By Ramona Roberts

If you've been going to lectures or buying textbooks at Memorial University (MUN), you may feel like you're on a totally heterosexual campus. Believe it or not, one of the easiest ways to find a queer oasis is to head over to the QEII library.

Unlike most of our profs, MUN librarians have already discovered queer writers and queer works. The library has queer love stories and poetry, queer history, coming out stories and much more -- all available to anyone.
Granted, finding the queers at the QEII can be a challenge. When I came to MUN, I had no idea that the library had queer stuff . It's not all arranged in a well-marked "Queer" section, or handily lumped under the call number Q.

Still, some frustrated digging and an afternoon with a librarian later, I was hooked.
That's when I began what became my main academic activity at MUN: lugging home stacks of books with "lesbian" in the title, with a huge grin on my face.
Call me a nerd, but it just feels good to see novels, magazines and even research studies with queers on the covers.
If you'd like your own pile of queer content, there's no need to come out to a librarian or drive yourself nuts on the search computer. The librarians may have rejected my proposal for a comfily furnished Centre for Queer Studies, but I did learn how to use their system to find the queers. And you can too -- here's how.

First, the library might have books you've heard about. If you already have a specific author or title in mind, you're all set. Search by "author" on UNICORN (the library's computer search system), and everything in the library by that author will come up. UNICORN also has a "title" search option that works the same way.

If you're not looking for a particular book, try a "keyword" search. When you enter a keyword, UNICORN will call up every item that has that word anywhere in its description. This includes the author's name, the title, the subjects of the book and the publisher. (So if you search for "dyke" you get "Old Dyke Tales," "Dyke Life," biographies of Dick van Dyke, and histories of the Netherlands too.)

Don't worry if your keyword search turns up thousands of titles. You can narrow down the search by adding "AND" and a second keyword. This'll let you limit the scope of your search to, say, "lesbian AND catholic" or "gay AND fiction".
You can also save time by searching for several similar words at once. Type the root word, a "$" sign and the number of different possible endings (like "lesbian$3) and you'll get listings with all of the possible words (like "lesbian," "lesbians," "lesbianism").
I can tell you from trying that you'll get results if you plug in any of these keywords: "lesbian," "gay," "bisexual," "homosexual," "transgender," "transsexual," "dyke" or "queer."

Once you've found one great book, you can often find others from the same publisher. Just enter the publisher's name as a keyword. To start off, try these publishers, which publish many queer-theme books: Press Gang, Naiad, SisterVision, Alyson Books, Crossing, Seal, Firebrand, and Stonewall Inn Editions (a division of St. Martin's Press).
Like I said, most of the library's queer content is scattered throughout the stacks, shelved with other fiction, poetry, plays, etc. But for one-stop shopping, visit the HQ76 section in the stacks, on the fourth floor. It's the "queer" part of the sociology section.
Many famous queers, like MP Svend Robinson, the first openly gay Member of Parliament, have spent their university years in the HQ76 section of their libraries.
Here, you can find coming out stories, self-help books, books on queer parents, children and families, histories of queer movements, and studies of queer identity.
If you're feeling more adventurous, QEII also has several queer-theme bibliographies in Reference, on the main floor. These are selected lists of queer-theme works, which the library doesn't necessarily have. But it's a good place to get a list of authors and publishers to search for.
To find the queer-theme bibliographies, just do a keyword search for things like "gay/queer/etc. AND bibliography."
One of the snazziest bibliographies is Fiction Catalogue, which is an annual list of selected fiction in print, with brief plot summaries of each book. This isn't a specifically queer-theme resource, but it does have books under the subject headings of "homosexuality," "bisexuality" and "lesbian."

I've found a lot of great stuff using all of these methods, but I've also gotten a few nasty surprises.
Not all of the library's queer-theme books are positive or supportive, particularly in the psychiatry, psychology and religion categories. I've found manuals on "curing homosexuality" right next to really supportive books on coming out. So browse carefully.
You can also let the library know what's lacking in their collection.
Just get a request form from the QEII information desk. The library acquisitions committee eventually has to read all of these forms, and it's one of the ways they choose books to order.
So you don't have to blow your budget buying books, or resign yourself to reading the straight and narrow. Just head down to the QEII, get comfy at a UNICORN terminal and start browsing the queers.

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