The American lesbian civil rights organization Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), founded in 1955, is not usually associated with book collecting or amateur bibliography, but part of its original mission was to encourage its local chapters to collect “as complete a library as possible” of lesbian-relevant titles for its members’ use. In this article, I argue that the DOB's chapter libraries belong to a larger history of alternative reading spaces developed by marginalized groups and, as such, deserve attention both within the history of librarianship and the growing field of queer bibliography. I briefly survey some of the surviving records of DOB libraries from the chapters in San Francisco and New York before turning to a longer discussion of the library of the Boston DOB chapter, which survived long after the DOB's national organization disbanded. The Boston DOB librarian's monthly newsletters offer a particularly detailed account of the development of one DOB library in the 1980s, when lesbian literature was rapidly expanding. Located in their chapter offices and thus offering a physical space where members could not only find information but connect with each other and come out, the DOB libraries reveal some of the radical potential of queer community librarianship in the later twentieth century. I conclude by suggesting what we might learn from the example of these libraries in our own increasingly fraught political moment.
Amanda Watson (Sat,) studied this question.