The bus at first looks unassuming, a black trailer you’d see at any old craft fair or farmers market.
But like a mysterious wardrobe or rabbit hole, the doors open to something fantastical: lavender shelves, disco balls, brightly colored stickers, and rows and rows of queer books waiting to be loved.
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Never Miss a Beat
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Welcome to Carabiner Collections, a lending library bringing LGBTQ+ books to the masses in Brazos Valley, the region of Southeast Texas home to Texas A&M University. As school boards and state legislatures continue to push censorship of queer and trans-focused books across the country, both grassroots and nonprofit-funded activists are finding ways to bring stories to the people who want (and need) them most.
“Especially in the state of Texas, a lot of book bans focus on minority groups and queer people, so it was important to us to create an opportunity for queer people to see themselves in stories that were being taken off the shelves and still are being taken off the shelves,” said Carabiner Collections co-director J Turpin. “Our idea was to fill that gap with a free resource.”
For maximum accessibility, Carabiner Collections is a fine-free library, so readers can check out another book even if they do not bring the first back.
In addition to their two satellite dropbox locations, Carabiner Collections opened its first physical space last month in downtown Bryan, which they hope will increase the organization’s ability to serve the community and provide a safe, welcoming drop-in space for local queer and trans people.
“I’m still in shock at the fact that we’re running something in downtown Bryan,” Carabiner Collections co-director Soleil Gignac said. “Bryan is becoming more bar culture, so the fact that we get to be in the midst of all this activity, it’s really beneficial for getting a lot of queer people to come to this space.”
She envisions the space as somewhere the local LGBTQ+ population can feel affirmed and validated while still “learning basic things” they are unable or uncomfortable talking about with parents or friends. “I think the downside of this town being in the heart of Texas,” she said, “is the fact that your resources only become available if you present certain ways.”
You can’t get rid of us
The journey of Carabiner Collections began as many great love stories do: with a road trip. In the summer of 2023, the three coordinators traveled from Bryan, Texas, to visit Turpin’s family in Sacramento and made a stop at Lavender Library, one of the country’s longest-running, volunteer-run LGBTQ+ libraries.
“Halfway back home, we were in Albuquerque at a bar and we were just sitting there thinking, ‘Why can’t we do something like that?’” co-director Jordan Gignac said. “We’re just three random people. The government can’t stop us from giving out free queer books.”
From there, the idea snowballed. As soon as the trio got back to Texas, they began building out the name, website, and distribution plan. They became a 501(c)3 in November 2023.
They began by hauling books on carts to community events and quickly ran into a problem – so many books that the carts kept breaking. The team received a grant through John and Hank Green’s Project For Awesome to create the trailer bookmobile and received even more book donations directly from authors.
Carabiner Collections is not the only effort to increase access to queer books in a time of censorship and legislative attacks. The Pittsburgh Equality Center, which stewards one of the largest LGBTQ+ libraries in the country, launched a Little Queer Libraries initiative, stocking Little Free Libraries with queer literature from PEN America’s Banned Books list, along with healthcare resources. There are currently 10 such libraries around the greater Pittsburgh area and beyond, with five more on the way, primarily in community partner locations.
“They are supposed to be in places the Center is not,” said Pittsburgh Equality Center President Ray Sidney-Smith. “We want to put them in places that are going to be safe. That’s the whole idea, to get them out there so folks can access them.”
The Little Queer Libraries initiative is a personal passion project for Sidney-Smith, who launched a queer book club 25 years ago, shortly after coming out.
“I don’t know if I would have known all that I know about being a gay man without books,” he said. “I can’t understand the lives and experiences of other people in the LGBTQIA+ community without some connection to them, and that’s been books for me – reading about intersex people and trans people and lesbians and bi folks, that’s all been through the lens of literature.”
In suburban Monroeville, town council members compelled the library to remove a Pride display. One council member accused the display’s LGBTQ+ books of “grooming” children. For Sidney-Smith, the incident underscored that the issue of censorship of LGBTQ+ books is not going away and that there is a massive need for Pittsburgh Equality Center to continue creating affirming spaces and ensuring Pennsylvanians have access to queer and trans stories.
“It’s a subtle message, but it’s there, that you can’t get rid of us, no matter how hard you try,” Sidney-Smith said. “We’re going to keep access to queer literature front and center.”
Sidney-Smith said the Pittsburgh Equality Center is in conversation with the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and hopes to connect with more libraries and schools to offer advocacy and support where needed. “It’s been something of a passive approach to issues when they come up,” he said. “It’s not about pushing an agenda, but when people do reach out, we respond in kind. It is incumbent on us to start having conversations with libraries.”
The range of the rainbow
Carabiner Collections hasn’t directly experienced book censorship, but they have seen books removed from public libraries, school libraries and university libraries in the area and across Texas, Turpin said. The Cypress-Fairbanks school district in the Houston area automatically opts its 114,000+ students out of more than 10,000 titles. In New Braunfels, more than 600 titles have been banned in schools through the use of a restrictive AI program, according to the Texas Freedom to Read Project. And just last month, the state’s Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick (R), announced he would push legislation to drop a school’s accountability index rating a full letter grade if they did not remove books deemed “dirty” or “filthy.”
But there have been signs of resistance, big and small – especially from local librarians.
“There’s a big wave of librarians standing up and risking losing their jobs,” Turpin said. “But in more covert ways, one of the things these librarians have done is donate the books to places like us, or to other LGBTQ+ community centers.”
