Real life, storybook ideals collide
One woman's display on gay authors led to Hillsborough County banning support of gay events.
By RODNEY THRASH
Published July 2, 2005
TAMPA - "You were in the New York Times," her mother said in an e-mail.
She turned to Page 17, the A section. Sure enough, in the fourth paragraph, there was the young woman from Vero Beach, the daughter of a postal worker father and store clerk mother.
Perhaps Meagan Albright would have shared her mother's joy if the story had been about something else.
But this? This was nothing to be proud of.
"Florida County Ending Official Support of Gay Events," the headline read.
It was her gay authors exhibit that drew complaints from three visitors to the West Gate Regional Library in Town 'N Country. Her pamphlets that prompted a Hillsborough commissioner to introduce an ordinance that prohibits county government from acknowledging or promoting gay pride and events.
Her posterboard that made Tampa and Hillsborough County the epicenter of a national debate on homosexuality.
And to think: All Albright wanted was an A on her graduate school final.
Television and Nintendo were not permitted in the Albright household. Books were.
Her mother read her The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien when Albright was 6 years old.
Even at the dinner table, over meals of lasagna, salad and garlic bread, Albright and her two brothers were engrossed in books.
Albright said she doesn't have a favorite book; she has five, depending on her mood.
1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. 2. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. 3. The Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. 4. The Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis.
5. The Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien. "It can relax me," Albright, 24, said of reading. "It can transport me to a place that I would have never seen otherwise. It opens doorways to new worlds.
"I know that sounds kind of cheesy, but I sincerely believe that. I want to show those doorways to other people."
It made sense that when Albright started college in Jacksonville at the University of North Florida in 1999, she would major in something related to books.
She settled on English, with a minor in philosophy.
As a teenager, Albright worked at local bookstores.
She enjoyed working with people, but she said she did not like "selling things as much."
One day, Albright was talking to a friend about graduate school. The friend said she was thinking about studying something called library science.
At that moment, Albright realized that "that's exactly what I need to do."
Albright had two options for graduate school: Tallahassee or Tampa. She visited both places and settled on the University of South Florida.
Last spring, she enrolled in a popular online elective: Multicultural and Special Population Materials for Children and Young Adults. The course is designed to help future librarians understand how to serve underrepresented communities.
As a final project, the professor, Dr. Linda Alexander, asked the students to design an Inclusion/Awareness Program for a children's or young adult public library. She told students they could create pamphlets, posters and fliers about one of the 14 cultures covered in her course. A handful of students selected the gay, lesbian and transgender theme. Albright, who is not gay, was one of them.
It was an easy choice. June was Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.
She had gay and lesbian friends who said that if libraries in their communities had displays like hers, maybe they wouldn't have spent their teenage years feeling weird and alone.
And she had read and seen the statistics:
- Gay and lesbian teens, she found, were two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers.
- One in four gay teens, she said, is forced to leave home over conflicts with parents about sexual identity.
Over two weeks, she cut and pasted multicolored letters on black posterboard.
Famous Bisexual, Lesbian, Gay and Transgender People!
There were black and white photographs of Ellen DeGeneres, Elton John, Frida Kahlo and others. She created a pamphlet of support groups and Web sites. It's okay to be gay, the back of the pamphlet read.Alexander, her professor, gave it an A.
The display went up May 31 at the West Gate Regional Library in the Town 'N Country section of west Hillsborough where Albright worked as a part-time librarian.
The library received its first complaint June 4. Two more people lodged complaints June 6. Albright expected that. That's one of the reasons she consulted her supervisor, Elvia Vera. But she did not expect what happened next. Tampa-Hillsborough Public Library System officials decided the display had to go.
Not because of the theme, they said. Aesthetically, it wasn't professional enough.
"If I didn't think that it looked very good," said Vera, the principal librarian of the West Gate Regional Library, "I wouldn't have allowed it up."
Albright tried to work out a compromise with chief librarian Jean Peters. She would not budge.
Albright could not dismantle the display herself. She was busy helping library patrons. She remembers glancing toward the entrance and seeing the poster coming down.
It was a surreal moment, Albright said. The display is now in the trunk of her car.
That night, Albright wrote a letter. One and a half pages. Single-spaced.
The profession of librarianship has a responsibility to raise public awareness, provide materials and services for all segments of society and to promote the diverse interests of the population. As a librarian and a compassionate human being, I cannot remain silent on the injustices of the issue occurring in the Tampa library system.
She sent it to her class e-mail list, Alexander, the ACLU, Equality Florida, the director of the Tampa-Hillsborough Public Library System and the Florida Library Association.The response was immediate.
The first story appeared in the St. Petersburg Times on June 8, on the eve of Albright's 24th birthday.
Library officials said the display could go back up. Smaller and in a more discreet location. The adult-only section.
Albright was not at County Center June 15, the day Commissioner Ronda Storms introduced an ordinance asking the county government to abstain from acknowledging gay pride or events.
She was at school.
Alexander, her professor, tried to speak in support of Albright. Her name was too far down on the list.
For the life of her, she does not understand how a library exhibit turned into a debate on homosexuality. She thinks this is an issue of intellectual freedom.
"If it had been on any other topic," Alexander said, this would not have have been an issue. "This is . . . a topic that a lot of people have a lot of fears about.
"To me this is an intellectual freedom issue, a First Amendment issue. It's not a gay issue, but it became a gay issue."
Some patrons don't understand the hoopla either.
"It's such a shame," said Mei Bisaillon, a Town 'N Country mother to fourth-, eighth- and ninth-graders. "I don't think the display was to offend somebody. It was more to enlighten somebody. People are not ignorant. Just because it's not spoken of doesn't mean it's not there. Our children, these days, are more sophisticated than that."
In a way, Albright said, the controversy is a good thing.
"I think that (Commissioner Storms) has done a great deal to motivate the LGBT community, so that in a way she may end up doing much more good than she does harm on this issue," she said.
On Thursday, Vera and colleagues at West Gate gave Albright a farewell party. Not because of the episode of the last month. She decided months ago that she would return to Jacksonville and complete her graduate degree online.
She said the woman who arrived in Tampa in August is not the same woman today.
"I've lost some naivete," Albright said. "But it's made me even more resolved to hold onto to my professional ethics and to stand up for the issues I believe in."
- Rodney Thrash can be reached at 727 893-8352 or rthrash@sptimes.com