, like active contribution that I can make to make things less horrible for some people out there. So yeah, it's definitely fun in that way. Yeah, if you're not careful, you'll just like not do your day job and just work on cool all day. I don't do that, obviously. their employers listening but yeah I recently so I've been handling a lot of the technical stuff I started off really focused on spreadsheets

my first official title was spreadsheet bit I believe on the website site it's spreadsheet king but yes okay that's not how I started it's so good But in your heart, you're still spreadsheet, bitch. Always. I can't escape it. It's a good t-shirt, you should sell.

Yeah, you're spreadsheet king right now. Yeah. Just, you know, again, in case the employer is watching. I think I'm the only one who doesn't have a cool title. I literally couldn't think of one. And so I threw out a reference to the mummy, you know, beautiful bisexual film that it is. But I need to work on that. We should have titles.

I think some of our other, what are some of the other titles? We have nonprofit. Social media gremlin. Yeah. There's some good ones. Design which. Business gay. We like to have fun.

Yeah, with the volunteering and we can do whatever we want. Yeah, I love business gay. Like, put that on my resume, right? Yeah. Business gay sounds like a, like a fashion trend. Like, it's like khakis and like a ruffled shirt. I feel like you would hate that.

I didn't say it was a good fashion trend. Cackey is never a good trend, one. Thank you very much. This is true. You look like a big third grader. The business gay is the one who makes sure that we like have regular meetings and goals and things. Yeah, I was going to say with so many librarians who are often a little bit leaning anti-capitalistic, it's useful to have someone who's like, no, we need money to function. And this is how we will get more money.

and you have to do that while you're doing all this other fun stuff. So it's great to have a big variety of input in that way. We got lucky with the people we have. Yeah, like there's actually some collective out there that does like financial training for anti-capitalist projects and like co-ops and shit. Yeah, because our treasurer for the Lucy Parsons Center got that training. So they, yeah. So it's out there because you care about money but are also like cool anarchists are out there. Yeah.

Nice. See if I can find that So we put in the nose Speaking about money I do want to know About the funding Because it's based in Massachusetts So it's Massachusetts

Locally funded nonprofit grant Because there's a grant From a Massachusetts organization Did I misremember that you're making a face? Yeah, so the Massachusetts address Is because that is where NOPI, the nonprofit incubator Who Fiscally Sponsors Us is located

So that's where the Massachusetts address comes from Most of that were primarily donor funded, and that's through the Give Butter platform. So there's no real address associated, I don't believe. But I'm also not the fundraising, which it's going, I would say, pretty well. Amazingly, I never thought we would raise this much money. Of course, our business gay wants us to raise even more money while I'm over here going, holy shit, people gave us money.

So thank you to everyone who has ever given us money. You helped us buy so many queer books for so many people. It's incredible. But yeah, it's like, yeah. No, you go ahead. I was just going to say that we have like a support quill fund, like a donate button that's available from our website all the time. But we also do have like specific fundraising pushes throughout the year.

So in Pride we usually have a fundraiser and then there may be a couple other events. But really it's the people that are giving reoccurring donations. If that's like $5 a month or $10 a month that really helps us like stabilize and plan and make sure like, okay, we can expect. to make at least this much so then we know we can still buy this money holds that month or whatever. Yeah. And how long is that funding for? Like, is there a, I know sometimes it's like this is a three-year grant or something or are they kind of

committed to helping you get fully up and off the ground forever? Right. So we don't actually, we don't get any money from NOPI by being our fiscal sponsor. That means they actually got a proportion, like a pretty. percentage, a small percentage of the money we fundraise in order to pay for their services for like doing tax forms and being the official 50C3 provider and whatnot. We don't have to deal with all of those little bits and pieces. So yeah, I had no idea what a fiscal sponsorship was until yeah. We met these people like okay. It's apparently a very normal like way for

nonprofits to function, even ones that are much bigger than us. But the majority of the the money that comes in is from individual donations. So that's whatever people decide to give us whenever. We actually have gotten our very first grants within the last couple of months, which has been really exciting. But those are pretty small grants. It's still amazing. But we're working to continue building that and diversifying that. So some of those grants could be term limited, but we're really not at the point where we're getting those huge term limited ones yet. We're looking more in the realm of like one to $10,000. And then hopefully those are grants that can go into just general operating expenses

and aren't constrained in certain ways. So we're trying to be strategic with which ones we apply to so we can do whatever we need to do with them at this time. Because buying books is by far the biggest need that we have. The demand is just more than we have. We don't have as many books as we want to for people. The queers of America are voracious readers, and we love it, and we are doing our best to bring down the hold times, and we will succeed one day. I know I didn't join until just recently, even though I've been following the Tumblr for a long time, because I thought, no, they're still small, there's probably a million, they're probably a really long hold lines.