In September 2025, the Trump administration issued NSPM-7, a broad memorandum targeting nonprofits and members of civil society that are ideologically opposed to the administration, including organizations supportive of trans people, and, in broad strokes, accusing them of “terrorism.” Turpin said this is the closest the group has felt to any kind of threat or intimidation for its work. “We’re just small enough that it hasn’t really gotten to us, but that’s always a concern in the back of our minds,” they said.
Despite those concerns, the three cofounders remain highly visible, with their names and faces included on the group’s website and social media. That visibility has drawn people in.
“We all have very different styles that encompass the range of the rainbow,” Soleil Gignac said. “A lot of people can find identity with that. Jordan has an edgier look and J is a bird scientist and I’m more of a normie. We all have different energies that attract different people across the spectrum. We’re almost like the mascots.”
That visibility, she says, is what has helped the group gain so much traction with locals, especially at high-traffic events where the bookmobile has appeared, like the downtown “First Friday” street festivals.
“As students and onlookers gravitated towards us with curiosity, and particularly the queer individuals, it was almost like watching a Pride parade,” she said. “You could see the glow in their eyes. And we’ve been congratulated by people you wouldn’t expect. There are a lot of people here who support LGBTQ+ people but they maybe don’t show it or because of their job they’re not allowed to, something like that. But they’ll verbally support us and say what we’re doing is needed. There’s just a lot of unspoken pride, and everyone has it.”
“It was really in the small moments of personal connections with queer and trans people, the people walked up crying who said, ‘I never thought we could have something like this and I’m so grateful,’” Turpin added. “Those are the moments I really remember and drive for me why we keep going.”
Bryan is a college town, and with a college town comes bars. But queer nightlife has fallen short, Jordan Gignac said. For a while, one local bar, Halo, was the de facto gay bar but refused to call itself that. Eventually, Halo partnered with a well-known conservative bar owner, who immediately banned drag shows at the venue.
“On the storefront and industry side of things, there’s a little bit of a gay tax in parts of the city,” Soleil Gignac said.
But there are still thriving community spaces in and around Bryan, including a Pride Community Center, a Unitarian Church and other LGBTQ+-affirming faith institutions, not to mention the queer organizations at Texas A&M, all of whom Carabiner Collections credit with their ability to do what they do.
“None of us would be here if it wasn’t for the history from before we came,” Soleil Gignac said.
Ironically, Jordan Gignac cites the co-directors’ transplant statuses as something that made it easier to do the work.
“We had no ties to this town,” she said. “We had no ties to the people. If I had been doing this in my own hometown, I might feel a little bit differently because I grew up there, and there are family and friends you’re not comfortable expressing that part of yourself with. We were brand new and able to take it by storm with no apologies. We’re here, and here to give you queer books.”
The love and support Carabiner Collections has received has radiated across the country, from organizations like Books Not Bans in San Francisco, who supported the group’s first Pride event in November 2024. They connected Carabiner Collections with popular children’s author Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, who provided free books to the community at the event and paid for a food truck.
The Carabiner Collections team are regularly learning and drawing inspiration from both established and grassroots queer literary initiatives and organizers, among them the Nonbinarian, a Brooklyn-based bike-powered queer bookstore and mutual aid initiative which has since evolved into a brick and mortar location.
One of the most powerful connections, they said, has been with Flavia Rando, coordinator of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York, who donated books to Carabiner Collections and gave the organizers some key advice about how to build their work beyond the bookmobile and pop-up libraries. They’ve taken that and run with it with events like a Pride book fair held in June, featuring author talks, drag shows and other activities, which drew more than 500 people.
“The way that you really bring the community together is to have events, whether they be small potlucks or bigger events like what we did with Lemony Snicket,” Turpin said.
And, of course, they’ve built a relationship with the space that started their journey, Lavender Library in Sacramento.
“I was just visiting a couple weeks ago and they were like, ‘You’re Carabiner Collections!’” Turpin said. “That was a really cool feeling to be recognized for that work. They’ve donated extra books to us, and I was able to get a lot of advice from queer elders about how to run a physical space. They’ve been in existence for over 30 years now so they have a strong, rooted physical space and have figured out the stuff that we’re still learning.”
For the Little Queer Libraries of Pittsburgh, Sidney-Smith said the next steps are to do a proper inventory of circulation for each of the libraries, to ensure books remain well stocked all year round, as well as building out funding and volunteers to keep the project growing. He encourages people looking to replicate this effort in their own communities to visit the Little Free Libraries website for both prefab and directions to build custom structures, and added those seeking advice and support can also reach out to the Center.
In the interim, he is also enjoying seeing the growth and positive response to the project, down to the community volunteers who build and paint unique designs on the libraries themselves.
“Seeing people make these beautiful libraries come to life — I’m just really heartened by seeing the reception people have in-person to these libraries and seeing people enjoying themselves,” Sidney-Smith said. “That really makes me feel all the good feelings.”
To launch an initiative like this can seem intimidating, but Jordan Gignac reminded readers that none of the coordinators were professionals or had nonprofit experience before they started and underscored that you do not need permission or experience to try something. The nonprofit certification and title can help with finance and getting resources, but it is not necessary.
“Just showing up with a wagon would be incredibly important,” she said. “It’s genuinely the easiest thing to make a difference to somebody in the community by trying one thing.”
For Soleil Gignac, Carabiner Collections is as much a laboratory as it is a library, to make the things she wants to see in her community come to life.
“I use this nonprofit almost as an excuse to tackle these projects and it’s allowed me to explore more sides of the community,” Soleil Gignac said. “It’s a playground with the background of stories and literature and honoring our elders and neighbors. The coolest part is that you can do anything. If I’m not feeling motivated then in my head I’m like what do I want to see? How do I make this cool? And you find your people along the way.”
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