Lisa Houde's Serving LGBTQ Teens: A Practical Guide for Librarians (2018)

Houde, L. (2018). Serving LGBTQ teens: A practical guide for librarians (35-53). New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield.
   
    Houde’s (2018) text is a great resource for anyone looking to serve LGBTQ teens; chapter 4, in particular, concentrates on the collection - first reviewing the history of LGBTQ lit, discussing concerns some librarians may have when considering titles for this group, as well as tips on assessing and maintaining the collection.
    For anyone selecting titles for YA, there has been a noticeable surge in LGBTQ titles in the last 10-15 years: answering Houde’s (2018) subtitle for this chapter - “Will they find themselves at the library?” (p. 35) - the answer is, ‘More likely now than before.’ As Houde explains, LGBTQ titles went from only 40 titles in the 80s, to still only 75 titles in the 90s, to 493 titles in the first decade of the 2000s (Houde, citing Cart & Jenkin’s 2015 work). While this certainly is an improvement, selectors need to be mindful of the many identities that exist within this group, and titles that someone who is transgender, intersex, or bisexual can relate to may be harder to find, but not impossible.
    Houde addresses the many concerns that librarians may have when selecting LGBTQ titles. Houde (2018) is clear: “There are truly no defensible reasons to exclude LGBTQ materials from any library collection” (p. 39), but nonetheless discusses them (paraphrasing Gough & Greenblatt’s 1990 work) - in part to put these excuses to rest, in part to encourage those who feel intimidated by the possible backlash. Here are a few:
Gay People Don’t Live in My Community
Citing 2014 and 2016 statistics, Houde notes that those who identify as LGBTQ increased from 3.4 percent to 4.1 percent; Houde adds that sites like Wikipedia show that, state by state, “there are LGBTQ people in every library community” and that Gough’s work “points out that there are certainly LGBTQ people living in towns that are large enough to support a public library” (p. 39).
Gay People Don’t Seem to Use My Library
Naturally following is the belief that those who do identify as LGBTQ don’t even frequent your library. Houde notes the obvious dangers of trying to identify who is LGBTQ; internal statistics may not show who is a part of this group, as members may not indicate who they are but nonetheless use the materials.
I Don’t Feel Qualified to Order These Materials
This “problem” allows Houde (2018) to be the most encouraging: “Gough states here that no librarian is uniquely qualified to order books about any given topic; they are by no means experts in every topic about which they have to order materials” (p. 40). There are tools that can be used to select materials for any group, tools readily available to the librarian that wishes to surpass excuses that have stifled the collection. 
I’m Uncomfortable with What Some of These Materials Are About / That Stuff Doesn’t Belong in Libraries—at Least Not in My Library / I Don’t Approve of Homosexuality or Homosexuals
Houde (2018) makes the role of the librarian clear:  “Librarians are trained to refrain from passing moral judgments on an item when evaluating its other aspects (the item’s level of technical difficulty, currency, price, etc.)” ( citing Gough and Greenblatt (1990, p. 8), p. 40), adding that librarians have an obligation to “not permit what may be their own personal perspectives, and even distaste, of library materials to interfere with equitable collection development for all groups” (p. 40).