I have like five other digital cards from some of the like biggest library systems on the West Coast. So I will just hold off on that for a little while. But I did cave and actually get a membership like last week. So. That's exciting. Yeah. Vouracious readers. Yeah.

So speaking of collection development and that sort of thing. So like it's all digital. So it's all through overdrive, right? It's all overdrive and Libby. I was really curious how your guys' relationship with Overdrive is because, like, you know, there's that insane inflation for e-books and stuff, which is hard enough for, you know, tax-funded libraries. You guys are non-profit run by donations. Like, have they been, like, are they just straight business with you guys? Do you guys have, like, a supportive relationship with Overdrive? Or is it just like you're every other library and that's your problem kind of deal? I think that part of the reason that getting started, like, kind of snapped into place once we were getting started was partially because Kieran used to work at Overdrive doing collection development. And so there was a bit of an existing relationship with people. Everybody's been really nice and great.

And then we're there as a private library. Amber, you were saying that you remembered more of that than I do. Yeah. Yeah. So because we're a nonprofit, we're like technically classified in their system as a private library, not a public library, which is, doesn't really mean a whole lot on the front end, but just changes a few little things on our side. And so the way that that works is they charge like a base rate based on the number of patrons you have. So when we first started off, we were like, well, we don't have that many people when we first got started. And so we were at their kind of. And so we were at their kind of. the lowest tier. And so as we get more patrons, they could raise that a little bit, but that's like a one-time annual fee. It's really not too bad. And in terms of like digital licenses, those ones that you have to re-buy again and again, like those meter access titles, that functions kind of exactly the same for us as it would for any other library. What we've been doing

with that is we've just been trying to be like super, super smart with the money that we do have. So for all the library nerds out there who really know exactly what this is, we don't explain it too much to all of our patrons because like no one cares that much. But we try and buy as many of like the one copy one user we get to keep it forever license as we can. And we have a couple of like simultaneous use packages so we can make sure there are some things that are always available. And at the end of the year like those like the, I don't know, cost per use. If you do the math, it is a really huge bang for our buck actually. Like the price per checkout is like one which is incredible because so many people are reading them. So we've just been trying to be really

smart with that and not by too many things that we need to then repurchase again on a later date until we know that we can kind of sustain that moving forwards while still balancing it with what people want to read and are interested in reading and like what's coming out, all of those fun factors. And do you find that the selection that Overdrive has is sustainable. Like, I mean, obviously, I've read a lot of different queer romances via overdrive. I'm a liby user. But just in the terms of things that could fall under the definition of a queer book, they have an adequate selection you feel. I think they're always outliers, but what were you going to say, Amber? I was going to say, you should see the size of our

wish list. Oh, yeah. Massive. And those are books that aren't available yet? Oh, no, no, no. Or we can't Yeah, that we want to buy, but we haven't been able to buy yet, but are available in overdrive. Okay, okay. So I think we could... Oh, no, sorry. I think we could keep going at kind of the rate that we're buying books for at least another, like, year or two or three before we started to run out, so to speak, of things that we wanted in the collection, if that makes sense. And I would say that you're talking about reading queer romance on Libby, that is a big portion. what people are reading and asking for.

And I think that's just a genre that's really, really growing right now and that there's a lot of on overdrive. So we've left out with that at least. E-books are for porn. And also those are the books unless you're at like the boss of public library or something that like the queer romance are going to be the ones that like a lot of public library systems aren't going to have as much. I feel like because it doesn't fit with their patron wants or whatever.

all of the straight heteropromance novels and they have to spend all their money on those, right? So like for y'all to be really filling that specific niche, especially for more niche queer romance as well as that, as more people, I guess, move off of Kindle and Limited and move more towards like traditional or independent publishing that's not just on Kindle. Yeah.

I love seeing the asks on Tumblr that are like, do you guys have any like pirate, sapphic adventure novels? and I'm like, if they have more than two on that list, then I'm, then we are winged. I'm like, I never would have thought that sort of niche would be there, but it's there. Hallelujah. Those are always fun. A lot of times Amber will come into the Discord and be like, hey, we got this ask. I know these two things.

What do you guys know about? And we just kind of like filled off with each other. There you'd be amazed. We definitely have more than two Sapphic Pirate Adventure stories too. I just want to make that clear. We also have more than two like cowboy stories. Fuck it, dude.

It's amazing. Oh, yeah. Personally. Somebody asked for sword lesbians and we're like we literally have a collection, a list ready to go that's titled Sword Lesbian. We got you.

