By Tess Goldwasser
Joel became a GLBTRT member in 2007 while he was still in library school. Since then, he served one year as Director-at-Large on the Executive Board and is now on the Stonewall Book Award committee. “I have always sought to increase the participation of new librarians in the RT, and the encouraging of more queer women to get involved,” Joel said.
A branch manager and children’s librarian at the Free Library of Philadelphia, Charles L. Durham neighborhood library, Joel likes children’s services, especially baby and toddler story times, and helping people of all ages use technology better.
Joel and his boyfriend, Ray, have been together for more than ten years. In talking about his terminology, Joel said, “Even though we got legally married in my home state of Vermont, we are both wary of the privilege that comes with being gay married. We avoid using ‘marriage language’ like husband because it is still an institution that mostly harms women and other queers.”
With his passion for feminist and queer science fiction, Joel admires Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ, Maureen McHugh, and Beverly Crusher. (We all know Beverly is his real passion!) “To me, queer and feminist sci fi offers us humans lots of roadmaps out of our current disasters–sociological, ecological, etc.–and I can read and talk about the strange things we should be learning from weird fiction for hours.”
Joel is most proud of his writing. In 2013 he published a book for librarians about using iPads in programming. He also sold a fantasy story to a “weird fiction” magazine, another to a literary anthology, and a “near-future story” about two teenaged cousins, a lesbian and a gay boy, is in the offing in a gay literary magazine. About the baby that he and Ray adopted last year, he said, “I’m also very proud of being a parent to a wonderful 10-month-old who challenges and encourages my own world-building in this reality.”
His goals are “to keep talking to librarians about how we all can make libraries better for queer or otherwise gender non-conforming kids and their families.” He also really wants to finish the novel he’s been working on.
If Joel were an animal, he’d like to be a whale because “they’re smart, playful, mysterious, often kind to other animals, but also can be vicious as hell. I like the mix.”
His five guests at a dinner party would be Dolly Parton, Angela Carter, Joanna Russ, James Robert Baker, and Don Belton. Joel says Belton was “a writer who wasn’t famous, but he was my friend and teacher who was murdered by a ‘straight’ lover. And I miss him. So yeah, four dead writers and Dolly Parton!”