William Way LGBT Community Center Duplicate Collection
The Library at the William Way Center is one of the largest of its kind in the country. The center gifted nearly 3,000 duplicate titles to the Libraries, which were processed to make them readily available to Penn patrons.
Collection Overview
The John J. Wilcox, Jr. Library at the William Way LGBT Community Center is the nation's oldest LGBTQ lending library, established in 1976 as the Library of the Gay Community Center of Philadelphia. It now contains more than 14,000 books and DVDs, mostly acquired through community donation, and includes works of fiction and nonfiction about any topic relevant to the LGBTQ community. Over many decades, and especially during the pandemic years, many donations of duplicate books were made, and by 2022, these amounted to thousands of duplicate copies. As the William Way Center planned to modernize its library, extraordinary archival collection, and art gallery, it needed to relocate its duplicate books. The Penn Libraries at this time was growing its collection of material relating to sexuality--as the Penn Sexuality Collection--and welcomed a gift of these duplicates, many of which are scarcely held in academic libraries and are not readily available to Penn patrons. The books were processed to allow them to be browsed alone, allowing one to see what appealed to the overwhelmingly non-academically oriented LGBTQ community in Philadelphia.
The books from the William Way Library in the Penn Libraries include a fascinating concentration of genre fiction featuring LGBTQ characters. For instance, the Libraries' catalog lists 415 mysteries in this collection, ranging from ten books in the suggestively titled Dick Hardesty series to numerous award winners. Romance novels are similarly well-represented. Fictional books in the collection are frequently erotic, and there is also a significant collection of LGBTQ erotica, including many anthologies and 'best of' collections. Nonfiction works include books about self-help, interpersonal relations, health, and activism.
The Library at the William Way Center, located at 1315 Spruce St., allows visitors to browse and check out its books. Readers interested in this Penn Libraries collection might consider visiting William Way to use their much more extensive holdings.
