Ep. 8: Do Say Gay
Release Date: 12/16/2025
A little more than a year later, the world and especially libraries and higher ed environments look really different. In hindsight, this class happening when it did feels like a precious moment, a little gift, when a university could be funded to bring a bunch of young people to a gay library and let them learn about how this country has historically silenced queer people.
- Episode Producer Anna Mason
From April to June of 2024, Gerber/Hart and DePaul University partnered to run Do Say Gay: Banned Books and LGBTQ Freedoms, a unique undergraduate class on book banning and censorship of queer voices in moments both present and past. The class was run through DePaul's HumanitiesX program, funding specialized courses that bring together Chicago community partners and DePaul professors/students to create interdisciplinary, public-facing humanities projects. This particular partnership was designed to culminate in a Gerber/Hart exhibit for the summer. The summer exhibition turned to a run that lasted to early 2025, and, as of December 2025, you can still find some remnants of the Do Say Gay exhibition materials on display in the Howard Brown waiting room.
Just as the Do Say Gay exhibition has left its mark on 6500 N Clark St, its presence has left its mark on all its contributors and attendees. This episode follows the story of how it came to be, the world it came into, and how we might think through what it means now.
"Do Say Gay": Identifying a Need & Building a Course
“If our histories don’t exist [...] then, in a way, our present and our presence do not exist, right? It is a way of destroying and erasing us from social life.”
- Professor Heather Montes Ireland
“The way we linked the library to this discussion wasn’t just books, it was also this idea we had that we have always been banned, right? And that’s why all of our things are here.”
- Professor Barrie Jean Borich
Do Say Gay was co-taught by DePaul professors Barrie Jean Borich and Heather Montes Ireland. They are faculty members across DePaul’s LGBTQ, Women's and Gender, English, and Critical Ethnic Studies Programs, both experienced directors of DePaul’s LGBTQ Studies Program. The idea for the course took shape as book bans and censorship increasingly dominated queer news in the US at local, state, and national levels. In response, they decided to turn to queer pasts, the information professionals on the frontlines of safeguarding it, and young adults eager to learn about histories so often kept out of the classroom.
In addition to their 20 undergraduate students, they were assisted by undergraduate student fellows Taylor Sellers-Varela and Bella Netti, who helped to facilitate and document the course throughout the quarter.
Working in the Archives: Building an Exhibit
“There’s tremendous power in asking students to make things… the energy and the excitement and the satisfaction that comes from making something, I think can’t be overrated. It’s so powerful for them. And what they made, it was good. It was quality. And they were so proud of how it looked.”
- Barrie Jean Borich
Students were split into four groups, all responsible for (1) connecting predetermined topic areas back to issues of censorship and book banning with archival materials, and (2) creating zines specific to their group and its members. No other restrictions were placed on the students, just the trust that, if given unrestricted access to the archives, young people were fully capable of creating something that would meet those criteria and more.
SAVE OUR CHILDREN
The “Save Our Children” exhibit focused on YA & children’s literature, children as a rhetorical device in anti-LGBT movements, and community efforts to protect queer kids throughout our history. Spanning from Anita Bryant content to support materials for queer youth found in the archives, the group built a full classroom-themed environment inviting their viewers to consider the full range of what it means to be a child interacting with queerness, queer books, and a public that has ceaselessly used them to defend violence against LGBT people.
OPEN BOOKS, OPEN MINDS
The next exhibit focused on the relationship between queer libraries and bookstores as some of the most powerful places to combat epistemicide, a foundational concept in the course. Their space featured archival materials documenting the history of Gerber/Hart itself, local queer bookstores, and a prominent collage that asked exhibit goers to consider the ways in which histories of queer resistance can inform the way we think about the ongoing destruction of information institutions and systems of knowledge in Gaza.
SILENCE=DEATH
“Silence=Death” focused on AIDS history and community responses to political repression, censorship, and the parallels between denying queer history and denying queer life at the most literal level. This group spanned the physical bulk of the room, painting the back wall the black of the infamous Silence=Death poster & lining it with AIDS awareness and activist posters, local obituaries for AIDS deaths in Chicago, and two interactive chalk body outlines. The body outlines asked visitors to write in their own answers to the questions “How does your rage motivate you?” and “How did you first learn about AIDS?”
WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN BANNED
“We Have Always Been Banned” focused on exploring what it means to be banned from public life & queer histories of joy and resistance in the face of attempts to erase our spaces and communities. To speak to that history of resistance and persistence, the group constructed an interactive mock gay bar space, plastering the surrounding wall of their exhibit with scanned ephemera from the archives and their own painted contributions.
Working In America: Building Community & Making Meaning in Spring 2024, Chicago, USA
“It felt more like a community working together, rather than 'we’re just in this class and we just have to get through this project and then never talk again.' So I feel like it was really special and really intentional in that way.”
- Student Fellow Taylor Sellers-Varela
But that community wasn’t just a way to make the pressures of schoolwork fun. This class arose from a need its professors identified in an increasingly hostile political climate, one which was personal for each student in its own way. It also oversaw a tumultuous period at the university itself, overlapping with the period in which many DePaul students gathered together to build and maintain an encampment on campus in protest of the Gaza genocide and in solidarity with student movements across the country. One Do Say Gay class meeting even overlapped with the day of Chicago police raiding and shutting down the encampment.
“I almost didn’t show up [on the day of the raid], but kind of felt called to show up because I knew that I would find support and community in this space.”
- Taylor Sellers-Varela
Though reflecting on Do Say Gay in the political conditions of 2025 may change the way we see the exhibit now, it was also a moment to come together and bring awareness to the rapidly growing antigay and antitrans sentiment that led to our own political moment. Even more critically, it allowed students to explore and highlight the importance of remembering long histories of resistance in our communities, just as relevant now as in the 50s, 70s, or 90s.
Opening, Connecting With Audiences, & Connecting With Futures
Do Say Gay opened to enthusiastic reception at a packed event on June 7th, 2024. Attendees took advantage of the interactive elements in all 4 exhibit sections. By the time it left the Sandfield Exhibition Gallery, it had been shaped by twenty student curators, two professors, two student fellows, two Gerber/Hart librarians, and every visitor who passed through and left something of themselves in the space.
“We had a middle school class that came in, and I was talking about the exhibit, and one of the students asked, What's AIDS? And so I explained, but you know, and then they wrote, here is where they learned about AIDS.”
- Jen Dentel
Since June 2024, multiple students have continued their involvement with Gerber/Hart, 18 months’ worth of Gerber/Hart and Howard Brown visitors have been able to interact with the exhibit materials, and Heather and Barrie have continued fighting for the right to teach subject matter increasingly under attack in universities across the country.
“I think about this every time I walk through this space, that this is the evidence of our survival. It’s evidence of our survival before all the times when things were terrible, different kinds of terrible, […] but we have survived through all of this, and this is the evidence… And we survive by creating things. We survive by making worlds for ourselves. We always have. We always will.”
- Barrie Jean Borich
Links
- Do Say Gay class zines. Or come see them in person in the archives!
- Spotify playlist included in the exhibit via QR code, built by Do Say Gay student Eli Reynolds
- Articles from the official HumanitiesX Medium account on the Do Say Gay class and the final exhibit they built
- CBS Chicago feature on Do Say Gay, ft. Taylor Sellers-Varela and Jen Dentel
- Windy City Times and Block Club Chicago articles on the exhibit opening event
This page was compiled by Do Say Gay student & episode interviewee, Ori, but our exhibit, including my own work on it, was only made possible through the unique stories and contributions of each and every Do Say Gay co-curator. I encourage listeners to take the time to learn more about them all through our class zines!