June is LGBT Pride Month. It’s a time when members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community celebrate sexual and gender diversity while promoting equal rights. To the west, Philadelphia’s Pride Parade took place on Sunday, June 9. The event was a flurry of color and sound that began in the Gayborhood and marched one and a half miles through the city loudly spreading messages of inclusivity and tolerance.
Closer to home, the Cherry Hill Public Library is doing its part to help spread these same messages throughout June. The Pride at the Library series has now reached its fifth year, and according to Deena Caswell, supervisor of outreach and diversity at the library, the event has grown in both programming and reach every year.
Caswell said when she came on board as the library’s outreach supervisor, her role was to let people know what libraries in the modern era do and find out how they can best serve people’s needs. She said part of that meant taking a look at underserved communities.
As a member of the LGBTQ community herself, Caswell, who is bisexual, began thinking about how they could better meet the needs of the LGBTQ community. She saw that the library had books and movies, but lacked the programming.
So, she helped start the Pride at the Library series during Pride Month. The first year was largely about connecting with different community organizations. They had members of PFLAG Collingswood, an organization that provides resources to LGBTQ people and their families, come in and talk to families about their organization. PFLAG, in turn, connected with them other organizations such as the Transgender Oral History Project, which came in to talk about its efforts to gather stories from the transgender community.
“We’re into our fifth year of running Pride at the Library, and it’s very exciting to step back and realize we’ve got a lot of history with it,” Caswell said. “It’s fun. Every year things are always changing.”
Since its inception, Caswell has incorporated Pride at the Library into the library’s ongoing programming. She said they screen movies, hold book clubs and air documentaries with an LGBTQ focus.
“We want to extend it beyond Pride [Month],” Caswell said.
At the end of the day, it’s about building community connections. She said in her experience, the more programming they’ve held, the more people and organizations have caught wind of their efforts and offered to come in.
“We’ve had a growing interest,” Caswell said. “Every year our programs have gotten better attended, more diverse and more crowded.”
This June, for instance, members from Garden State Equality held a workshop on Creating Safe and Affirming Communities for Transgender Youth. The goal was to have participants leave the workshop with tools to engage with their friends, family and community as they strive to advocate for the transgender community.
But the library’s most notable program came around two years ago when it held a Drag Queen Story Time, according to Caswell. They invited local drag queens to come in and read stories that incorporated messages of inclusion and acceptance. While similar events had taken place in larger cities, Cherry Hill was to be one of the first suburban towns to hold a Drag Queen Story Time.
Leading up to the event, however, the National Review had coincidently posted a story about Drag Queen Story Times painting them as hysterical events, and it subsequently drew a fair bit of media attention to Cherry Hill’s upcoming event. Caswell said she was nervous as to how the program would be received, but much to her surprise, the storytime filled up completely and they even had to add a second running. She said the community came out in droves to show their support, which, at the end of the day, is what the Pride at the Library series is all baout.
“It’s about the idea that libraries are for everyone,” Caswell said. “All libraries are a free space where people can come in, continue their education and get good resources.”
On Wednesday, June 19, the library will hold its next Pride at the Library event at 7 p.m. “The Life and Writing of James Baldwin” will have actor/comic Grant Cooper and scholar Dr. Lindsey Swindall engage participants in an interactive dialogue that unravels the truths of racism in this country and examines other themes, such as sexuality, in James Baldwin’s writings. Participants can register for the event by calling (856) 667-0300 x2.
