Responding to a court order requiring the city to reinstall an exhibit on gay pride that was ordered taken down by Mayor George Wuerch June 5, library staff at Anchorage’s Z. J. Loussac Public Library restored the display July 11, one day before the imposed deadline. “Celebrating Diversity under the Midnight Sun” will remain at the library for the next 30 days, according to Library Director Timothy P. Lynch, though without one component involving the library’s third-floor elevators, which had been decorated to resemble closets.
“Library patrons going into or out of the elevators would have symbolically ‘come out’ of the closet or taken their beliefs about homosexuality ‘into’ the closet,” the Anchorage Daily News reported July 10. Wuerch had initially objected to the exhibit because it was “promotional” in nature. But after the court order specified that the portion around the elevators could be moved adjacent to them, the city emphasized that its concern was for safety and did not want to force library patrons to interact with the display.
“It should never have been put up without modifications,” Lynch told American Libraries. “The sponsoring group was contacted and messages were left for them. When they came to put the display up that night, they were told they had to speak to me or to the facilities coordinator first.” But that didn’t happen, the display was installed, and “the next morning, when my boss met with the mayor and showed him the diagram, the mayor said it shouldn’t go up,” Lynch said, “not realizing that it already had.”
Lynch said that the library’s exhibit policy was “being reviewed by the city’s legal department before it goes back to the library board for possible changes.” It now allows the removal of any display that could trigger “substantial disruptions or material interference with primary library business” or that takes an advocacy position.
Posted July 16, 2001.