Literature of the Underrepresented:
A Conversation with Steven Mandeville-Gamble
 University of California, Riverside University Librarian Steven Mandeville-Gamble, Class of 1987 alumnus and special collections librarian at Stanford from 1994-2004, has created an endowment at Stanford Libraries for collecting and preserving queer literature.
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What motivated your creation of The Steven Mandeville-Gamble Book Fund for Queer Literature?
I have collected queer literature since the age of 18. In mainstream publishing as late as the 1980s, a typical plot for any book or novella involving gay men or women in romantic relationships was that by the end of the book, if it was true love, one of the protagonists had to die a tragic death. Alternately, at least one protagonist was depicted as damaged or predatory. It was downright depressing! Although denigrated as literature at the time, the pulp fiction of the 1960s provided a powerful counternarrative to the big publishing houses by depicting relationships that persisted happily. The 1960s saw an explosion of literature by and about gays from the ephemeral presses. For the first time, the literature was fun and positive, even though it dealt with difficult issues and topics.
Stanford Libraries’ Special Collections, where I worked for ten years, holds The Bud Flounders Collection of Gay Fiction and has been collecting and doing important work in the subject for a long time. Knowing that demand for the materials is high and that dedicated funding is needed, I created an endowment to provide books, manuscripts, and artwork with gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer-identified protagonists or major characters. My goal is to provide long-term support, so I pledged monthly contributions and I plan to leave a portion of my estate to the fund.
Queer literature from the Steven Mandeville-Gamble Collection. Photo credit: Steven Mandeville-Gamble.
What were the highlights of your undergraduate experience at Stanford?
I grew up in the small town of Corcoran in California’s Central Valley. My father was the chief operating officer for the J. G. Boswell Company, which had over 135,000 cultivated acres in Kings County and farming operations as far away as Australia. My parents took me on a road trip up and down the Pacific coast to check out universities. Stanford was the last place that we stopped, and I fell in love immediately with the stunning architecture and the atmosphere of famous authors and Nobel Prize winners.
I was on track to be an engineer until I took Introduction to Anthropology during my Freshman year and changed my major. The course was taught by the husband-and-wife team of Professors George and Louise Spindler, founders of the field of the anthropology of education and estimated to have taught over 40,000 students at Stanford. I studied cultural anthropology, Asian cultures, gender and sexuality with Professors Harumi Befu, Sylvia Yanagisako, Jane Collier, and Gilbert Herdt. Professor Renato Rosaldo, already well known for his publications on headhunters in the Philippines, influenced me with his later work on culture and power. In my graduate studies in social linguistics at the University of Michigan, I continued to explore language, culture, and power dynamics in a multiplicity of ethnicities, finding that language was involved and complicit in all cultures of power.
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"I fully expect that my fund will expand Stanford Libraries’ holdings in queer literature and promote its study by scholars and readers worldwide."
– Steven Mandeville-Gamble
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How did you become a librarian?
Barbara Celone, head of Stanford’s Cubberley Education Library, encouraged me to apply for a position working on the Special Collections desk while I was on leave from the PhD program. There, when a student inquired about African American primary sources, I could find very little to recommend. Seeing that questions can only be asked of the archival materials at hand, I became interested in documenting the lived experiences of the underrepresented and recovering parts of their story that had been erased.
I am a graduate of the penultimate Master’s in Library Science class at UC Berkeley, a top-three program nationally before being disbanded. At Stanford, I worked on the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund Records and the unparalleled Chicano and Latino collections that any serious researcher should consult. Stanford is also strong in post-WWII American and British literature and in the history of science. Some of my esteemed colleagues at Stanford Libraries were Bill McPheron, Henry Lowood, John Mustain, Adan Griego, Roberto Trujillo, and Maggie Kimball.
How did your career progress after Stanford?
After being head of Special Collections at North Carolina State University and George Washington University, as well as associate university librarian at the latter, I found the idea of university librarianship compelling after receiving recruiting calls. UC Riverside is an ideal match for my own values, so I accepted appointment as its ninth university librarian. We have a mission to serve the underrepresented and enroll one of the most diverse student populations in the country. A high percentage of students is eligible for Pell Grants, and UC Riverside is unmatched in achieving social mobility from the lowest to the highest quintile, one of the common measurements of educational success. We also have a strong research program with federal funding and a reputation for research excellence because of diversity, not despite it.
Queer literature from the Steven Mandeville-Gamble Collection. Photo credit: Steven Mandeville-Gamble.
What are some of the notable collections at UC Riverside?
The Dr. J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy, established with the donation of a Bay Area doctor’s private library, is now the world’s most comprehensive with about 400,000 items including Chinese and Japanese materials. The strength of the Eaton Collection sustains the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science program founded in 2013. Speculative fiction encompasses science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The program offers an undergraduate minor and a designated emphasis at the PhD level. It focuses on the sci-fi of the underrepresented and employs 18 faculty from several departments. For example, a materials science professor assigned superhero comic books to stimulate engineering students’ thoughts about new materials; an associate dean of medicine assigned readings about alternative healing technologies; and an anthropology professor’s students considered gender values in speculative fiction. In my reading, I have particularly enjoyed Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series and the hard science fiction works of space scientist Alastair Reynolds.
The Rupert and Jeannette Henry Costo Papers is the archive of two prominent Native American scholars associated with UC Riverside. Not only were they Native American scholars, but they were also lobbyists, journalists, founders of the American Indian Historical Society and the Indian Historian Press, and editors of the first academic journal by and about Native Americans. Rupert Costo was one of the co-founders of the Citizens University Committee, which successfully lobbied the State of California to found a UC in Riverside. We have a dedicated reading room, like the Barchas Room at Stanford, containing their personal library and displaying their pottery and basketry. The Costo Papers and their extensive personal library on Native American history, art, culture, etc. are an important resource for California Indians and emphasize contemporary issues such as land and water rights.
The UCR Library is also the home of the Water Resources Collections and Archives, established in 1958 as part of the Water Resource Center at UC Berkeley and relocated to UC Riverside in 2011. Consisting of more than 200,000 technical reports and 50,000 historic photographs and documents, it serves as a gateway to information in support of water management decision-makers throughout the United States with an emphasis on California's water-related issues.
Special collections are a distinguishing mark of research libraries. As we move to digital, the general content of academic libraries is more similar, since we tend to buy the same databases, journals, and subscriptions. Libraries define their uniqueness through their special collections. I fully expect that my fund will expand Stanford Libraries’ holdings in queer literature and promote its study by scholars and readers worldwide.
Endowment sponsors are entitled to membership in Stanford Libraries’ Jewel Society. To discuss creating a library materials fund, please contact Gabrielle Karampelas in the Library Development Office: gkaram@stanford.edu, 650-492-9855.
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