Glasgow Women's Library - then and now

We’ve recently finished writing up some research we conducted last year, asking lesbians about their coming out experiences, including things that helped and things that made the whole thing more difficult. We’ll be making our report available in the next few weeks.

Something that has emerged very clearly in our research is that, for a lot of us, seeing ourselves reflected in the world makes a huge difference, whether in terms of knowing other lesbians, reading books about lesbians or hearing about other lesbians on TV or online. Today, we visited Glasgow Women’s Library, a place that was important to me when I started coming out as a lesbian in the 1990s.

I was in my twenties when I started to come out, and I didn’t know any other lesbians and was very anxious. I had moved into a flatshare, answering an advert for a ‘gay-friendly flatmate’ and feeling like I was being really bold, but I hadn’t even managed to talk properly to the gay man or the lesbian I was sharing the flat with – years later it came to light that they had thought of me as their straight flatmate throughout that whole time.

I joined Glasgow Women’s Library, which at the time was up several flights of stairs in a building in the Trongate in the middle of Glasgow. I used to arrive at the top of the stairs in an out-of-breath, nervous state, but the women in the library had created a space that was not only comforting and welcoming, it was openly lesbian-friendly.

One of the volunteers at the time, an older lesbian, used to try to encourage me to have a look around the Lesbian Archive, situated upstairs in the library. Despite her efforts at putting me at ease, I wasn’t ready for that, but I did borrow a lot of lesbian books. The women in the library would go out of their way to talk to me about the lesbian authors whose works I had selected. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was living through a kind of golden era for lesbians, in which I had found a place staffed with other lesbians who wanted me to feel comfortable and welcome.

At that time, the library’s policy was that men could visit the library by prior appointment, and they could not visit the Lesbian Archive at any time.

Before we made our visit to Glasgow Women’s Library today (now in its latest home in the East of Glasgow), we already knew things had changed. The library has, in recent years, cancelled a booking by For Women Scotland. GWL’s current statement on ‘women-only’, in relation to women-only events, is, ‘All women-only opportunities and events are inclusive of Trans and Intersex women, as well as non-binary and gender fluid people’, a statement so all-encompassing that there seems no point in making any distinction between their women-only and open-access events.

In some respects, our visit to GWL today showed traces of the library of old. We were greeted by a friendly woman at the front desk, who asked us if we had been there before and if we’d like her to tell us about the library. She talked us through the building and its contents, adding that it had previously been a Carnegie library with a large reading room for men and a much smaller one for women. Apropos of nothing, given that we are two women, she then advised us that men are very welcome in the library and that the toilets are gender-neutral.

We had a look around. One space was being used for an exhibition of the library’s history. The main space was the library itself. We sought out the lesbian section, but found that lesbian authors were mixed in with the general fiction. There was a small non-fiction ‘LGBT’ section, with books on transitioning sitting side-by-side with lesbian titles.

There was absolutely no sign of the Lesbian Archive, despite GWL being the custodians of the UK’s lesbian archives since the 1990s. The woman on the desk had made no mention of the archive, and GWL’s web page about it hasn’t been updated since 2017.

When we criticise Glasgow Women’s Library, it’s not the simple criticism of a service that misses the mark. It’s much more personal than that. The library was in its time pivotal for me, in terms of seeing myself reflected in a place and being encouraged to feel at ease, at a time when I was struggling with these things. It is heartbreaking to think that a young lesbian visiting the library today would already need to know which authors to search for, would be completely unaware that somewhere in the building there is a Lesbian Archive, and would be told at the door that the library is also a place for men, rather than welcomed as a nervous lesbian as I was.  

For a place to be truly women- and lesbian-centred, it needs to be overtly and unapologetically so. By peppering its language and literature with references to being gender-neutral and all-inclusive, and by hiding its lesbian resources, GWL has forfeited the culture that once made it unique.