DO SAY GAY: Banned Books and LGBTQ+ Freedoms
This online showcase is part of a series designed to capture the work of the HumanitiesX fellows and students at DePaul University. Over the 2023–24 academic year, three teams of HumanitiesX fellows created unique community-engaged, project-based courses in the humanities. These new courses were taught in spring 2024. See the other course showcase posts on the HumanitiesX website, including those from spring 2022 and 2023.
THE COURSE
Do Say Gay: Banned Books and LGBTQ+ Freedoms is a course about contemporary book bans and their relationship to the democratic role of LGBTQ+ libraries and archives developed by professors Barrie Jean Borrich (English, Creative Writing) and Heather Montes Ireland (Women’s and Gender Studies), along with Community Partner Gerber/Hart LGBTQ Library and Archives, located in the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago. Founded in 1981, Gerber/Hart focuses on collecting, preserving, and making accessible the LGBTQ+ history and culture of Chicago and the Midwest. The teaching team was also joined by two HumanitiesX Student Fellows.
In the course, students examined the urgent issue of the rise in book challenges and bans, and its threats to democracy, alongside the possibilities, traumas, and beauties of LGBTQ+ existence that books illuminate. They read banned books about LGBTQ+ lives by Maia Kobabe, Gabby Rivera, and Kacen Callender, investigated queer repression across time, and studied theory about censorship, LGBTQ+ rights, and democracy. Students considered the democratic role of LGBTQ+ libraries and archives in the preservation, celebration, and continuation of intersectional queer lives and its relationship to challenging epistemicide, or the destruction of knowledge systems.
One day each week, the class met at Gerber/Hart and explored material collected in the archives and special collections, guided by Gerber/Hart staff/librarians Jen Dentel and Erin Bell, while learning about curating archival materials.
Students engaged in a range of experiential learning activities through the 10-week quarter, including volunteer service to assist Gerber/Hart with library business. They also had the opportunity to learn experientially from other libraries and librarians, including the Chicago Public Library (CPL) and DePaul’s Richardson Library.
On a field trip to the Harold Washington branch of Chicago Public Library, students engaged with the “Unbanned” exhibit by social practice installation artist Theaster Gates, and heard from guest speakers throughout the course including CPL and DePaul University librarians.
Midway through the course, students participated in the creation of a pop-up library of banned books in Kelly Hall at DePaul’s Lincoln Park Campus on April 30, 2024. The assignment for the class was to create one-page descriptions of archival materials or banned books, which allowed them to practice using creative skills along with archival research before starting to create their exhibits for the culminating project.
THE PROJECT
The culminating project of the course resulted in a student-curated public exhibit of archival materials at Gerber/Hart that honors the history of LGBTQ+ expression, ensures the continuation of queer stories, and displays the power of queer libraries. A public reception was held on Friday, June 7th, 2024 to launch the exhibit, to which students invited friends and family to see their work and enjoy the spaces they had created. The opening event attracted over one hundred attendees, including members of the community, students, faculty, friends, and family, and was covered by CBS News Chicago, Block Club Chicago, Windy City Times, the Chicago Reader, and DePaul Newsline.
To mark the occasion, Montes Ireland and Borich talked about the political and socio-cultural stakes of the exhibit and the origins of the course. The Gerber/Hart librarians and HX student fellows also presented remarks about their experience working with the class and the impact it had on them. Lastly, members from each group of student curators spoke in front of the visitors about their groups’ themes and the process of creating their exhibits. Attendees celebrated by “eating a banned book,” as one student baked a cake featuring a two-page spread from the graphic memoir Gender Queer. The program concluded with a drag king reading of LGBTQ+ children’s books.
The Do Say Gay students used Gerber/Hart’s archival materials, supplementary research, and the theoretical frameworks from various assigned readings to create their collaborative public exhibit. The class was split into four groups, with each group responsible for creating a portion of the exhibit and a complementary group zine to further highlight their research. As students engaged in archival research, Gerber/Hart librarians pulled materials and made suggestions to fit each student’s interests and areas of study.
Getting to look through the archives opened my mind to the fact that there are people out there doing this work, finding and preserving our lives and histories.
— A student reflection in course evaluations
The exhibit was collaboratively curated by four student groups and organized by four sub-themes. The four sub-themes were 1) SAVE OUR CHILDREN: Queer Young Adult & Kid Lit, 2) OPEN BOOKS, OPEN MINDS: Libraries, Rights, & Political Action, 3) SILENCE=DEATH: Aids Activism, Literature, & Art, and 4) WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN BANNED: Banned Sexualities & Genders.
For more details about the exhibit and to read the digital zines from the groups, check out the Do Say Gay Exhibit Showcase.
THE TEAM
Barrie Jean Borich (she/her/they) is author of Apocalypse, Darling which PopMatters said “… soars and seems to live as a new form altogether. It’s poetry, a meditation on life as ‘the other,’ creative nonfiction, and abstract art.” Her memoir Body Geographic won a Lambda Literary Award and her book-length essay, My Lesbian Husband won the Stonewall Book Award. Borich’s most recent work appears in the renowned American literary journal Conjunctions, and her essays have been widely anthologized. She is a professor in the Department of English-MFA/MA in Creative Writing and Publishing Program at DePaul University in Chicago, where she directs the LGBTQ Studies interdisciplinary minor and edits Slag Glass City, a journal of the urban essay arts.
