Scratch nearly any kind of story—political, social, economic, cultural, and so on—and you’ll find a labor story. No matter what’s happening, whether it’s an environmental disaster, an art opening, or a contentious school board meeting, it’s taking place in someone’s workplace, involves the fruits of someone’s labor, or someone is being called in to clean up afterward. Public libraries are no exception, and Republicans’ current headline-grabbing obsession with what goes on inside them is very much a labor issue.
By targeting public libraries, Republicans and other far-right groups have not only launched an attack on the principles of free speech, diversity, inclusion, and access to knowledge, they’ve also taken direct aim at library workers themselves. Whether they’re pushing for increasingly draconian book bans on queer and trans authors and authors of color, violently protesting drag queen story hours, or directly threatening library workers, far-right activists are creating a hostile work environment for the nation’s librarians, administrators, and other workers who keep the public library system running. LGBTQ+ library workers are particularly vulnerable.
“The rise in anti-LGBTQ+ incidents in our libraries tracks with the national increase in hate incidents, and they’re not limited to states with different political majorities or geographic location,” says Nicholas A. Brown, COO of Communication and Outreach for the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System in Maryland. “LGBTQ+ staff [including those in leadership roles] and allies are increasingly feeling threatened and unsafe because of these incidents, which are increasing in frequency.”
The conservative-manufactured culture war that’s swirling around education and public libraries not only harms the communities—including children—who rely on those systems, it also places a heavy burden on the workers themselves. Brown’s library system has suffered multiple instances of vandalism over the past several years, including during Pride Week, as well as the disruption of a discussion of LGBTQ+ literature by a self-identified “anti-LGBT” activist.
In addition, he says that library staffers have received threats, complaints, and harassment on social media as well as in person; some have even been doxxed, and had their photos posted publicly to invite further abuse. “These threats are happening in every state, and they’re intensifying,” Brown says.
“Public libraries have always been good at adapting, but how much of adaptation is capitulation worries me in times like these,” says Tori Patrick, a staffer at the Daniel Boone Regional Library in Columbia, Missouri, and member of its staff union. “As a trans library worker, I’m seeing my human rights and my career attacked at the same time, and while it is certainly exhausting and frightening, I try to find hope in the ways our community shows up for us day after day.”
The support has been necessary. Republican politicians in the Missouri legislature recently made headlines by trying to defund the state’s entire public library system, a shockingly cynical move fueled entirely by ideological spite. In February, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Missouri Association of School Librarians, and the Missouri Library Association challenged a vaguely worded new Missouri state law banning “sexually explicit material” from school libraries—a move designed to impact hundreds of titles, many of them written by or about LGBTQ+ people or people of color.
In response, Republican House Budget Committee Chairman Cody Smith proposed simply cutting all $4.5 million in library funding from the state budget for the next fiscal year—a proposal passed by the state house of representatives that is now awaiting a vote in the state senate.
“Anyone who works in local government or serving the public need in general is more than familiar with feeling like we never have enough resources to fully do our duty,” says Patrick Johnston, a Circulation Assistant-Lead at the Daniel Boone Regional Library and member of its staff union. “Watching our funding being used as a political football again is as exhausting as it is disappointing. We’ve always done the best we can with what we have and will continue to do so whatever may come.”
Smith’s gambit seems to have failed this time—Senator Lincoln Hough, the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said on April 4 that the library funding would be restored to the budget—but the threat of lost funding is very real, and has been used to punish public library workers who push back on book bans.
Conservative activists in Jamestown, Michigan, successfully persuaded voters to defund their own public library in 2022 after librarians resisted demands to remove books with LGBTQ+ themes from the shelves. A similar drama is playing out in Llano County, Texas, where a federal judge ruled that books that were removed (including Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and other books on race and LGBTQ+ themes) after complaints from a conservative group of parents must be returned to the library system. Two weeks after the judge’s ruling was announced, county officials scheduled a special meeting for April 13 to discuss shutting down the entire county library system.
I also spoke with a high school librarian in Idaho, another state where Republicans and far-right groups have been clamoring for book bans and harassing librarians for doing their jobs. The librarian (who requested anonymity for safety reasons) expressed frustration at the legislative threats—and worse—that have continued eating into library workers’ time and taking resources away from their communities.
“Some librarians have been harassed by right-wing groups like the Idaho Freedom Foundation, and many have had to sit through challenge meetings where they’re told by patrons/parents that they’re sexualizing children, grooming them, and providing pornography and obscene materials in libraries,” the librarian says. “This adds undue stress, not to mention excessive time reading books/preparing for challenge meetings, added time to prequalify books for purchase [they must be posted on the district website for 10 days for public comment], and time to follow, research, fight legislation, and advocate for ourselves. We’re exhausted, and this takes away time and energy we would be spending on our main job—creating lifelong readers.”
Rowan Walsh, another DBRL worker and union member, has a similar assessment. “It’s frustrating and exhausting and frightening,” Walsh says of the culture war enveloping the profession. “It’s dovetailed with increasing attacks on bodily autonomy, on POC, on queer communities and scholarship. And it’s alarming, as a trans worker, to watch the rhetoric ramp up, and wondering if our admin will act to support us or simply bend to pressure. Banning books disproportionately hurts and impacts already vulnerable community members.”
Every library worker I spoke to for this piece emphasized two things: first, that they are struggling, and second, that community support has been a massive help during a frightening wave of censorship and repression. Library workers provide vital services to their communities, and as far-right politicians continue to try to ban books, distort the truth, and erase marginalized peoples’ histories, librarians will be there to fight them every step of the way. But they can’t do it alone.
“Solidarity matters more than ever,” says Johnston of the Daniel Boone Regional Library in Missouri. “Together we can do anything. Reach out to your local library and ask the workers what they need; they will know best. Sign up for a library card if you [haven’t] already. Take your kids. Yell at politicians. Anything—just don’t forget us. As a trans library worker right now, it’s a bit much feeling like the state is singling you out very specifically, but we’re sure as hell not going anywhere.”
Kim Kelly is an independent journalist, author, and organizer whose writing on labor, politics, class, and culture has appeared in Teen Vogue, Rolling Stone, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, and many other publications. Her first book, Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor, is out now via One Signal/Simon & Schuster. She is currently working on her second book.
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