That's all that one that's incredible. Maybe this is a question you don't know how to answer because I don't know how to answer it. Do you all have like, when searching in Libby or something because it's not like you'll have like a traditional catalog you can search through. Can y'all put any,

like local metadata in those records at all? No, because I was like, this is like a gold mine if like you put some homosaurus terms in there, you can get like granular as fuck with those search terms. We have, we talk of sort of like a long-term goal

being having an OPEC one day where we can have stuff from different sources and where we could do our own records. And yeah, I would be delighted to be able to add homosaurus to stuff. Yeah, but that's one of those future goals. Like at some point when we do outgrow just having Overdrive as a platform

and we're able to add more pieces on, that will involve having the OPEC to add all those other things on. So it's all discoverable through one search. And at that point, we could do all of those things. But right now we don't do any like cataloging in that way. It would be super dope. Yeah, so it comes down to kind of like that super specific curation. Which we can do some really cool things with.

I don't know if you've like from our homepage on Libby, you can see those lists we've curated. We have some guides too. So for like kids and young adult and for nonfiction and for genre fiction, like we can get into a little bit more detail there, which has been really fun, but it's still limited in some ways. And have either of you worked in a public library?

How do you feel like the reader's advisory questions? are they like I I would find this just absolutely like fun I'm but I'm not a librarian so I don't know how much that would but like that sounds like a dream come true to me like how many sword lesbian books do you have like don't mind if I do how does that compare to like just working in like a standard library where it's it's not just the queers I say Amber's done you did a bit of public library like before grad school didn't you. Yes. Yeah, I was an assistant youth services librarian. So the kinds of reference questions that I was getting was, do you have any nonfiction books about mermaids going over to the juvenile nonfiction section being like, actually, this is technically nonfiction because it's in the

300s in mythology. So yes, to a seven-year-old. Um, however, it's a little different. It's like that, it's like that fake documentary on Discovery Channel you watch in the year seven. It's like, Bermades are real. And I was like, they are. Gosh. So it is quite different. But it's really fun. It's also one of those pieces of this work that does take a little bit more like depth of time that we don't always have. So that's one of the areas that I'm hoping within the next year or so we can bring on some more volunteers to help with that kind of work because to answer those questions well and to get them like really cool stuff, that stuff that's in our collection. It's awesome, but we don't always have the time for it. And they have a lot of questions, and they have a lot of really specific questions.

How often do you guys get questions about nonfiction and like queer history and stuff? Not as frequently, but we do get comments in various other ways. So whether that's when people comment on like the donation form or in any of the surveys that we've sent out, that they're like, wow, it's so incredible to have these resources. available. It's great. It's normally we get a few more questions or interactions around like pride. So in June when we're like promoting a lot of that stuff. But I personally really, really excited about the nonfiction that we do have. It's one of my favorite areas to like do more collection development in. So we like have a specific like curated list that's for like the

queer community and health like navigating healthcare systems and various resources there. So yeah, that's something that I'm really excited about and also like being able to be a resource for people who are doing research into various like queer things, but they need something more than just Judith, you know, Judith Butler that they can get at their public library, right? So that's really exciting to me to keep building up. And I think it's a really important part of what we do. Like obviously reading for fun, amazing, but also sometimes people need more than that. Yeah. And sometimes people are. massive nerds and they really want to read a 400-page book about like, I don't know, the intricacies of Dragon India, right? So we want to be able to give that to people. So you kind of talked about this a little bit already, but are you guys have any like plans on extending your resources just beyond overdrive? Like you talk about like having the OPEC and the collection of all of an event of that, but is that just like sort of a pie in the sky wish. Is there any sort of concrete planning towards that? Because I think it would be great if you could

just go to one, one catalog and be able to see, you know, like, where the closest queer archive is to me, or, you know, where the closest queer bookstore is. Or, like, you know, that's sort of, like, bringing the digital, like your digital status out to make other things more accessible for more people, if that makes sense. But that may be just my wishful thinking. I like the social thinking. Yeah, it's good to be to be wishful and hopeful and root for things. We do actually have a page

on our website that's like under online resources, but then it's queer information centers in the U.S. in real life, so maybe that's an oxymoron. I don't know. I didn't build that section of the website. But we have tried to provide a little bit of that.

I would say that we're not in any concrete planning yet to move towards and OPEC and getting more of those things. It's definitely something that we want to do. It's not totally pie in the sky. I think it is achievable in the future, but we're not far enough along to plan that.

We don't have the capacity. We're kind of still playing catch up with, like, we've had a couple posts. Actually, it's like a year ago now that was totally viral on TikTok. And the explosion in like membership numbers, demand was kind of insane, very cool, but also insane. and we're still trying to like run to catch up to some of that. So it's just, it's not something we have immediate capacity for.

Makes sense. Yeah, I'm thinking about that. That explosion was a lot. We opened in October of 2023 and then in February, 24, we had a few hundred members and we were. I think it was like maybe 3,000. Had it really gotten that high even? I don't. Yes, I think so.

