In theory, that space is curated for everyone in your community. Your local librarians use the physical space of the library to create a wide-ranging series of recommendations and possible reads, and in the best-case scenario, the books they choose to highlight encompass the widest possible definition of who belongs in your community. The library offers a quiet place to explore a new hobby, research a new interest, get invested in a new novel series, or finally find the words that help you explain yourself to yourself.
The internet age should have made finding those words easier, but in practice, it has proved surprisingly limiting as a tool to discover new ideas and possible selves. The initial promise of the internet was that it would bring the entire world to your home, but in the algorithm era, a number of corporations have taken that endless possibility and narrowed it down considerably. There is no attempt to get you to think about others, not really. There is, instead, an attempt to just keep you consuming, usually by serving up things the algorithm is pretty sure you already like.
In an age dominated by algorithms, going to a good library feels a little like replenishing your brain with the variety of all that is available to you in the world. That might serve as a saving grace in a time when so many of us long for that decompression, at least a little bit.
That very quality of libraries is what’s under attack. What might undo libraries is an insistence that they should reflect only one view of reality, one that has little room for queer people in particular. Thus, when right-wing complainants issue grievances about books featuring queer characters or programs like drag queen story hour, it’s not hard to see these pushes as part of a larger movement to limit or turn back the gains queer people have made in visibility over the last two decades. If the library is one of the last remaining pieces of our public square, then pushing queer people out of it (or into a quiet, unmentioned closet only the librarian can access) is, in effect, an attempt to push us out of public life.
In an era when you can tell an algorithm not to show you something, it’s tempting to imagine continuing to cordon off the public square into 335 million carefully curated walled gardens of the self, an individualized America for every single person. But without public spaces where you can encounter new ideas, even by simply seeing the titles of books you might never read, you can never realize if the garden you’re in is the one you want to be in. The library is worth defending not just because it’s important to our society as a whole. It’s important because it helps us understand lives we believe to be unlike ours, understanding that can help us unlock our most empathetic and authentic selves.