Em Ricciardi gives a presentation to celebrate Pride Month at the Cherry Hill library on June 11.
June marks Pride Month for the LGBTQ community, and organizations around the area are honoring the occasion with a wide array of events and celebrations.
The Cherry Hill library is one. It has organized a number of events throughout the month to honor the LGBTQ community and its history. In partnership with Jewish Family and Children’s Service and the township, it presented the talk “Uncovering Queer Figures with the Library Company of Philadelphia” on June 11.
Em Ricciardi is the cataloger and LGBTQ+ subject specialist for the Library Company. He organizes printed materials from throughout history, and curates the Library Company’s Queer History Collection, including printed materials and graphics or visuals.
Mayor Dave Fleisher started the event with a few words on Pride Month.
“I believe that although it’s Pride Month, that the character of a community is defined by how people are treated 365 days a year,” he explained. “And I am very, very proud, not just of the library, but proud to be part of leading a community in a township like Cherry Hill, where people are welcome and treated with dignity and respect 365 days a year.”
Ricciardi highlighted historical figures during his talk, from the well-known to the unknown throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
“We were the Library of Congress when Congress was meeting in Philadelphia,” he noted. “And we’ve been around for about 300 years. So as you can imagine, a lot of our stuff is super old.”
Ricciardi also went on to explain that the Library Company is unique in its collection of rare books, because it includes only printed materials, no manuscript or handwritten items.
He began his discussion of queer history figures with actors and performers, including two female impersonators in an early form of what is now known as drag queens, Julian Elton and Richard Harlow. Though it’s not known for certain if the men were LGBTQ, their norm-breaking performances earned them a place in Ricciardi’s library talk.
“He was very aware of the way people would perceive him and judge him if they thought that he was purposefully transgressing those gender boundaries,” Ricciardi noted of Harlow.
Ricciardi told the story of Charlotte Cushman, a stage actress and lesbian known for her many affairs and documented relationships.
“Charlotte Cushman was, in fact, as we can confirm, a lesbian and a messy lesbian at that,” Ricciardi acknowledged. “Cushman had a number of female lovers over her lifetime, and often overlapped them.”
The presentation also evoked the story of James How, an individual assigned female at birth. How dressed as a man to marry his wife of 34 years, but it is unknown if How was a lesbian dressing as a man to marry a woman, or a transgender man.
“In some cases, it was certainly just two lesbians trying to be together,” he revealed. “In other cases, there might have been a trans identity going on. A lot of times, we don’t know exactly why one of the partners chose to dress as a man and the other didn’t.”
Literature was also discussed as a place where queer figures often appear, specifically writers Fitz Greene Halleck and Sarah Orne Jewett. Neither of them is confirmed as queer, but the use of language and themes in their works is often interpreted through the use of literary analysis as reflecting a queer identity.
Ricciardi also described how many of the accounts the Library Company has access to only feature white queer figures, since it was much more difficult for people of color to have access to printing throughout history.
“It is obviously true that people of color throughout history were writing their own works and publishing them,” he observed. “However, it is also true that white people had a lot more access to traditional venues of printing and publishing.”
Ricciardi also said that many of the historical narratives the Library Company has access to on queer people of color are white people writing about people of color, instead of people of color writing about themselves.
He also showed photos of figures from history who seemed to be in same-sex relationships, though none of their identities is known. That prompted Ricciardi to speak about how many queer figures from the past are unknown, only leaving small traces of their lives behind.
“There are a lot of people out there who we just don’t have any information about …” he said. “We have a number of photographs that depict people crossing gender boundaries, sharing close relationships with people of the same sex or gender …
“We just have these little tantalizing glimpses into a potential queer life that they might have been living.”
