 All right everyone, welcome back. So right now I'd like to welcome to the stage Molly Hitching and Yasmeh Dalmazzo. They're both with Alameda County Library and they will be speaking with us today about responding to hate lessons learned about LGBTQIA plus programming. So much lower. Hi everybody, welcome. So we'll introduce ourselves in just a second but as was shared we're going to be presenting on responding to hate and we're going to give you a sense of what we're going to be talking about and then we'll introduce ourselves and get started. So we're going to share who we are, what we do. We're going to talk a little bit about the specific Proud Boys attack that happened at the branch where we're located. We're going to talk about our libraries, kind of changing world of libraries, how the context of doing programming and a lot of things about libraries is changing, has changed. We're going to talk about our branch specific response, our approach to LGBTQ programming, particularly in light of all these events, some of those program wins and challenges and then of course some lessons learned. So as you might guess from the title and topic of our conversation, who want to offer a content warning, we will be talking about things related to hate speech, we will be talking about Proud Boys, we will be talking about homophobia. So just take care of yourselves people. If at any point you need a minute, please feel free. I'm Yeltsma, my pronouns are he and they and I've been a library tech with San Lorenzo Library, which is part of Alameda County libraries for about three years. Ms. Molly, I'm a librarian at the San Lorenzo branch with Alameda County. I've been with the county for about five years and I've been doing queer centered programming kind of since I got there, but definitely have been kind of doing more and more of that the longer I've been here. So Molly's gonna share with us a little bit about what specifically kind of that incident at our library looked like. Yeah, so last year myself and one of our other colleagues, we were really excited to offer another drag story time. We were kind of just getting back into in person programming at that time, having a little bit of a slow return to bigger events like that. We had had a drag queen story hour previously prior to the pandemic in 2018 and there was a little bit of conflict. There were some people not too happy with that. We did have some demonstrators, but it was pretty low key and we were able to handle it. So we did see a few kind of red flags before the story time was scheduled to be kind of like bogus registrations, a few angry phone calls, social media comments, things like that, but that was very much in line with what we had experienced in the past. So we didn't really think anything more of that. We found ourselves pretty unprepared for our story time to be disrupted. So right at the beginning, in the middle of our welcome song, eight men burst into the room. They were shouting slurs and insults. They were filming their disruption probably and what we saw after that, clearly to make social media content for themselves. So they were using that as a tactic. We obviously immediately asked the men to leave. It was very clear that they were breaking numerous policies. So we asked them to leave. When they didn't, our manager did call the sheriff. We then just did our best to get everyone out of the space. So we got the families out. We got our performer out, made sure they were safe and just tried our best to remain calm and just deescalate the situation as much as possible until law enforcement was able to arrive. It took about 10 minutes for them to get there and in that time, they continued homophobic rhetoric. They were really latching on to visibly queer staff that was in the room in a very homophobic way. And once the deputies arrived, they were very relaxed about the whole situation. Almost seemed like they were a little annoyed that they even had to come and said some sort of vaguely sympathetic things to the proud boys in order to get them to leave. So they did leave eventually. At first, they just left the building and lingered outside, but then they did, it was actually the firefighters. We share parking lot with a fire department. The firefighters actually got them to move on. And so after we took a moment to regroup and we checked in with our performer, we were able to go ahead and finish the story time. There were a few shaken families that were really dedicated to still be there and attend. And so we were able to still continue and complete the event. But it was sort of the beginning of a shift in our library because for weeks afterwards, we got a lot. We got basically inundated with angry phone calls and hate mail and things like that. So while I wish that I could say what happened to our library was a very unique experience and probably wouldn't happen again, as probably everyone in this room has noticed, doing library work is in a very different context now. So these are just some data points to kind of offer what I imagine many of us anecdotally have a sense of, right? Just by the sheer number of book challenges, mostly done by three organizations. The number of laws against trans and queer folk that have been attempted, not necessarily passed. So there's so many indications that libraries as public spaces in the way that schools also are being contested as public spaces and sort of becoming this site for culture war, frankly. And mostly targeting whether it's books or programming or curriculum in schools that relates to people of color, specifically black people and LGBTQ programming, most specifically trans folks. And some of the tactics that we saw both in our experience and seem to be unfortunately