What I remember for sure is that I was in charge of updating our spreadsheet. and entering manually all our users into overdrive to get their accounts going. And I went from checking every few days and having about, yeah, I guess it must have been the thousands because I'd have like 10 to 30 new members every few days. It was great. And then one day I'd done the upload and then people were like, hey, TikTok is happening. Can we check? And it had been like three hours and we had 1,200 new members.

and it was like we had we got like a like 10,000 in a day or something it was yeah I think we went from completely unexpected we went from like 3,000 to like over 30,000 in like 24 to 36 hours it was insane and we weren't expecting that um and that was like three months after we opened and then like over the course of the rest of the year I think the last number I saw Avi which you probably know better was like 99,000 which is yeah. Yeah, we were, this would have been just a week or two ago. We were like 99,400. It might be a bit more. I could actually pull that up. Mind-blowing numbers. Yeah, because I think I joined right after I moved to Boston. So I think that would have been in 2023,

and not from TikTok or anything. But it was like, I think when y'all like got really big on Twitter, maybe is when I heard about it or something. I don't know, but that's, because it took like a couple. Yeah, it took a couple. weeks, I think, to get approved or it took a little bit. And there were still like really long wait times on everything. But I got a cool book about cruising. So that was fun. Amazing. Was it park cruising? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think well, part of the reason for that too was that like our opening capsule,

like our opening collection was 405 items. So that was as much as we could purchase at the time and we've kept adding to it. But it was pretty small to start. Yeah. I say if you were waiting a while to get in that's because I have ADHD. That's where that came from. Same. Honestly. We all do. That's the spice of this podcast.

That's one of the nice things about our new login system is that I'm not doing all of that by hand. And then if I can't get it. God, I can only imagine. I'm still fine. There's a lot. Yeah. My life since that happened has pretty much just been troubleshooting people's

logging issues. But hey. better security for everybody, so that's wonderful. Yeah, very, yeah. And we have a little over 103,000 members. I didn't even know this. Wow.

Incredible. He heard of your first, folks. Yeah. You really did. We haven't even... Yeah, heard it before Karen did. So what's your feedback been like since you guys got up and running,

like besides just a wishholds, times were shorter or that sort of thing. Like, has it been, like, the testimonials you have on your site are all exactly the kind of thing I would imagine would come about, you know, very like, I'm so glad this exists, et cetera, et cetera, because those are my exact feelings when I first learned about you guys too. But, like, what's the sort of very, what's the spectrum of feedback that you've been getting? I think my favorite feedback is usually just when there's people who are working with queer

kids or teens who are able to use this resource that they can't get from whatever institution they're working through, that's always my favorite. It's just that it's kind of another avenue, especially for people who aren't out or whose parents would improve. Yeah, we've had messages from people in like Florida and South Dakota and Texas and various other places say like, wow, this is my primary library access. Like, I'm able to share this with this many other people are like, I'm a teen librarian and I can show these people, I'm a therapist, and I can share it with these people, which is just like, obviously it's amazing to reach like the very online people who are like really connected and into it and like know everything about the latest

your book. But to reach these other people is also kind of like exactly why we wanted to do this in the first place. I'm trying to think like were there other areas of feedback that you're curious about because mostly just that. I, yeah. I worry in the current political climate that, like, God forbid, something happened to your guys' feedback form or something, you know, it goes Reddit on the wrong, or it goes viral on the wrong Reddit thread kind of deal. So, like, but it has been mostly positive. Yeah. Well, we don't have, like, a feedback form per se, right? Like, most of those testimonials have come from surveys that we've sent to our membership. So hopefully that's a little. bit more contained. I mean, we have gotten a few comment once in a while. It hasn't broken containment too bad, but it does feel a little bit like, oh, is the shoe going to drop someday? We've tried to make some plans and precautions for if that did happen, hopefully not. Like,

we have some lawyers just in case, right, who we hope we never have to use in that way. And we've taken some other precautions too, but by and large, the feedback has been overwhelmingly incredible, so supportive, so positive. It's really touching to see the kind of impact that us just kind of like fucking around and doing this really fun thing that is like the ideal of what we would have wanted to do as librarians. And then it's really touching people in this concrete way, right? So that's my main takeaway. Yeah. Yeah, I think we're always a little nervous when something big happens that that might get those attention in a way we don't want. But so far, we've been really lucky with that and just going for us as we can.

I think we did get like a bit of a response that we didn't love when we put up our queer and Palestine list. And other than that, that's kind of been it. Maybe you too can have a screenshot of Tucker Carlson looking confused next to your logo, calling you gender jihadists. That's the dream. Yeah. My dad was so proud. You made it. Yeah, these militant transgender, yeah.

Trans-Antifada now, et cetera. You know. You're not wrong about all of us. I mean, we do literally have a book titled Transgender Marxism in the collection, so. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Interesting text.

