One of San Francisco's greatest treasures is located in the Civic Center, across the mall from City Hall. It is a place where history is preserved and sometimes history is made. More than a museum for books, it tells the often-untold story for the diverse communities that make up San Francisco. You don't need a passport, proof of citizenship, a driver's license, a voter registration card, a diploma, a credit card, a mortgage, or even an address to access the rich resources there. The San Francisco Public Library is a temple of learning where all events are free, and all are welcome.
Of particular interest to our community, one of the library's unique assets celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. Founded as the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center, it was recently renamed the James C. Hormel Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Allies (and advocates and agender) Center, because it more accurately describes the breadth of the collection. It is a library, and accuracy of information matters to staff and patrons alike. The new name reflects the passion of its custodians that it remains a living resource, dynamic and changing as the community whose story is honored and recorded there.
The Hormel Center didn't just happen by accident. Visionaries like Steve Coulter, Kathy Page, and Chuck Forrester, to name a few, were determined that the new main library would include a world class collection of materials that relate to our community's contribution to shaping the broader culture, without fear of censorship, a hallmark of the American public library system. The new collection would be marked clearly for what it was, not shrouded in euphemism or shaming language. The housing of the collection would reflect the liberation trajectory of our movement. Not buried in a back corner, the Hormel Center, which bears the name of its principal donor, James C. Hormel, has its portal in a coveted corner location. The Hormel Center's main reading room contains just a taste of the entire trove, and is itself an artfully designed tribute to same-sex love through the ages. If you have never visited the center, go spend an hour and take in the ceiling mural that depicts in names and images and in bold and beautiful light a chronicle of a people who had previously been consigned to the shadows.
Forty years ago I was a freshman at Columbia University. I chose this school in part because it had been the host for a few years of well-publicized "gay dances." The fact that it was a men's school in New York City, and had been the famed college where Allen Ginsberg and his homosexual cohort of beatniks had matriculated, further increased its appeal. Having failed to find any reference to homosexuality in the public library in my small town in Michigan, one of my first stops in college was Butler Library in the center of campus. I wasn't disappointed in one regard: homosexuality was listed in the card catalogue �" with this notice: see Sexual Perversions. Today a curious young person does not need to seek out information in a private library at an elite institution and have their uneasiness reinforced by how the information is guarded. Anyone can walk into the San Francisco Public Library and have access to the keys to their freedom. These collections are still rare in settings like this. One tribute to its success is how many times it has been successfully replicated in other public libraries today. You don't have to be a scholar or already educated or pass through the scrutiny of a judgmental person's gaze in order to browse here. You just have to possess an open and a yearning mind.
Thanks to creative and dedicated staff like the founding manager, Jim Van Buskirk, himself a part of the history of LGBT San Francisco and a feature of its literary scene, and his successor, the equally talented Karen Sundheim, who had proven her mettle by turning the Eureka Valley branch library into a mini-outpost of liberation during her tenure there, the Hormel Center contains not just books but an esoteric collection of photographs, films, archives of organizations as diverse as ACT UP and the Feminist Bookstore News. It's all here. There is even a rare copy of a 1970s artifact, the "Cunt Coloring Book," which almost cost Mr. Hormel the ambassadorship to Luxembourg during his Senate confirmation hearings because he was accused of promoting what the Christian right described as pornography because this offending (to them) item was in the collection made possible by his philanthropic largesse.
This tribute is also a personal one. Most of my life I have been a minister but I spent an amazing period serving for more than a year as the LGBT outreach coordinator of the Hormel Center. I think of it as a break from religious work but I definitely served in a sanctuary of liberation. That year I saw Kirk Reed debut his first book with a dramatic gesture, opening the volume and blowing white powder from it �" at the height of the anthrax craze. I saw Sarah Schulman workshop a new play in collaboration with Theater Brava, and witnessed Will Daugherty and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sound the alarm about the Patriot Act and its chilling effects on the free exchange of knowledge. I helped bring together Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin, Barbara Gittings, and Kay Lahusen (there was a little competitive tension there), the four great pillars of Lesbian Liberation, for an event in which we also raised money for a public library in Alaska whose own fledgling gay collection had been shut down by local authorities. I saw the innovation of Michelle Tea's Radar Readings, and hosted a pioneering conversation between FTMs and butch dykes. I met authors like Susan Sontag, Red Jordan Arobateau, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Daniel Wolfe, and E. Lynn Harris, and was moved to tears to see the largest crowd ever to that point crowd out the Hormel Center and spill into the main library when Bishop John Shelby Spong spoke, even though no Episcopal Church in San Francisco would allow him to do so. That's what libraries are for.
Next week we celebrate the birth of the evolving James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center. Treat yourself to a visit, and acknowledge with gratitude this great resource that even in 2016 is a rare gem.
Jim Mitulski is the interim pastor of Metropolitan Community Church of the Rockies in Denver. He has been the pastor of historically gay churches in Berkeley, San Francisco, Guerneville, Los Angeles, New York City, and Dallas. In 2001-2 he served as the outreach coordinator of the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library, through the generosity of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. To contact him, email [email protected].