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Abstract: "Independence Brings Safety In A Lot of Ways and Unsafety in Others": Information Loss and Narrative Value in LGBTQIA+ Communities
In information science and, more broadly, popular culture, we tend to focus on information excesses or dearths of information. What we miss with both extremes are information's situational and temporal elements. For LGBTQIA+ populations who face unique challenges and barriers due to cisheteronormative biases, information access fluctuates. While purposeful queer-affirming information work exists within and between LGBTQIA+ individuals and their communities, maintaining informational resources and spaces must be addressed with sustainability. Such spaces and resources, if not maintained by the labor of dedicated individuals or provided with institutional support, both financial and structural, often disappear. These absences require LGBTQIA+ communities to reengage in the curatorial vetting process or potentially accept the information as inextricably lost. This paper reports on ongoing research involving, at the time of submission, 15 semi-structured interviews with US LGBTQIA+ adults who have lost access to at least one LGBTQIA+ information resource or space. While we structured data collection to ascertain typologies of loss and practice-based responses, participants organically leaned into storytelling elements when recounting the spaces they lost and their importance. Many participants expressed a desire for the history of their spaces and resources to be documented so they might share with other LGBTQIA+ individuals effective practices and approaches to emulate and recreate such spaces and resources. This underscores the crucial role of information professionals in supporting LGBTQIA+ communities. Libraries and information professionals, in turn, could learn from these stories of loss, documentation, and recreation. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the reasons for the loss of LGBTQIA+ information spaces and resources and examines how the participants conceptualized the information values lost resulting from the disappearance of the unanticipated absence of information. Key findings include the highlight of how the loss of LGBTQIA+ information spaces often occurs as a result of exclusionary practices resulting from intersectional issues such as ableism and racism within LGBTQIA+ information spaces. Additional loss comes from resources and spaces, often due to economic demands, becoming co-opted by or oriented towards cisgender and heterosexual individuals, thus resulting in spaces reproducing the biases once carefully excised from such information. Findings contextualize values associated with lost information spaces and resources to include affective and emotional connections, the provision of multiple types of LGBTQIA+ information in one setting (i.e., health and cultural information); and geographic proximity. The paper utilizes these findings to theorize how information professionals might offer support through sustaining both resource and space-based needs of LGBTQIA+ communities. In particular, findings emphasize how to collaborate with and through the individuals who have responded to such loss by creating or curating new spaces and resources or by documenting the historical spaces that have since been lost to time. Findings emphasize the role of information professionals in providing tools and technologies to support this work, rather than intervening on behalf of the communities, and look towards how approaches inform practices ranging from place-based outreach to digital resource stewardship.