Adding that to my list. I haven't read it. There are some very good essays in there. I don't love all of the essays in there. I also know people who know the editor of that book. And I've heard some of the background info of how that book got made.

So, um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but the, the, the woman who edited it, she's a,

a trans scholar in the UK, I believe. And so most of the writers for that are UK writers. And she recently came out with a book on, like, the history of trans misogyny. Uh, I believe,

she's a really good historian. She gets published with Verso, I believe mostly. Yeah. Shout out. Transnative Marxism. Like literally defining an academic genre was why that book was so important. It's a pretty cool text, despite Mike Wulms with it. I mean, classic academia, though, right? Yeah. I'm not going to agree with everything in there, which is good. Yeah. And what sort of like partnerships do you guys currently have? Are you hoping to make in the future? Like, what's on the horizon in that sort of direction?

Do you want to talk about the Penguin Rundoo House thing? Sure. I can go ahead with that. So the thing we're really excited about right now is that we have a partnership with Ocean Vuon and Penguin Press, which basically means that anyone who pre-orders Ocean's newest book, the Emperor of Gladness, I believe it's called, a percentage, if they, like, submit the order numbers and whatever in Penguin's site, that a percentage of the proceeds from all the pre-orders are going to go to us, which is incredible. and it was something that like Ocean brought to Penguin, and then they reached out to us. So that was a shocking email to receive, frankly, on whatever weekday we happened to open up the inbox and get it.

But really delightful. Really delightful. We're really excited about it. So, hey, if you pre-order that book, part of the proceeds are going to be donated to the Career Liberation Library. Incredible. And I think it's been interesting thinking about when we have the ability to do more stuff,

what we can do with the digital kind of library space that we have and with other really awesome queer libraries that are out there. And I think that someday we would love to do more like programming and get to have guest talks and stuff like that.

But we're just not quite there yet. That's fair. Focus on building the collection first. It's a pretty big author to get, though. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was stanching. The gays could discourse about the poetry, get some attention.

It'll be great. Absolutely. It's incredible. We have a poetry. We have a poetry consultant. Very formal title. It's actually just my girlfriend. They're just like so cool.

That's such a girlfriend, like, titles, the poetry consultant. Yeah. They're incredible. And they make sure that in addition to the books, the poetry that I think, just like looks fun in overdrive. They make sure we get like, this is quality literature. So it's wonderful.

Sadie, that's so gay. I know it's super gay. That's so good. That's like I have a slur to say levels of that. Affectionate in parentheses. Thank you, Jay. Amazing. We're all admiring Sadie's tattoo.

Yeah. For those, this is a visual. an audio medium. Yeah. The poetry duet tattoo. Would love would love to be

the gay poetry advisor eventually once I retire or something, I don't know. They can be your library pump title. Yeah, you could just like DM a suggestions.

Well, no, no, no. Actually, for all the people out there, we do have like an acquisitions request form on our website that you can, if we don't have something and you want us to have it,

sometimes it's already in our wish we might not be able to buy it for like months, but it'll make sure we know it's out there. I do monitor the things that come in through that, so we will see it. We use the Notify Me tags on Libby a lot too. We do. We do.

So, hey, send us your queer poetry, Rex. We would love to see them. What queer poetry do I even know off the top of my head right now? I can't think of it. Besides like what's the fucking, oh, who's the guy wrote Crush that all the fan fiction is titled after?

Oh, what is his name at Richard Seichen? Richard Seichen, that's right. Okay. Okay. Actually, I have something... Not available to any book? Not available. It's not available for Overdrive.

I have tried. I'm so sorry that we cannot get that particular author. However, I will say if you need more queer poetry in your life, we actually currently have a curated list up on Libby. That's poetry for Black History Month. So... Hell yeah. Do it.

I was scrolling through your available now. while you all were talking and seeing some good shit. It's nice that there's some actually really good stuff there, and it's not all kind of off-to-the-side stuff. I was curious with the restrictions on what libraries can get, overdrive and whatever, is there any, because I know a lot of fiction is written through Amazon and therefore not available to libraries.

Is there anything you would recommend to queer authors out there when they're looking for publishing venues to make sure that you can get it? Yeah, so things that we can get through Overdrive, usually this is more like indie authors as well. Draft to Digital pops up in overdrive, Ingram pops up through overdrive, Smashmouth pops up through overdrive, I believe it is, or smash words. I might have gotten that wrong. So there are.

Somebody. I don't have a, yeah. That's what I'm here for. I don't have a drop. Yeah. So there are a few platforms like that where if you can get your books available via those platforms and make them available in that way, then we're able to access them. But it kind of comes down to what you can do as an author and how you can work with your publishers there. I think we have had an author too who has reached out to their publisher and been like, can we get this there so that we can donate a copy and that has worked. Yeah. I know several zine distros actually you can buy through Ingram. And so I wonder if people are making like digital zines that they would want to make available to y'all if that could also be. Because I know I think it's silver, Sprocket, Microcosm are available on Ingram.

