“Like so many good queer stories, ours starts in the closet,” said Iggy Gehlen, board vice president of the Quatrefoil Library in Minneapolis — one of the country’s oldest and largest collections of LGBTQ+ literature.

The closet is in this case both physical and metaphorical: before being publicly out in the 1980s, avid reader Dick Hewetson stored his ever-growing queer pulp collection in his partner David Irwin’s linen closet. Until then, he had resorted to reading these books with haste at the local bookseller. Possessing them, he worried, would out him by proxy.

While Hewetson’s personal collection expanded, general access to queer stories didn’t. The AIDS crisis, which resulted in the deaths of 125 Minnesotans by 1987, only reinforced the stigmatization. Irwin and Hewetson were soon running a quasi-library out of their home. Friends and their friends lent texts at such a high frequency and with such apparent thirst that when the opportunity presented itself for the pair to establish a publicly accessible library at the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union (now the ACLU of Minnesota) building in 1986, they took it. Christened the Quatrefoil Library, the collection made it out of the closet along with its founders.

In the 40 years since, Quatrefoil’s materials, most of which are donated, have outgrown various locations. In 2011, the library found its current home: a comfortable brick-and-mortar building on East Lake Street. More than 27,000 materials (including films and magazines) are accessible seven days a week due to the efforts of dedicated volunteers who staff the library. In 2025 alone, about 150 people participated in some volunteer capacity.

In that number lie countless stories of chosen family, social groups and even romantic partnerships.

The stacks host no shortage of thoughtfully curated books that fit tight, but right. There are several displays (including a current one that exhibits books published around 1986, the year of the library’s founding) and gathering areas that seem to beckon you to stay a while. The front desk is covered in rainbow flags with a coffee station manned by volunteers who are happy to gently guide first-time visitors or chat with the regulars.

Community forming space

In the past few years, Quatrefoil has reinvigorated its purpose: memberships have “basically doubled,” Gehlen said, a symptom to him of increased legislative uncertainty for queer folks around the nation. Quatrefoil provides a space for community forming, which manifests in craft circles, recovery and support groups, tarot readings and many different book clubs.

“We’re finding that people are needing that space more (today),” said Ollin Montes, board president of the library. “Since 2023, when there was this wave of criminalization of gender-affirming care, and widespread targeting of queer folks, we’ve had folks migrating to Minnesota and coming to the library.”

New groups form and congregate in the library often. Recently, migrant volunteers from the southern United States created a group that welcomes transplants from all parts of the country. Those who come to the library hoping it will bridge them to queer community find that it offers just that.

“It’s really important that people have safe spaces, where they feel affirmed, and where they can just let their hair down,” Montes said. “I feel grateful that we’re able to provide that space for folks who are needing it.”

He first connected with Quatrefoil as an escape from feelings of burnout from his day job as an immigration organizer in 2019.

“I came in and I just fell in love,” Montes said. “It was surreal to be in a space where all of the content was focused on queer issues and topics.”

Shared identities

What touched him most upon his arrival were the two older front-desk volunteers willing to plunge into deep conversation with him immediately — a moment he soon realized was one of his first experiences of conversation with queer elders.

Intergenerational connection is especially challenging in queer communities because unlike other minority groups, LGBTQ+ people don’t traditionally congregate in a central hub. Youth are less likely to grow up around people with shared identities after which they can model, or at least visualize their future. This makes positive representation in physical media all the more important.

But at Quatrefoil, patrons have the chance to hear stories of survival straight from the source. Current head librarian Karen Hogan, for example, became a visiting patron of the library in 1987 and has volunteered since the ’90s. She’s a resource beyond her role, a walking archive of sorts, and has been especially helpful in planning the 40th anniversary celebration that the library will host in October.

This intergenerational aspect is something Montes says keeps him in the space. Talking to queer elders about their personal experiences has helped him through several milestones in his life, like presenting his boyfriend to his parents for the first time.

“Hearing those stories gives you a sense of power,” Montes said. “Our history is passed down both through what we write and the stories we’re told. Some of those stories are told by virtue of having the opportunity to have a conversation with somebody who was alive during that time.”

Queer people have long relied on pioneers within the community to recognize, safeguard and circulate materials relevant to their lives. Thanks to the efforts of Jean-Nickolaus Tretter, for example, who donated his large lifelong collection of LGBTQ+ related materials, the University of Minnesota now has one of the largest LGBTQ-specific archival repositories in the country.

Digitizing the collection

Clubs and bars are nice places to find community, Montes says, but spaces to “nerd out” are just as important.

Volunteers have started to digitize the collection as well. As some Pride events are tabled in rural areas this month, library volunteers will be able to point curious minds to the virtual site.

For closeted kids in rural Minnesota, virtual access could help prevent the same issue founder Dick Hewetson faced.

“It gives you a kind of plausible deniability,” Gehlen said. “You don’t have to hide the book in your backpack. You can just close out of the app if you don’t want somebody to see what it is that you’re reading.”

Montes says that having access to queer history as a young person gave him strength.

“Learning about all the things that queer people did to protect ourselves, to care for each other, to support one another … made me understand that (we) are so resilient,” Montes said. “We have the capacity to meet these moments of crisis and uncertainty.”

He points to a quote by writer James Baldwin, who said: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

A bittersweet anniversary

The name of the library pays homage to the seminal 1950 queer novel “Quatrefoil” by James Fugaté (pen name James Barr), one of the first texts to depict gay characters in a positive romantic light. The lessons taken from history and fiction is what continues to guide the space into the future.

“There’s a lot of scariness outside in the rest of the world, and we don’t want to downplay that,” Gehlen said. “But within this space, we have a lot of people who care a lot about protecting great stories, and share their time and expertise to continue to create something that is even bigger, beautiful and accessible, while really staying true to that original mission that was created by Dick and David.”