Lesbian Library Day!

Welcome to lesbian library day a, sober sapphic social soriee

If you're on this website, it's probably because you got a postcard from a friend who went to New York City Lesbian Library Day. We'd love if other people held their own Lesbian Library Day in their own cities, with their own creative vision of what it could be

I think of how the Dyke March in New York City has a tradition of ending in jumping into the Washington Square Park fountain, in comparison to the Boston Dyke March has fire eating. Both are a reflections of their own queer community and the creativity of the people who started these traditions. Community is not a thing that is just handed to you by a guy with a basket, it's a thing you can form with your own imagination.

Btw. this is just the placeholder site (I wrote all this an hour before the event was supposed to start) if you would like to talk to someone, you can reach out to me at my email and I can give you a zoom/signal meeting just to tell you how I ran it and help you if you had any questions or anything

Quick notes on how to run Lesbian Library Day

The first Lesbian Library Day was held on July 12th, 2025 at the SNFL branch of the New York Public Library. Over 300 people attended. It had a scavenger hunt, book swap, social and silent reading rooms. The purpose of this was to build more community space for the sapphic community, and address community issues that other sapphic spaces struggle to address (such as bars)

There was one, vitally important rule to this Lesbian Library Day:

• Please do not leave without learning the name of a stranger

If you're reading this on your phone, think about how your phone is a designed object. Look at the corners, they're curved. This was a decision made to control how you interact with your phone; this is an item you will pick up a lot, and so the beveled edges make it easier. Think about activism and building community as a thing of design too; if you go to a meeting of some sort, a lot of times they'd have a "hello my name is" tags so people can learn each other's names

With Lesbian Library Day, we very intentionally have a rule you can't leave without learning the name of a stranger, to address an issue of isolation in our community. The less people are strangers to each other, the more connections taht are made, it is harder for them to kill us. And so, a lot of the other decisions are made trying to figure out how to make things as easy as possible for people to follow that rule. For example, libraries are open to the public, and so we supply these little flower buttons so people can flag that they are participating in our event and identify each other in a shared public space. When we update this site more, we can go into more details

The political goals of the event

If Lesbian Library Day is run in other cities, I ask that you reach for two goals in the spirit of this event.

• Build socialization in queer community, getting people practicing talking to other people as seamlessly and naturally as possible. So, besides the "talk to a stranger" rule, we also have social rooms with little shit on the tables for people to futz with, and a scavenger hunt designed to force people to interact with each other in order to succeed. This is because, when building political power, being able to talk to people and being well-practiced in social skills is important, but it's such an annoying, difficult skill to build that this event exists to make things easier
• Build community orgnaizing skills social media makes everybody think they know how activism and power-building works, but you can't learn how to be a community organizer online anymore than you can learn to become a professional guitarist. The skills of organizing mostly comes from practice, and understanding how person-to-person dynamics works. The design of Lesbian Library Day is to bring everybody into the room on the promsie of a fun, flirty event but then that is leveraged into a call-to-action for people to go out into their community and build more events like this, or to get invovled wiht already-existing orgs.

the structure of Lesbian Library Day is this; we call it a "lesbian library day," but it's secretly a mixer, but if you call it a "mixer," only losers show up, and so you heavily imply that it's a mixer through the description to get everybody into the room. But it is really an organizing training event, but if you call it that, nobody will show up.

Anyways, that's all I will write today. I will expand this page in the next couple of days. Good luck wiht you, and build power in community