So I wonder if that could ever be something that could happen because that'd be dope as hell. I know we've definitely got some of the more booky microcosm things, but I'm not sure about straight-up scenes, but I should check as an occasional zine librarian. Yeah. Yeah, I would say that the one other tricky. thing that they run into sometimes is when people are making things available on overdrive or when authors are making their things available there, they have to check like an extra box that says in addition to public libraries, it's also okay if you make our book available to like private libraries.

Oh. Because we're a nonprofit technically, they have to make sure it's available on that level too. So every once in a while will run into something like that, but not too often. And I would also say as well, like I don't know. I haven't seen that many zines pop up through Overdrive, so I don't know if that's like the public versus private library situation or if it's something else happening.

But whenever we get a question about something like that, I always say, hey, we aren't a zine archive, but you know who is? Cizab. Yeah, Coup is out there. They're amazing. They're already doing this thing. Please check them out. So we really like to refer people out to other, like, amazing queer resources to whenever we can.

Yeah, the other one that we refer. do a lot is Stone Butch Blues. Oh, yeah. People are like, why is the Stone Butch Blues in here? Because it's free. Yeah. Because he didn't want us to do that. But here's this nice link.

It's on our resources page because we've got people. Let's hear of Stone Butch Blues. Genuinely, I think every like three months, there's another like acquisitions request for him that comes in. Like, I can't believe you didn't have this already. And I have to be like, honey, I'm so sorry. I would buy it if we could. But here's the free PDF.

Like, come on. Google it, please. Good news, though. It's free. Great news. It's amazing. Like, on purpose, Leslie Goldberg wanted it that way. That is the kind of thing that we could put on an OPEC if we get that. Oh, yeah, that is true. And so we could move out and start hosting it ourselves. Like Project Gutenberg plug out the ones that work there.

And I saw the open access books, the open textbook library link that you have. So you could also put all those in your catalog as well and everything on. open access book database. Oh, is that open book? That should, yeah, I can. Yeah. The various open access resources available on the internet to folks. Yeah.

But for now, we just let people know that those are additional things that are out there and available and to check them out. And if we can be that person who lets somebody know that that exists, hey, amazing. That's still really cool. Yeah. gotta spread the word to the children. For the gay children. Yep. Who live in our discord.

Do you guys have any advice you would give somebody who also wanted to maybe start a sort of nonprofit library like Quill? Like if they maybe wanted to take it in a different direction, like, you know, like a black history or something, something sort of similarly niche. Do you guys have any big words of wisdom for somebody who may be contemplating? that kind of thing? I can jump in right away, Avi, if you want to think a little bit. It looks like you have your thinking face on. So I think one of my things is to make sure you, before you start doing stuff, pull together a team who have like different areas of expertise that you're going to need.

So before we really like put all the pieces together for Quill, we had someone who like knew nonprofits and did nonprofit work. We had a couple librarians. We had people who knew like social media. media things. We had a graphic design person, right? So having people who like fill all those different areas before you like start doing the things and then you have to scramble and be like, ah, need to do it, but don't know how and don't know the person. The team, I think is really important. Also to like share the load and share labor and not get overstressed and not like feel like

the weight of the world is on your shoulders. Yeah, that's been a big thing for us. I think, yeah, just like flexibility has been really important for actually making things happen. I'm kind of, like with any project, like get rid of the perfectionism. I would also say on a really practical level that if people are interested in doing this type of thing from a nonprofit angle, that the fiscal sponsorship has been really helpful in terms of like removing a lot of those barriers of like pursuing the 50C3 status just by yourself, right? Because they have some of that expertise and they know what kinds of paperwork needs to happen and they can check all those little boxes for you. Right. So I think that was a really useful thing that let us get started sooner without worrying about some of the background noise and still do it very legitimately, but without having to stress about those pieces. Yeah, I might say don't stress about getting big as soon as possible, like kind of paste your stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Like to the test. I'm glad that we're getting the word out and the people on our team who do the social media are really great. but they took the training wheels off really serious thanks book talk or just i don't know maybe we had like some plans for like when we get bigger this is how we'll handle things but like having an emergency plan for popularity or something could be helped if the shit hits the band in a good way yeah the last thing i'll say that's really really important is make sure that it's something that you and the team that you have together, that you're going to have fun.

You have to have fun with it. You have to enjoy it, right? I think that's really core. The sustainability and the persistence of the thing, right? The having fun along the way, the joy along the way. It's not just about fighting to make the thing happen. Yeah, we've always said that this primarily is we're here to have fun too.