a growing trend within the context of kind of having programmatic disruption or the phone calls or the social media that we got is really targeted at sort of diminishing availability of public space, the way that social media functions, right? People can just print very easily a list of books that their political affiliations thinks are terrible and then call everybody, making very personal posts on social media. Here's the phone number of this person, right? We had a lot of videos of our staff that were posted in various places. And also kind of disguising, we had a lot of the calls about either whether it was talking about peaceful protest or First Amendment rights, but really the reality of what's happening is pretty aggressive and very intimidating. And sort of a play, again, in our experience, but I think also mirrors a larger context is really a connection or an implied attempted connection with law enforcement. So when we do have sheriffs that show up, they're sort of, we sometimes have heard a mirroring of, well, even if you just don't like what they're saying, we can't ask them to leave and really not understanding the deeper implications of what's actually happening. So Mollie's gonna talk a little bit about our branch and sort of system-wide response to this specific incident. Yeah, so this horrible thing happens and we were getting a lot of hate, but also at the same time, it's important to mention we were getting a tremendous amount of support also from other parts of our community. Whereas, law enforcement wasn't especially helpful day of. Our local community leadership were an unincorporated area, so we don't have a mayor or anything like that, but our area supervisor contacted us and said, this is a horrible thing that happened. How can we work together to show that that is not what our community stands for? They were able to be very generous with some funding to help us make this plan happen, but our response was every month is Pride Month. If you got so mad that one month was Pride Month, let's do it the whole year round. So our main goals for at the beginning of this last year was to increase visibility, to create a more welcoming atmosphere and also to directly give back to affected and marginalized LGBTQ populations with this whole series of programs. And Yosemite will tell you a little bit more about our more specific approach. So as you might have guessed, Molly and I have been doing queer programming since day one, and even at the CERC desk, I most often get the queer reference questions, shocker, they're like, I see you. So it wasn't that we weren't doing these things before, it's just that it really helped us distill like what are the central things that are important to us with queer programming and frankly, a lot of different kinds of programming. So really creating visibility first and foremost, right? If I don't, even for myself, if I go into other spaces and there aren't physical markers of queerness or other POC, you have an assumption, right? Maybe the space isn't for me. So really explicitly creating library spaces, visibility in library spaces, visibility among staff, and in programming as well. Really a proactive, like we sort of borrowed, thinking about inclusivity, we kind of borrowed the lens of universal design if folks are familiar with that, with disability work. So rather than kind of waiting for someone to make an accommodation request, we just put wheelchairs in buildings, right? No brainer, we just do it. So a similar kind of thinking and lens about how do we create an inclusive space from the get. And that's from how we're doing the program, what space it's in, how we're inviting people in who we're partnering with. Certainly this event sparked a lot of conversation within our staff, our staff and other branches and with our library admin about a lot of things like a staff designing our own safety plan. So it's really, it's a way to kind of push forward these conversations that have implications for a lot of things beyond queer programming and safety planning, of course, safety planning and policies. We didn't really have them and didn't, you know, pretty quickly, thankfully our administration was like, oh yeah, we gotta get on it. Like what are the pieces we need? What models can we look at? What are the things we want to say? Who do we channel these angry phone calls to? So really thinking about it, this sort of was a catalyst for us to think about all those things. So Molly is gonna talk a little bit about some of our programmatic wins and then we'll talk about some of our programmatic challenges. Yay, lots of rainbow happiness on this slide. So I just wanna highlight a few of our most successful programs from the year and also to kind of just give you a sense of the variety of style and audience that we did offer throughout the year. We had three more successful drag story times since the 2022 incident. And we also, in addition to those three at our branch, we have had one at one of our other locations in Fremont as well since then. All of them have been pretty well attended. There's over 175 participants cumulatively, probably well over 175 if we include Fremont, which is a lot for us. Our program attendance is not massive. So even a small group is pretty mighty. We had a name change clinic partnering with Bay Area Legal Aid that we were able to connect 20 trans folks with free legal help to fill out name change and gender marker change paperwork. So that was a very tangible kind of program. We knew we were helping those individuals out. We had several programs that we called part of our Queer Lit Life series where we had local authors and poets share their work and have workshops and things. And we closed out the whole year with