Out on the Shelf

The Ontarion - News
October 27, 2005
OUT ON THE SHELF
Written by Meghan Moloney

A new resource library and centre for the queer community, called Out On The Shelf, had its official opening on Thursday, October 20th. 

Located in downtown Guelph, the centre includes fiction and non-fiction books, magazines, comics, newspapers, and other resources geared towards the queer community. The two-dollar membership fee covers book borrowing; access to the centre itself is free. 

In addition to resource materials, the centre is also a welcoming space for queer people and their allies who wish to meet with friends, ask questions, participate in events run by volunteer organizers, or just to hang out. 

The volunteers who have worked over the last two years to create this space all agree on one thing: the need for a queer-positive location in Guelph, accessible to the general public. Dave Vervoort is a therapist who works with the queer community and has been one of the main organizers of Out On The Shelf.

“Guelph on the whole has been a fairly open-minded city to the queer community," he said at the opening. "We knew on the whole that things were supportive here, yet we had no place to congregate. People don’t want to meet in the bars... certainly some people do, but not everybody.”

Echoing Vervoort, Bruce Buchanan – a Hamilton community member – explained that bars shouldn’t be the only spaces available to people. 

“Being a gay person, most resources we have are bars, and they’re open on the weekend, and they’re not necessarily the place you want to go and meet somebody, or visit,” he said. As a representative of smaller queer communities in southern Ontario, he described Toronto as a “Mecca” for gay people; however, according to Buchanan, “For people within the small communities, the rural communities that live outside of Guelph or Hamilton, it’s a lot easier for people to drive into our locations to get that information about what’s going on.” 

Buchanan, in collaboration with the Centenary United Church, is planning to open a library similar to Guelph’s Out On The Shelf centre. He currently runs a restaurant in Hamilton called the Comfortable Pew – “a place where you can go have lunch, and visit with friends and meet up with people, in a very safe environment.”

As well as being a safe and positive meeting space, Out On The Shelf is also an important way to dispense information to the queer community. Vervoort, along with the SpeakOut program, has produced a pamphlet called the Guelph Queer Resource Guide, which lists local services, businesses and entertainment spots that are queer-positive or provide important resources to the community. 

Vervoort stressed the importance of having a physical space like Out On The Shelf to dispense this kind of information, in addition to networks of activist groups and support systems. He also emphasized the collective effort that has gone into this opening: instead of focusing on the original six volunteers, he says, “We’d rather people know that it’s a community effort – it’s a lot of volunteers that came together to pull this off.” 

The centre is the result of more than two years of collaboration between groups of activists involved in the queer community, including PFLAG (Parents, Families & Friends of Lesbians and Gays), Ally organizations, Change Now, and University of Guelph organizations such as Guelph Queer Equality (GQE), OutLine, and the Women’s Resource Centre. 

Out On The Shelf has also benefited from numerous donations: Vervoort mentioned Pink Triangle Services, a non-profit charity and social service agency based in Ottawa, and the Dr. Kelly McGinnis library, as having donated “well over half the books”; the Wellness Centre donated 1000 dollars of seed money, to help with production costs like photocopying. The Canadian Mental Health Association was an essential supporter of the centre: volunteer Tahira Dosani said, “They let us use the space, don’t charge us rent, have given us a phone line and they were really supportive in creating the initiative.”

One of the key goals of the centre is to bring together various parts of the Guelph community and its members. “The best thing about this project from my perspective,” said Vervoort, “is that it’s brought together a diverse group of people within the queer community, and a diverse group of Straight Allies, to come together – and we all have our differences, but we’re able to come together and work collaboratively.” Vervoort also points out that much of the financial support being given to queer resource centres in Canada goes to “the metropolitan cities – Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal.” The hope of many volunteers is that people from rural areas who come to Out On The Shelf – including university students – will be inspired to create similar spaces and start similar initiatives, outside of larger cities and without extensive financial support.

The centre hopes to run many events in the coming months, including readings from authors and collaborations with the Bookshelf. Rob Gartner, another volunteer, also plans to run promotional events with the university: “There’s a large pool of people [on campus] who have questions about life, and that we wanted to approach, and to be able to promote and also let them know that this exists.”