Hello! For a while, I’ve found myself resistant to writing anything; creating anything. I’ve re-written this entirely at least three separate times. Each time it taking new form and getting closer to what I was hoping for. I think hope is what’s keeping me going right now; hope for sentiment to be reciprocated; hope that the softer times are to return. Both on a personal and global scale. I suppose this is at the heart of why I spent the last month creating a digital library.
Being born right before the turn of the century I was blissfully unaware of the collective fear that seemed to loom over every adult’s head. Having only been a few months old when the fireworks burst welcoming in the year 2000, I knew next to nothing about this millennium bug that was predicted to be a computer-induced apocalypse. Despite Y2K causing very few real problems, I’ve grown to understand that fear a little better now as I’ve borne witness to the rapid evolution of technology over my quarter-century lifetime. While I have deep admiration for those early days of the internet, they seemed to coincide with something I hold far less fondness over: the slow departure of physical media from the mainstream. The feeling that something is truly yours, to have and to hold, ‘till death do you part, had been lost on us.
The birth of this archive didn’t sprout from grief over the lost days of analog media nor a fear of technology’s ascension. It grew from my love of the Internet Archive.
The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle and grew rapidly into the web’s largest free archive: hosting digitized media ranging from movies to print materials to whole websites for anyone to borrow on-demand. A history of the internet as we know it. Being someone who’s worked in a library the last three years, I understand the significance of information being accessible to anyone who may need it. Despite it being one of the most remarkable resources on the world wide web, the Internet Archive, as well as other digital libraries, have been the target for legal battles with publishing companies over alleged copyright infringement. Their latest lawsuit, Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive, resulted in over “500,000 books being taken out of lending, including over 1,300 banned and challenged books”. The gravity of that number of books being suddenly inaccessible is unprecedented. During the duration of the lawsuit, several devout Internet Archive fans, myself included, feared a total shut down of the website. Which, in turn, would have resulted in the complete loss of some critically important human history that is not archived elsewhere. Libraries and archives are, historically, one of the first institutions to be targets for censorship and bans and often, burning. We already see in recent news that entire sites of public information are no longer available. Whole histories being erased at the click of a button. As fascism thrives, education continues to be defunded, anti-intellectualism grows, and resources online continue to be censored or paywalled to serve someone or another’s agenda, the goal remains to keep people misinformed, uneducated, and unquestioning. Knowing that, it makes sense why new shadow libraries continue to pop up in hidden corners of the web. People have taken it upon themselves to create lasting records of books and history that would be lost otherwise. In 2020, almost immediately upon starting the copy of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues I’d found on the Internet Archive, I knew it would soon hold a special place in my heart and I wanted a hard copy for my bookshelf. I searched far and wide, only to be met with “rare” copies being sold for over $200 or an unsightly “UNAVAILABLE” posted among different book store sites. Why was it so difficult to find this book? Funny enough, Stone Butch Blues actually happens to be readily accessible on hir website through an at-cost print service for $10(!!!), along with a free PDF version of the 20th anniversary Author’s Edition, as zie did not want the book to be mass-produced. The About the New Edition section on hir website discussing the book reads:
Leslie Feinberg worked up to a few days before hir death to ready the 20th anniversary Author’s Edition of Stone Butch Blues, to make it available to all, for free. This action was part of hir entire life work as a communist to “change the world” in the struggle for justice and liberation from oppression.
Hir book(s) and legacy have left a lasting impression on me (and the person I strive to be) even after all these years. Some books, however, are not afforded that same luxury. Either because they, too, have been out of print for decades and/or because no one deemed them important enough to be archived in this way. There’s some books I am still on the look out for that I couldn’t find this time around, but hope to be able to in future updates. Libraries have a general policy to withdraw books from the collection that haven’t been checked out in some years. In our case, it’s three. Perhaps I am far too sentimental for my own good, but the thought of a book collecting dust on a shelf for three years without having someone think twice about it breaks my heart. And with more books being challenged and banned every year, the number of books withdrawn from library collections and history itself increases exponentially.
As the mushy, overly sentimental, person that I am, I’ve spent the last month on the course to creating a digital archive to house books, zines, and other resources that have been or are at-risk of being erased from history. Each resource not only being uploaded to the digital archive, but also saved to a separate digital storage and a physical USB drive, in case all else fails us and things go up in flames. Eventually, I hope to learn enough about coding to transfer this all to its own site, but for the time being N*tion is doing a fine job of housing the collection. I set out first with collecting as many banned and challenged books as I could. There is no shortage of banned books; from cautionary classics like Animal Farm and 1984 to more recent bans like Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir Gender Queer and George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue. Coincidentally, two books having been repeatedly challenged and banned over recent years for “LGBTQ+ content” deemed explicit. I knew this was what I wanted to do.
In addition to being a devout fan of the Internet Archive, I was also moved to begin this after a recent DIY zine event that I’d co-facilitated alongside the organizer of the Orlando Zine Meet-up. Sharing an evening amongst other queer and trans people making art does wonders for your brain, it turns out. While I had little idea of what co-facilitating entailed, given that it was my first time doing so, I prepared something on the off chance that I’d have to speak in front of everyone. There was a point in the evening where the hosts asked everyone to pause and allow the community partners to share what their missions in mutual aid were. Overly-confident for someone who fears public speaking, I asked one of the hosts if I could share what I’d prepared towards the end of the event. Someway, somehow, I mustered up what very little courage I could, through a trembling voice and unsteady hands, to read from my phone an excerpt from Beth Pickens’ book Your Art Will Save Your Life in front of a room of about 50 people. Not knowing whether the words would have any impact, I felt better having put them out into the world anyway.