a Queer Comics Expo. We had three speaker panels, a dance class, arts and crafts, cosplayers and local artists, queer resources and vendors all there for the public. So some of our, oops, next slide. Some of our other kind of wins, as I was saying it really sparked conversation within our branch and branch wide. So at a branch level, we actually created our own safety plan, printed out a map of our building. Where would be the most appropriate spaces? We all walked around, where's the exit? What doors can we close and exit another, from another space in that contained room? Who's the contact person for the performer? Who's gonna get the families out? All of those kinds of conversations, the nuance of actually how we're gonna do it and then as part of our preparation before, we invited our performer, we all did a walkthrough. We also did an FAQ for desk staff and thankfully we had amazing support from our admin and our marketing folks that were like, yeah, hang up the dang phone. Like you don't need to be yelled at, you don't need people saying terrible things to you, that's not part of your job. So we had a much more closely monitoring all of our social media, monitoring if we had any registrations and then making kind of an FAQ. So even staff who weren't there on that day or a part of the planning the program felt like they had some resource. For our system, we actually created a film and photo policy, again, because filming was such a big tactic used at that in 2022 and actually one subsequent drag story time. They also did a lot of filming. So we created a film photo policy and so we had to look at what does the ALA say and libraries has publicly accessible buildings versus public spaces and is that different? And so we really had to create the policy that now thankfully we have a policy like behavior policy that we can say, actually, this isn't allowed in the library. Lots of staff conversations of course and then we had an every month is pride month planning team, but we also have a pride planning team. So even though the funding, this particular dedicated funding doesn't exist anymore, we're still doing the work, different scale and in different ways. And so that's kind of our system wide and because we're a county library, we were already kind of pushing our county in terms of like performer paperwork, so much paperwork and for our library paperwork we had lots of gender options but for some of our county, it's the same form, whether you're doing public health something or police something. And so we're already in conversation trying to change that, but we actually got traction with this, right? That this really got the county's attention, it's national news, they moved the needle on this conversation. So now we actually have county paperwork that our performers have to sign that has TGNC as an option. So Molly is gonna start sharing a little bit about some of the challenges. Yes, there were many. Number one, I would highlight for us specifically at our location, as I kind of mentioned before, we are an unincorporated area that can lead to a lot of kind of blind spots or lack of resources or kind of point people to directly turn to. So we don't have an LGBTQ center, we don't have a senior center, we don't have things like that. So that was challenging because those kinds of entities or organizations are sort of the first stop when doing this kind of program planning. So we had to be a little more creative, a little more grassroots in that way. And it also, because we don't have that kind of unified queer space, it can feel kind of hard to push this sort of programming because there aren't necessarily people in the library like directly coming up and knocking down your door saying, hey, where's my queer programs? But we had faith that if we, sort of like the field of dreams, we had faith like if we build it that they would come. But that was a little kind of sketchy in the planning process to be like, okay, we're just gonna do this thing and kind of hope that this need is correct. So some of the other challenges as Molly mentioned, we're in an unincorporated area and we also have a history as a sundown town, right? So kind of why did this happen in our area? They didn't go to San Francisco, right? They didn't go to Oakland. There's historical reasons for that. And of course the intersections of racism and homophobia. So that's, in addition to administration, there isn't like a local police department, right? Who would respond? Also, it can feel challenging to do this kind of program, like bonus, we got all this funding, challenge. We have to do one event a month. And sometimes with rich and deep collaborative community building and outreach, that's an intense timeline. Because we wanna make sure that we're doing complex programming for all ages. So if we're gonna have a queer comic expo, we definitely wanna make sure, do we have POC drag queens? Do we have folks living with disabilities who are on different channels, are we talking about class as well? So we wanna make sure it's really complex, which sometimes that timeline is a rough go. Also different branches in our system, which is probably true for others, have different resources. So we're a smaller branch in a larger system. So that can be a challenge sometimes. And the context changes, right? So in the middle of this, or towards the end of this, we had a supervisor who changed, which is different for unincorporated areas. So our branch serves communities that have, they could be blocks from each other, but it's two different supervisory districts. So you're kind of constantly living in a landscape of changing political climate. And then again, as we mentioned, engaging law enforcement. It's the county sheriffs who