From Harper’s BAZAAR
Alum Paul Fasana (M.L.S ’60) was a champion of LGBTQ causes through his scholarship and philanthropy. After graduating from Berkeley, Fasana began a long successful career in library administration. He credited his opportunities partly to his time at UC Berkeley, which he stated has “opened doors.” He established the Paul Fasana LGBTQ Studies Fellowship for School of Information graduate students whose research interests or studies are related to queer studies in any field or discipline in 2018.
The Unknown Librarian Who Saved Queer History
By
I’ve always loved public libraries. They were my refuge as an isolated, nerdy queer kid in the 1980s. They gave me my first jobs, and were the first places I found information about queer history. Limited, sure—but still better than anything I’d gotten from school, or my family, or on television, or anywhere else.
Unfortunately, these days public libraries are embattled spaces. My hometown of New York City is looking to cut $36 million from the library budget this year, a devastating blow to an already overburdened system. Librarians across the country have been attacked as groomers and pedophiles for simply allowing queer books on the shelves. Perhaps most troubling, Republican lawmakers and presidential hopefuls seem intent on driving queer content from the public sphere entirely—out of libraries and off school syllabuses. Somehow, for people who never seem to have set foot in a library in their lives, they understand this crucial truth: Destroying our history is the first step to destroying our present and future. As a result, independent and private queer archives—which may once have seemed quaint, parochial, or no longer necessary in our age of acceptance—now feel like our one essential firewall holding fast against the genocidal ’phobic fantasies of anti-queer bigots...
You probably don’t know the name Paul Fasana, but read enough LGBTQ history and he pops up in book after book over the last three decades—not in the text itself, but in the acknowledgments: Pink Triangle Legacies (2022); Language Before Stonewall (2019); Greetings From the Gayborhood (2008), Becoming Visible (1998). From 1995 until literally the week he died in April 2021, Fasana volunteered as chief archivist for the Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, one of the oldest and largest independent queer archives in the United States.
A working-class gay man and first-gen college student, Fasana came out in the late 1950s, while getting a master’s of library science at UC Berkeley (where he later established a scholarship for queer students). After rising through the ranks at the New York Public Library, he moved to Florida in the mid-’90s and began the herculean task of organizing SNMAL’s holdings...