Also, it's a lot easier to just like, you don't have to start something new. It's a lot easier to donate like $25 a month or go ask your friends to anti up and kick in for all this stuff because if you want to feel like you're doing something like concrete it's not that difficult to you know pester people for donations or things like that to projects that are already going I feel like sometimes

I don't like every once in a while I see someone who's like I'm starting with community library I'm like no you're not oh yeah yeah I remember there was a point when Karen was had been talking about it occasionally, like as friends for a while when they were like, well, I've actually started talking to friends who are outside of this and like maybe making plans. And there's like a moment I was like, oh, this is real now. Like it was just kind of an idea and then it was very real. I think in that period of time, another thing that happened was our nonprofit, which formal title, right,

specifically said, if there's anyone else out there who has a nonprofit who's doing a digital queer library in the U.S. in this kind of way, we should. We shouldn't do this. We should support them instead. We should see what we can do to help them. We shouldn't reinvent the wheel. We shouldn't do it if someone else is doing this because of her expertise with this area, with nonprofits and how they function, right? So it turned out that no one else was doing exactly what we're doing. So we're doing it now. But I do think that's a useful thing to do is take a look around you. Who else is already doing similar work? Do you want to contribute to that work before you start building something from scratch? Because there's so many amazing things happen. And also a lot of these projects are smaller like us. And $25 a month is like huge. That's so impactful. Reoccurring donations are like our bread and butter. It's amazing.

Every time we get one, I'm like, oh, wow, oh my God, amazing. So yeah, very cool. All right. We're at about an hour so we could start wrapping up. Looking at the sick-ass merch. Yeah, right. Oh, my God. Do you want a modeling of the?

Oh, hell yeah. Oh, yes. Make that my work mug. I know, right? I was just thinking that. Like with my warmer homosaurus mug and quill mug, yeah.

I don't even have any homosaurus merch. Come on. The dinosaur is so cute. Exactly. I bought stickers, Jay. I'll see if you want in the snail mail if you want it.

These are awesome stickers, though. These like read queer books, read trans books. They're very good. One of those on my wall here. Fuck yeah. Yeah. So we try to end on like a hopeful, like looking forward note. So what is your, both of your, like, your ideal state for Quill look like. Like if you could project like best case scenario five years down the line, what would that look like to you? What are, what are your hopes going forward?

No, man, I saw that on the list of potential questions and it's like, oh God, five years from now. I know. It's a big question. Like there's always like, there's always like. a silence beforehand, but we can come back. I have a few things. Really practical list to start with. One, we're still here. We want to still be around. We want to be here for the long haul. We don't want to get crushed by something or the other, right?

We want to still be able to do the cool work that we're doing just more of all of it. My personal goal also is get the hold times down. Would be amazing. I would love them to be at an average of under. I don't know, under 30 days, that would be a miracle. I want that to happen. I think in other more positive things we've also mentioned, it would be so cool to do more programming, more collaboration.

We also really want to expand the team and bring on some more volunteers so we can build out our capacity, but also like building a structure so that you can have volunteers learn the system and have a good experience and have that work well and be great for everybody. We wanted to do it right, so it's taking a little bit longer. I don't know. I also feel like the fact that we've gotten the feedback that we've gotten. And we've also had the, like, the amount of people sign up for a membership and the number of checkouts and people using the library to such an extent really shows that there's like this huge information need out there that hasn't been met by traditional library systems, right?

I said before, the queer folks of America are really voracious readers and they want and they need these things. And like, we're filling a gap in information access there. And that's like really core to do. And I really hope we can just keep doing that like in collaboration and support and to supplement and to co-conspirate with like the public libraries and like all of other kinds of libraries out there and the other queer community libraries around. I, yeah, I just hope we can keep doing more of everything that we're already doing. I'm like, that's a good button, and mine are just kind of one-offs. But, I mean, cataloging and being able to do fun stuff with metadata is high on my list of things I would love to be doing. It feels like I'm like, but my job's like right there, and I can see it, but I can't do it. But also, I would love to be able to be compensating people for more of their labor than we can do. I love a volunteer project, but everybody works so hard. We think about it all the time. and that would be great, especially for people who maybe could lighten their workload and have a better worth of balance if that or something we could do.

We also talked about potentially being a platform for like kind of community publishing kind of stuff, and that's very good. That one is a total pie in the sky. That one has a lot of things to work through. I thought of another really fun thing that we would love to have. You've seen some of our cool merch, which is, You can find on our website. All union made. So, yay. We've already got mugs. We've got t-shirt.

We've got stickers. But we want hat. We want, and I'm a little bit joking, but also if it actually happened, it would be so cool. We want booty shorts. We want people to cut the t-shirts

that they already have in a crop top. You know, there are some other, like, really fun things we could do there. Like, we want to, we have those posters, not posters, they're flyers that you can print of Quill

and, like, post it on your telephone pole. We also want to do more things like that that we can get out into other spaces. That would be super cool. Very important question. Yeah. What would the booty shorts say on each cheek? Can I see?