respond. And so really thinking about, are there ways that we can have conversations to maybe shift some of that? And lastly, kind of, I think it's a pretty obvious challenge, but it's hard to keep moving forward on something that people are very aggressively giving pushback on, even if you don't agree with them, even if you think that their basis for doing such is not, doesn't really hold water. It's still, it's very difficult. So it was a lot of hate immediately after, but I mean, even as recently as a week or two ago, we'll still get the one off random call. You just pick up the phone and people are pretty much immediately being abusive to you about it. So that's been a struggle, but luckily, as we mentioned before, we're very lucky to have a very cohesive and supportive staff. So we've been able to just kind of stick together and push forward. So we'll share some of our lessons learned. Again, we're kind of using this as the our experiential example, but I think these can be applicable to hopefully lots of other library programming and planning. So outreach and collaboration, so, so, so, so important. And really thinking about not just where the library lets come into a community and say, here's the five things we can offer, but going to community and say, hey, we would love to partner with you. Here's resources we have. What work are you already doing? How can we support that? It's a really, yeah, mutual collaboration. And that's a really different way of working that for this, right, the timeline of once a month, that's a little hard, but that's the goal that we're going towards. And I think we're talking about emerging trends in library land and I wish I could say this was not one, but here we are. And so I think there is opportunity in the way that we collaborated as a branch and system-wide, I think there's opportunity to even continue to do that. Whether it's technical assistance or trainings for libraries throughout California, how do you do a safety plan? We've reinvented the wheel. I'm sure people do it better than us, right? Toolkits for how do you navigate or for smaller branches that maybe have, don't have a supportive administration that we do, or can we pair areas that there's less visibility with branches that have greater visibility and sort of have a buddy system or programs kind of in a box that we can share? Just, you know, I think there is opportunity for all of us as libraries to think not just to our branch and our system, but how can we support each other across? Cause this stuff is happening in other places in California too, even though we're all sitting in San Francisco, right? Yeah. We are, despite some of the claims, like not every place in California, is this the picture? And just sort of to summarize, like our last takeaways, you know, to echo what Yo was saying, unfortunately this issue, I don't think is really going away anytime soon. I think we're operating in kind of what people say is like a new normal. Acts of bigotry, they're gonna, if it happens at your library, it is going to affect everyone. It's gonna affect your LGBTQ folks and communities. It's gonna affect your library staff. It's gonna affect the whole community, library workers. The Ripple effects are really far and wide. They are organized. The people that decide to go and disrupt library programs or do first amendment audits or any of these kinds of disruptive things, they're pretty organized. So when I see that, we can be organized too and we need to be. Safety and fiercely holding our own space is what's really gonna be key here and the resiliency that we need. It comes from the community that you build. So I just encourage everyone to build community and build it strong. So I think we'll do, I'll end on a kind of happy and a couple takeaways and then we'd love questions. So in our most recent drag story time, we still had people show up, we still had people filming, but so much of what was different was not just the safety plan. We had queer staff from other branches who showed up. They were like, yep, this my work day or I don't work today but I'm gonna be here. We had staff come and drag. We had, literally we created a rainbow through the stacks to the entryway. We escorted everybody out of the building and we had kids inside the room who were just having a blast, having story time the way it should be and we papered the doors and just was like, whatever noise was happening outside was for a brief moment irrelevant. And we had a lot of families say, you know, thank you for creating this space that felt like, yeah, this is happening outside these doors but in here it feels really safe and I just wanna highlight that that's really, that's why we're doing this work. That's why it's important and to so much if you take two, a couple of takeaways, it's really hire, train, retain people of color and queer staff, right? Who we are in this work is what makes the difference and do queer programming all year. Not just the kind of rainbow craft during Pride Month but all of our communities are very complex. So yeah, let's do nerd out on comic stuff with a black drag queen artist and an experimental disability artist and everything in between. So that's, I hope the two takeaways. Yeah, and we'd love to offer some questions. Well, thank you so much for sharing and thank you for all the work that you did and are doing. I have a question about the piece that you said, prepare your staff for controversy and follow up for wellbeing. Cause even though we are in San Francisco, one of our branches did have protestors at their drag story time and we'll be having one at my branch very soon, like in a few months. And so I'm just wondering how to prepare staff because we definitely don't want hate to