Pride Library

Pride Library

Interior of the Pride Library.
Type	located in D.B. Weldon Library at The University of Western Ontario,
Established	1997
Collection
Items collected	books, videocassettes, DVDs, slides of paintings and posters; periodicals; and community magazines.
Size	6000 items
Criteria for collection	By and about LGBTQIAP+ people.
Website	Pride Library Website

The Pride Library is a collection of books, periodicals, and audio-visual resources by and about gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, and other queer folk. Located in the D.B. Weldon Library at The University of Western Ontario, the Pride Library is the first official queer resource center at a Canadian university. Since its founding in the Faculty of Arts in the late 1990s, The Pride Library has grown rapidly with the support of donors, volunteers, faculty, and administrators at The University of Western Ontario.

The Pride Library collection consists of over 6000 catalogued items: scholarly books; popular novels; videocassettes and DVDs of queer documentaries and feature films; slides of paintings and posters by queer artists; academic periodicals; and community magazines. Over 15 languages are represented in the collection. Subjects include the Gay Liberation Movement, gay and lesbian literary history, coming out, women's health and safety, homophobia, bisexuality, trans life, pornography, censorship, and same-sex marriage. Also included in the collection are early sexology works, homophobic classics, and queer pulps from the 1950s and 1960s.

Special collections include the Hudler Archives and the Burroughs Collection. The Hudler Archives is named after Richard Hudler, a local activist who served as president of the Homophile Association of London Ontario (HALO) from 1981 to 1995. The archives include the HALO community records, Hudler's personal papers, literary manuscripts, newspaper clippings, legal files, photographs documenting queer social history in London, and the catalogues of the Visual AIDS poster exhibition from 1988 through 1995. Exhibits of archival materials (Body Politic covers, HALO files, and Visual AIDS posters) can be viewed online at the library website. The William S. Burroughs Collection—Burroughs, celebrated for being both subversive and surreal, is the author of Naked Lunch (1959) and Queer (1985)—includes fictional works as well as autobiographies, essays, and interviews.

The Pride Library was founded by Professor James Miller in his office in the Tower of University College in 1997. In the summer of 2005 it was relocated on the main floor of the Weldon Library at the heart of the campus and officially reopened on February 14, 2006. Every aspect of the library was carefully designed and chosen to reflect its unique mandate and to welcome visitors into a distinctively queer space.