Dra. Heather Montes Ireland (she/her, ella) is an associate professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at DePaul. Her research and teaching interests include intersectional economic justice, racial capitalism, women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, and Latina/Chicana/Boricua studies. Her work has been published in Women, Gender, and Families of Color, the Journal of International Women’s Studies, and Feminist Formations. Her chapter “‘Don’t Say Gay’ and Can’t Be Trans: Behind the Anti-LGBTQ+ Schooling Agenda” was recently published in The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom.
Erin Bell (she/her), MLIS, is an information science professional with over 6 years of service in the field. She is the Operations Director at the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, after many years of volunteering. Bell is dedicated to accessible library service and passionate about archival preservation. She is a co-creator of the Gerber/Hart’s podcast Unboxing Queer History. Her article “Developing a Podcast to Share LGBTQ+ History” was published in the January/February 2022 issue of Archival Outlook, the official journal of the Society of American Archivists.
Jen Dentel (she/her) is the Community Outreach & Strategic Partnerships Manager at Gerber/Hart Library & Archives where she has volunteered since 2014. In this role, Jen manages Gerber/Hart’s community programming, social media accounts, and communications. Jen is a co-creator of Gerber/Hart’s 2022 podcast Unboxing Queer History and has helped curate several exhibits at Gerber/Hart, including exhibits on pre-Stonewall activism, the history of drag, and lesbians and feminism in the 1970s and 80s. She received her BA in History from the University of Chicago and her MSLIS from UIUC.
Bella Netti (they/she/he) is a 2023–24 HumanitiesX Student Fellow. They graduated in June 2024 with bachelor’s degrees in Community Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies. Their final capstone project centered around community archives as feminist method, specifically in the documentation and preservation of anti-war and pro-Palestinian student activism on DePaul’s campus. Netti recently wrote an article that explored Gerber/Hart’s role as a collaborative community partner with HumanitiesX.
Taylor Sellers-Varela (they/them) is a 2023–24 HumanitiesX Student Fellow and a rising junior. Double-majoring in English (Literature) and Media and Cinema Studies, they are interested in pursuing Secondary Education in the future. Their academic interests include analyzing media’s real-world and ideological impacts. They wrote an article for HumanitiesX titled “Chicago’s Black Art, Culture, and History: A Visit to the South Side Community Art Center.” Sellers-Varela is the 2024 recipient of the Department of English Bill and Irene Beck Award for Community Engagement and was interviewed by CBS News Chicago about the class exhibit.
LESSONS LEARNED AND NEXT STEPS
KEY LESSONS
- Queer literature, archives, and theory are a powerful necessity to foster civic engagement among LGBTQ young people. Students in ‘Do Say Gay’ learned how censorship, book challenges, and book bans have a long history in the U.S., and resistance is necessarily tied to the democratic project. To read literature that celebrates queer and trans existence is to affirm LGBTQ lives and is a powerful way to resist social and political exclusion. Working with Gerber/Hart further allowed students to reimagine what archives can do and what communities they can serve.
- Large projects can be accomplished with manageable steps and assignments from the start. Ten weeks is a short time to have successfully created an exhibit with the ambition of Do Say Gay, but we made it happen through deliberate steps along the way, including weekly engagement with the Gerber/Hart collections and a smaller-scale version of the final event at the midpoint of the course. We learned the importance of breaking large outcomes down into guided micro-steps, so that the students never had the opportunity to get behind.
- Active participation by the community partners is key to a successful culminating project. A key aspect of the Do Say Gay project was active participation — supported by the Mellon Foundation — of librarians Erin Bell and Jen Dentel, two of Gerber/Hart’s three-person staff. Both were instrumental in guiding the students into corners of the archives they would never have found on their own. Bell and Dentel did everything from mapping out the space to helping paint the walls, to finding ways to safely display the more fragile archive ephemera. The class could not have created this exhibition without their expertise and the partnership of the Gerber/Hart.
- Collaboration requires communicating and trusting the process. We learned that the more parties involved, the more that communication is necessary. This includes deep listening, releasing control of various aspects of the process, and trusting the ways that every participant is lending their talents to the project. When we are collaborating with others, we have to be clear about what we want, what our values are, and what expectations we hold. Additionally, dynamic collaborations happen across disciplines and professional training.
NEXT STEPS
The Do Say Gay teaching team and students plan to continue working with Gerber/Hart LGBTQ Library and Archives well into the future.
Building on the HumanitiesX experience, Prof. Barrie Borich is developing a project-based course for Honors Explore Chicago that will use Gerber/Hart Library and archives, as well as other LGBTQ collections in Chicago libraries including the Richardson Library zine collection, to explore queer Chicago space and memory and create chapbooks, zines, and/or catalogs of student research and discovery.
Prof. Montes Ireland plans to apply for internal grant funding from DePaul’s Public Service Council to create another project-based course that centers the public humanities in queer studies. This will result in the course WGS 230: Lesbian Lives in the winter quarter of 2025 that will explore lesbian print culture and struggles for sexual freedoms, partnering with Gerber/Hart. The class will also explore online archives such as the Adela Licona Zine Collection at the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona, and New York’s Lesbian Herstory Archives.