win. Like we definitely still wanna honor all of our community and offer that. And we want staff to feel safe and prepared. I definitely think what was really the things that were most helpful on like our second go around when we knew that, you know, okay, we better prepare this time. FAQ sheets for everyone that's gonna be there that has the kinds of antagonizing things that people might ask and just very direct, like single line, two line kind of responses to those kinds of lines of questioning. Really going over as many of the possible scenarios that you can think of and kind of walking through those individually, like, okay, well, if this is the kind of disturbance, then what do we do? Okay, if it's more like this, then what do we do? And obviously you can't account for anything that might happen. And sure enough, you know, despite all our preparation, like things didn't go the way that we thought that they would still, but it wasn't, I don't think anyone felt totally caught unprepared. Also, as far as like aftercare, I think if your library system has EAP, if they have employment assistance in that way, we had a few follow-up sessions after some of our more contentious events, just having a professional there to speak with, you know, for anyone that needed. And a lot of decompression time afterwards, if you know you're having a really intense day, the best you can make the rest of the day carefree, have some snacks, have some fidget toys, have some coloring, have a quiet space, just allow for any of those kind of self-care things that make us feel comfortable. Make sure that plenty of that is provided for your staff. I just wanna echo it's a huge challenge. Because this is a community I'm part of, I'm used to being embedded in this conversation, and I think for some of our staff, they were like, what is TGNC, right? And so we have a really different understanding of people, even what is happening and what's going on. So like Molly said, we had a small group of planning folks who really, you know, got into the detail of like what's the safety plan, what is the FAQ, and that included our marketing person and some high admin. So we really legit, we have a six to eight page document with a hand drawn map about like, if we get an angry phone call, here's the response. If we full on get people in the building, here's what's gonna happen. We asked for extra staff on that day and staff only had one role. So we had, you know, we maybe had six people the whole day who were gonna do SIRC staff, SIRC questions and reference, that's it. That's all they're gonna do. We have one person, they're just gonna make sure this entry is clear. This person is gonna, so really defined roles, so people feel like I'm only focused on this one thing and I have a clear sense of what I'm doing. For the staff that was going to be there, emails, a couple of meetings, just like these are things that could happen. Here's what you can say. And yeah, certainly before we started, just kind of us as staff taking a breath together, having a moment and afterwards as well. My personal safety plan was to come in drag and just draw a lot of attention to myself away from the families and the staff. I'm sure I'm plastered all over the internet somewhere. You know, so it looks different for different people, but we had that flexibility that I can come and drag and then I know I'm waiting in the back until we're totally done and everybody's out of the building. And somebody else is just working the SIRC desk for like these set three hours. The last thing I'll say too is, you know, it's very similar to like the First Amendment audit presentation earlier. These folks are coming to make a spectacle to be disruptive. So the only other thing I would really, really prime anyone that's going to be on site for, you got to tap into yours then maybe like, like just emphasize the more you can remain calm, that is the most important thing because they're going to come in there and they're really going to be trying to antagonize you and they're really going to be good at it. I consider myself a pretty cool customer and they definitely get me really riled. So just yeah, whatever folks can do to kind of mentally prepare themselves in that way, that's really going to be helpful. So much. So in a conversation for programming, I do a lot of teen programming and I feel like teen programming takes on the bulk of LGBTQ programming and I love it. But I'm also looking for ways to incorporate our adult programmers and our kids' programmers and say, jump in this bandwagon with me because I need help. Do you have any adult programs that you loved, kids' programs that you loved that can act as a spark for people who don't necessarily feel comfortable just jumping into LGBT programming for adults or for kids? Do you have any great ones that you're like, I'm going to do this one day or if I had more people, I'm going to do this or I've done this and it was amazing? There's a couple, I am an adult librarian myself. So that's kind of my bread and butter. Film screenings are a good place to start who doesn't like to watch a movie. It can be a documentary if you think that there's going to be interest for that or if not, just go along LGBTQ themes. You can also, I think, really tapping into your actual community. If you know some queer members of your community, most queer people have some kind of creative little venture going on the side, see what they're into, see what they're knowledgeable about, see what they're excited about, and a lot of times some good programming can grow out of that. I've also noticed working with our teen librarian too, that I don't know about you guys, but at our location, poetry among older teens and young adults is really having