I want to be a librarian like this when I grow up

The Unknown Librarian Who Saved Queer History: You probably don’t know the name Paul Fasana. But the librarian was instrumental in preserving hundreds of thousands of artifacts of queer history

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. Since 1972, SNMAL has been a crucial safeguard of queer history—particularly queer Southern history—but like all independent queer archives, its fragile existence has long depended on volunteers like Fasana, passionate pencil pushers who perform the inglorious yet absolutely necessary day-to-day work.

By the time Fasana came on board, SNMAL’s holdings had grown precipitously, particularly as it rescued vast collections from men dying in the first wave of the AIDS crisis. Out of a jumble spread across three different warehouses, Fasana knit the collections together into one usable archive—an archive that has been powering queer scholarship and community in southern Florida and across the country ever since. Today, in honor of Fasana and his partner, Robert Graham, SNMAL’s collection is known as the Fasana/Graham Archive.

SNMAL is the Stonewall National Museum, Archives, and Library in Florida, not connected to the Stonewall Riots of 1969, but it's 50 years old (founded in 1972). For more on them, see their about page.

I've taken the Back-to-School Reading Challenge to raise money for the Trevor Project

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