Dear Community,
With amazement and joy, we are proud to be celebrating our first anniversary since our doors opened on January 15th, 2021. We have experienced growth well beyond our expectations in this first year and that is only made possible because of you, our community of patrons, volunteers, friends, and collaborators. We want to take a moment to reflect on all the good this year has brought us, even amidst the stress of a global pandemic and all the uncertainty that came with it.
We opened our doors with a humble 1200 books in our lending library, all of which were donated. In a year, we have over doubled the size of our library with 1800 books cataloged and another nearly 800 books in our cataloging queue. This means through your book donations and financial contributions, we have grown our lending library to over 2500 books in total. We’ve been intentional about how we’re growing our library when we do have the opportunity to purchase books and have consistently prioritized trans and gender non-conforming resources and literature and works authored by Black, Indigenous, Queer, and Trans People of Color.
On the archival side of our work, we’ve been busy forging relationships across Iowa and throughout the country with LGBTQ Iowans to collect our histories to share with one another. Among our acquisitions this year we’ve collected Titpton born Craig Esbeck’s personal papers that contain an array of love letters from the 1980s and 1990s. We’ve also worked closely with Reverend John Harper to grow a collection centering his community work including a binder of wedding sermons he’s performed for LGBTQ couples.
When it comes to LGBTQ organizations in our community, we are happy to say we are the repository for the Quire of Eastern Iowa’s archival materials. If you are a member of an LGBTQ focused, owned, or operated business or organization in Iowa, reach out so we can talk about preserving your history. Iowa has been a prolific place for LGBTQ publications, so we’ve been busy amassing runs of key papers and journals including Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, RFD Magazine, AccessLine, and Pen Magazine. We do not yet have full sets of any journals, newspapers, or magazines, so if you have even a single issue to donate, please get in touch or drop off a copy during our open hours each week. If you have any personal papers, organizational records, or any publications that you’d like to donate, please contact us at archives@lgbtqiowa.org.
Beyond the library and archival growth of our organization this year, our strength is in community building. Queer Threads, our weekly craft circle has been a consistent source joy and friendship. We regularly host 8-15 folks from beginner to highly skilled and this group has brightened our physical space with a group crocheted mushroom garland! We can’t wait to have our queer threaders, old and new, back in our space this year once it is safer to gather. We’ve also served as a meeting space for a number of community groups including UI Trans Alliance and a Parent/Guardian of TGNC Youth Support and Resource group. It’s been wonderful to make connections in our community through our pop-up library that has made appearances at the Iowa City Farmer’s Market, Iowa City Pride, and the Transgender Day of Visibility Rally last March.
This feels like the tip of the iceberg when we look at our first year as a community space. What many don’t publicly see is the family that we’re building with our volunteer community and the ways these relationships and this space have kept us all afloat in an unprecedented year locally and globally. We’ve seen an attack on LGBTQ rights at the state level, an ongoing pandemic that has been especially troubling in Iowa due to our governmental negligence and lack of protections, and much closer to our family, a serious bicycle accident that nearly cost us our Executive Director. To all of our volunteers who’ve supported us and believed in LIAL this year, I want to say a personal thank you. It is your capacity to care for our community that sustains our work.
We cannot celebrate our anniversary without looking ahead to our plans and dreams for year two. We have an exciting announcement for year two:
Our lending library is moving to the Close House newly owned by Public Space One (PS1), our friends and local community-driven arts center!
Located at the intersection of Gilbert, Bowery, and Prentiss Streets, our library will stay walkable and accessible to downtown Iowa City and the University of Iowa campus. We will move in the spring when they are ready to open this house to the public full time. We are excited to see what this new space brings for our community as it will certainly afford collaborations with PS1 and a broader arts-based community in Iowa City.
We are also busy thinking about the direction we want LIAL to grow towards in year two. This includes building a non-profit board, expanding our volunteer capacity across the state, and making firmer commitments to our local community. To begin this process, we have developed a Racial Equity Statement, which we’ve included with this letter. The goal of this statement is to be transparent about both the work we are doing and the work we need to do as an organization for equity, inclusion, and collective liberation. We also want to be held accountable by our community when we aren’t being transparent, we aren’t achieving our goals, or we’re overlooking work we should be doing. This statement is a living document that we hope opens a conversation about how we can best show up for communities of color, especially at the intersection of LGBTQ life in Iowa.
We are thankful that our one year anniversary offers this time of deep reflection and gratitude, looking back and looking forward. Ultimately, we know that LIAL would not be so tangible, so thriving, and so possible without all of the people who have shown us support as visitors, donors, collaborators, sources of advice, and most importantly friends.
Happy new year and cheers to year two!
The LGBTQ Iowa Archives & Library Collective