a comeback and popular right now, and there's a lot of less serious poetry things you can do. I mean, you can get some of those poetry magnet sets and have that kind of be part of it. You can do blackout poetry using queer literature. The other thing I would recommend is be really intersectional about it. Not every queer program has to be a, in neon rainbow letters, a queer program. You could have a history program and oh, everyone you're talking about just happens to be a queer individual. So I think really looking at things from an intersectional lens and kind of any program that you might think of in general, if you think a little harder and think how can I put just a little twist on it, I think that's a really good way to get people engaged, maybe even in a way that they don't necessarily know that they're getting engaged, which is great. I just piggyback. Those were the two things I was gonna say is like one, hopefully in all of our programming we're thinking about how can we make this more queer? How can we center more POC? How can we have conversations? So even if it's a regular lit program that you always do, ensure that one of the speakers is a person of color. Ensure one of the speakers is queer. Inherently, that's gonna change the conversation and the dynamic and bring things out. So if, yeah, the neon rainbow glitter is feeling like a lot, we should just be thinking about that anyway, right? And I would say partner, partner, partner. If you have a local LGBT center, if you have another organization that serves a lot of queer folks, and it could be, and what are the things that they need? Maybe they need tax help and the library can provide that but your whole room has showed up and showed out and is really queer because the queer elders need tax help. Just an example, I don't know. Everybody needs tax help, frankly. Everybody's calling in January panicked. You know, like maybe that's what it is. And so I think to me that's a different way of partnering, right, instead of saying the library, like I need to put on this rainbow and bright and it has to be, it's like how do I build that into what's already happening and how do I partner in a really intentional way? And so then hopefully a staff who's then collaborating with an organization, it's less pressure on them too to have to know all the answers because they're collaborating. Inherently, they're doing it together. I think we have one over here and then one in the back. Hi. Did you have an issue after the first drag story time with the pushback getting performers who wanted to come back or just had questions about safety? I have a very informal LGBT group and they want to use the library more formally but are very afraid for their safety. And I just wanted to know like what kinds of, like verbiage did you use to ensure that they would be safe? Yes, we did. We did have, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, we did, we did. We had people, we had people definitely explicitly say, you know, given what's happened here, this location, this event, you know, it makes me nervous. I think we got better over the course of this year of programming, of working on that. And all you really can do is, I think just be as careful as you can with your safety planning. Be as transparent about that safety planning. Really listen to what the specific fears or concerns are and see how you can specifically address that as best as possible. Try to be creative. Something that we thought of after, you know, I still count it as a successful story time but our most recent one where we did still have some, some protests and what have you, we thought of after the fact we go, what if we just had this story time when we were not open to the public? What about that? That would be a lot easier to control the building and what have you. So things like that, I think it's, that's kind of part of the journey. And you just have to really work together and communicate with each other. And there's no magic, there's no magic answer unfortunately. I think part of our, not that anyone wants to be in this situation but I think part of the strength of our response is we just were very open about that with anyone else we asked. This is a thing that happened. This is what we're doing to ensure that this doesn't happen again. Some of those things included not just having a single performer but having multiple performers encouraging them to bring their people and their community if they would like to. Here's in the event this happens. Here's the safety plan. As part of coming to see the space they're gonna perform in, we literally walk through the building. Here's the person who's going to be, if anything happens, you follow this person and they're gonna ensure your safety. Asking other organizations too, like hey, and they really stepped up, we're like bring your families. We don't want hate to win. Like just come, dress however, all the sparkles, we're gonna have crafts and story time. So I think also safety in numbers and in community as well. And some things that we also communicated to our performers that we learned, we're not gonna put your picture on the flyer, we're not gonna, you know, we... Put your name on the flyer. We're not gonna put your name on the flyer or we won't put your performer name on the flyer if you don't want to. So just, and again, like Molly was saying, if there's specific concerns that that performer has to be real in addressing them and be real about where we have learned and what possible limitations there may still be. Tap your own volunteers, you know. Tap into a whatever you have access to in terms of numbers of people. If there are groups that you know support this kind of thing, specifically ask them, hey, will