Please. Never can I say our unofficial tagline. They can edit it out if they hated. It's beautiful. So our unofficial tagline for the library is read a book faggot. And that's the shorts for sure. I will model them. I am volunteering.

Let me use to DIY that for Jay specifically. I was going to say, that's for me right now. I keep saying I'm going to learn that screen printing, and this is going to be it. Just make sure you put the little Quill logo in the corner, and we're good. Okay, cool. Yeah.

Incredible. And then we'll be done. It'll be finished. So what can we do to help Quill out, to help you guys out, both as us, the hosts, as our listeners, What can we do for you guys? How can we help? I think, I mean, yeah, just as hosts, thank you for having us and for sharing us with people.

I hope that we'll be new to some people. And then in general, those, I say, our business gay will be mad if none of us say like recurring donation donations. No pressure if you can't. Oh, this won't be coming out in time for that. That's fine. We were doing a video for Project for Awesome and that's like a go vote thing, but that's this weekend. I just voted. Amazing. But also you can probably cut that part because it's all air in time.

We can post it in the Discord and stuff, though, for folks. Cool. Yeah, good. Very cool. I would say also other things that people can do, like obviously spreading the word, if you want to use your printer at work because ink is expensive, we all know to print out some of our little quarter sheets. And if you want to put them in your local coffee shop, in your indie bookstore, you know, wherever.

That's really cool. We've had a few people find us from that. who like never would have otherwise come across that we existed. So that's been really, really amazing. We have fun merch so you can check that out. Also using the library is really helpful as we start to try and plan for like more grants. We want to keep exploring that so we can continue like not just relying on individual donations if possible. Like we use those statistics of we have this many patrons.

They're checking out books at an alarming rate, which is incredible, but also give us more money so we can get them more books. Those numbers are really helpful. And we also do have a newsletter. So all future things that are happening within Cluel. If you want to stay up to date, you can sign up. I think if you go to our website, Coralibrationlibrary.org and scroll all the way down, you can sign up for the newsletter in the bottom left hand corner.

So that's a great way to stay up to date on anything else that we're doing, new initiatives, various fun things. I say, have we talked about our social media stuff? No, we have not. Follow on. I don't know you guys want to promote. So we have our Tumblr and an Instagram still. And blue sky for sure.

Am I missing? I actually, I don't think the TikTok has been deleted yet. It hasn't totally disappeared. It technically exists. I don't know if I would recommend that platform. I don't know if you do. But on whatever social media you are on, if we're there, it's at queer lib lib. So same thing, every place.

And if you have... Talk to us. If you want to come tell us we're cool, that's fun. If you want to come yell about your favorite queer book, please do that. We would love to hear all about it. We'll probably yell back. All right. Well, thanks for coming on.

This has been fantastic. It's really great to talk to you about a really hopeful project. I'm really glad you guys existed in the world. Thank you. Yeah. We're trying to do the best we can. I mean, obviously it's really fun. fun, but we also know that, like, it's not always just fun. Sometimes having that sense of, like,

connection and having access to this information and having that sense of not being alone can really be life-saving. So we're doing what we can. I'll say I lately have been every time I get into that real, real big despair, nothing's going to help, nothing's going to get better. I just go and I answer a troubleshooting email. And I get one more person actually logged into their account and getting access to things that they want and people want to take from them and then that helps. Everybody helps. Direct action. Tech troubleshooting.

Sometimes it is that. Sometimes. Get lucky and it is. Yeah. Thanks for having us so much. It's weird seeing your faces. At the same time it's hearing your voices. You get the special blue roll on the Discord now because you've been on the pod.

Yeah. It's exciting. Friend of the pod. Nobody will oversee because I. don't they lurk and never say anything. I've never been on the Discord. I should probably change that. There's the link.

It's in our notes, and it will also be in the description, along with the donate and with the pre-order for the Emperor of Gladness, and hopefully everything else we've mentioned is our usual media mentioned stuff. Perfect. Yeah, I tried to put links into anything I thought I would say that would have a link. So, yeah. But yeah, if you need anything else. So that we can then make them get the booty shorts.

God damn it. Yeah. And there were people who just, you know, send us blue skies. They're like, booty shorts, booty shorts. Well, also, I will say we did have to, like, for the partner that we work with for the merch, they were like, you have to sell a certain number of these first things before we let you add more items. So, which we did. But now we need to do more if we want to add more.

All right. Buy some mugs to get the booty short, to unlock the booty shorts. It's a DLC. If you want to see me with the booty shorts that say read a bookfaggot on them, then you better go buy a goddamn t-shirt and some stickers. Hell yeah. This is a threat.

That's a threat. Good marketing. Good night.