The excerpt from the introduction of the book was as follows:
“After the 2016 presidential election, many of my artist clients said things like, Maybe I should quit making art, it’s kind of selfish for me to focus on my art now, and I should help people in a more effective way. These are expected grief responses to the shock and horror of our times, but I beseech you: DO NOT STOP MAKING ART. I need it profoundly. We all do. Anytime you feel overwhelmed by humanity’s impact on people, animals, and the planet, or really, anytime you think you cannot leave the house because the world is too hard, I want you to think about the art, performances, music, books, and films that have made you want to be alive. Think of how those artists, like you, probably felt overwhelmed by their lives- and the times they were living in- but made the thing anyway. Your future audiences need your work, so you need to make it. I focus on history for perspective; this helps me take strategic next steps. I read about artists making work during war, in times of violence, and despite systemic neglect. For example, I like to look at artists living during the AIDs pandemic… the anti-AIDs movement was largely orchestrated by artists and activists, many of whom were young and watching their friends die. Today we are in a different time and place. Depending on who you are, the Trump administration may not impact you drastically or you may encounter devastating, life- changing experiences. We don’t know what will happen, but historically, under oppressive regimes and fascist governments, it is the brave and creative ones who lead, who solve problems, and who incite, inspire, organize, comfort, satirize, and reflect. You have what you need for your life for art, and for justice. Stay with your creative path, trust your vision, and know that your contributions will matter to someone else.”
Much to my surprise, a few people stopped me after to ask me again what the title of the book was or share that the words did have an effect! My public speaking paid off! Beth Pickens wrote Your Art Will Save Your Life during the first Trump presidency. I remember sitting on the couch beside my uncle, who had recently come out himself, the morning his presidency was announced. Refusing to go to school. Refusing to accept that as our new reality. I was 17 at the time and I was angry. Angrier than I’d ever found myself. And I’m still angry now. Deep down, still the same anger of that buzz cut sporting teenager. To the dismay of my parents, who probably wanted nothing more than for me to stop being so fucking angry all the time. Anger can often be a great motivator and guide. To hold myself accountable and having a goal to set out towards, I aimed for 500 books to start. I tried to be selective in curating my library. It was my library, after all. I researched books on civil and human rights, queer history and uprisings, memoirs and biographies, disability justice, public health and safety, zines on abortion and digital security, information on immigration and citizenship, amongst many others. From guides to keeping communities safe and supporting sexual assault survivors to queer erotica and Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction stories. I collected every single bell hooks’ book I could find. Every James Baldwin. Every Leslie Feinberg. All for the purpose of sharing amongst friends and community. With that, I had to find existent PDFs or EPUBs, or make scans of said books, import them into a spreadsheet including the author(s), genre, year published, and do enough research on the book to have general themes for each one. (My dear coworker reminding me periodically that Copy + Paste exist and that I did not have to type every single thing out manually. This truly was a labor of love.) I’d like to say I found a book for just about anyone. As it is currently published, I have uploaded 501 (1 for good luck!) books, zines, and various printouts that are accessible in PDF form to you and yours, to download, save, share, distribute, and print as you so desire. I even added a section for title or subject suggestions you’d like me to add in future updates, in case I’ve missed something that might be valuable to someone, and another to share which books you’ve checked out! And please, please, please continue (or start!) to visit your local libraries.
As I depart, I leave you with the words I’ve had pinned to my work email for the last three years. A reminder to myself (and hopefully you) that the only way to get through… is with other people. From Bryn Kelly’s essay Diving into the Wreck featured in the book We Want It All: An Anthology of Trans Radical Poetics:
“I wanna tell you, your life will be made sweet by comrades and friends. And it doesn’t come naturally. It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of effort. It takes chicken soup with matzoh balls when they’re sick. It takes a card or a call on a birthday. It takes lending them money when they don’t have it. It takes a lot of work to build friendship with the people with whom you struggle, but when you do, you get back twenty times what you invest. We need to get enough sleep. None of us should smoke! We have a very important job to do, and we need to stay alive and be healthy, and we have to help every one of our comrades to do the same, because when we do, our lives will be made sweet, and because I do, I am truly blessed. Figuring out how to live together is hard. To exist in community with people who constantly piss you of is exhausting, but ultimately: worth it. As Ms. Goldin says, it is sweet. But in between, there are these things that set our teeth on edge about each other, and we start smiling the kind of smiles that are about baring teeth to each other. We don’t let it show that it stings, or we shrug it off like it’s no big deal, and we keep a running catalog of hurts in our head and a dossier of every aesthetic political statement everyone we know has ever made in public and index it against our own internal emotional safety actuarial matrices. And sometimes, if we trust you, we send you a text, or give you a call, or whisper to you at a party, or point blank bring it up while we’re making you lunch: “Hey. Did you know you hurt me? Can we talk about that? I think I trust you enough to be vulnerable enough to tell you about this, even though it’s going to make me seem like an oversensitive bitch.” I suppose that’s just how you get through, with other people, because the only way to get through is with other people.”
Fare well ‘till softer times return.