you come to this? You know, we have this thing happen or I'm afraid this thing's gonna happen. Because I guarantee you, just from other incidents that I've seen at other locations, whichever site is outnumbered, you know, that's usually where the power lies. So if you can get really good turnout, however you need to do that, that's pretty good insurance. I will offer not specifically about this, but maybe as related to what you're talking about as well. I did reach out to a queer youth organization and they had similar concerns and I was like, let the library be your beard. Let's have a Steven Universe like watch party, right? And so when parents call, I'm like, yeah, they're at the library. They're watching Steven Universe, right? But actually what we're doing in that time is, it's coded queer, right? But it's not, so we could do whatever we want and parents could call and be like, yeah, they're here in a teen group. So getting creative, you know? Talk about the possibility of hosting a drag queen story hour and in my library, I was given the advice of my superiors to just have the program, but don't advertise it. Don't put it online. Don't post it better on social media. Don't put up posters or flyers, like anything I would do for a normal like story time. And one of the things you guys talked about was the importance of raising visibility through these programs. So I was like, do you hear your input on that? I think that's a really valid tactic for the very first drag story time that we did following this incident. That's exactly what we did. We didn't put out flyers. I think we posted the event. We really scaled down the publicity. I can't remember the exact specifics, but I think that's valid. I think there's a lot of different levels to visibility and I think that they all have different impacts and all of the impacts are positive. So maybe you're not able to blast it out into the world, but maybe instead of that, on the day of your drag story time, you do extra decorations, you make sure you have really nice queer book displays out, you get some bookmarks made, something like that, make the visibility that much more intense within your location. I think things, I think visibility doesn't always have to look one single way and safety is first and if that's what feels safest to have this event, I think that's fine and you find whatever other ways you can do visibility safely. I think too, I mean, yeah, you can put a flag in the library that's not tied to a specific event, right? We can have a Marsha P. Johnson display, not necessarily tied, could be, could be historical, could be Pride Month, right? And again, I know I will sound like a broken record, but partner, partner, partner, maybe the librarian goes to a queer space and does the story time and then folks know or you outreach specifically to these communities that have a lot of queer families and yeah, hand deliver flyers or they send it out as part of their newsletter. We did meetings with PFLAG so that folks knew that we were there and available. So even if they're coming for the story time or wanna check out a certain book or then maybe there's a greater sense that a lot of people will show up for a program once it's in the library because they know you and there's a little bit of trust. Any other questions? I also have no sense of time, which is always my weak point. Two minutes. Two minutes. Yeah, I think we have to take one more question. One more question. All right. Oh, oh, oh, one, oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm just curious, thank you. This is really just important work that you're doing. So I think we should all acknowledge that for, I want to anyway. I, I mean, so has anybody approached you about doing counter-programming like somebody who wants to, I don't know, do, do religious story? Oh, do you mean Kurt Cameron? Oh, are you talking about Kurt Cameron? Yeah. We can just say it. We can just come out and say it. Kurt Cameron and Brave Books has been in a lot of communication with our administration. I think because this whole thing happened at our branch and just the level of staff that we are, I'm very thankful and grateful that admin has been like, we'll take care of that. Don't, don't worry. So I'm still, it's actually still kind of up in the air. It's possible that Kurt Cameron might do a story time at one of our branches. Not really sure. We definitely don't want that to happen. I really don't think, also does everyone know what we're talking about? Okay, cool. I don't want to assume to say in, to say in. Yeah, but I think that's also one of the really amazing parts of some of our leadership is they're like, no, we legit explicitly are an anti-racist organization. And so at our branch, the librarian who this call initially was directed to, she was like, no, that doesn't fit within like our programming priorities, right? And so we use the language of in the same way, someone acting out of pocket in the library, our library policy and protocol to keep everyone safe and we're going to give you a warning. Otherwise, right? It's like the same type of thing, but with this. And so of course they're going to spin it, how they spin it, more angry phone calls. We made the news again. My family's like, what are you guys doing over there? Yeah. Are you safe? You're very small. So yes, in short, yes, of course, that's going to keep happening, but also like rock on. We're in an article with like 50 other libraries who also were like, nah, we ain't doing that. We were like, oh, we know our friends, we know who to call, we got to get in touch with those other libraries too and strengthen some community there too. Yeah. Thank y'all. Appreciate you. Thank you guys so much for your time. Thank you.