On June 8, 1974,the Lambda Rising Bookstore opened its doors in Washington, D.C., with a stock of three hundred titles and average sales of about $25 a day.
By 1987, it had opened a second store, established a thriving mail-order business, offers more than twenty thousand titles, and has annual sales of $1.5 million.
“We really didn't expect it to make any money,” said owner Deacon Maccubbin in retrospect.
Maccubin opened up a second store in Maryland in 1984, but it closed in the spring of 2008, as part of the trend toward LGBT bookstore (in fact, practically all brick-and-mortar bookstores) closures in the early 21st century.
Lambda did try to save one famous LGBT bookstore: The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, the United States' first gay and lesbian bookstore. Craig Rodwell in 1967 at 15 Mercer Street in Greenwich Village, later moving to the corner of Christopher and Gay Streets in Manhattan. Lambda Rising got the store going on again financially, but then sold it to the long-time manager.
Other famous LGBT bookstores that have closed include A Different Light in Los Angeles and San Francisco and Giovanni's Room in Philadelphia.
Specifically, Maccubbin announced in 2009 that his stores would close in 2010. He said:
The phrase 'mission accomplished' has gotten a bad rap in recent years, but in this case, it certainly applies. When we set out to establish Lambda Rising in 1974, it was intended as a demonstration of the demand for gay and lesbian literature. We thought ... we could encourage the writing and publishing of LGBT books, and sooner or later other bookstores would put those books on their own shelves and there would be less need for a specifically gay and lesbian bookstore. Today, 35 years later, nearly every general bookstore carries LGBT books.
What “general bookstores?” In Chicago, I've witnessed the disappearance of Kroch's and Brentanos, Crown Books, Barnes & Nobles, Barbara's Bookstore (where I bought my first gay book, The Sexual Outlaw by John Rechy) and Borders. Unabridged Books, a local (now it's trendy to be local) icon, in the Boystown area still thrives, but it is not exclusively LGBT, but does carry quite a bit of stock in that area.
Are brick-and-mortar bookstores, or gasp, even books, now a thing of the past, like rotary phones, local savings and loans, and milkmen?
Some might argue that the medium of print has evolved into diverse, flexible, electronic formats such as Kindle and will continue to evolve. But I think there's a deeper message here, and to understand it, we need to go back even further, before the days of gay liberation.
I was reading on the precarious faculty blog site (which calls itself an online reading room) that workers' reading and education tradition include Mechanics' Institutes (1800) and Reading Rooms in union halls. Dorothy Day's February 1940 Day by Day column in The Catholic Worker specifically mentions the reading rooms in every union she visited. Samuel Gompers' cigar rollers even voted to have a member on the clock read to them as they worked!
Imagine! Someone reading to you as an adult, not a child! And at work!
Now, in the monasteries and convents up to the days before Vatican II, as part of the religious discipline, someone would be assigned to read while the monks and nuns ate meals in the refectory. (I can't fathom something comparable happening in today's virtual offices!)
The experience implied that language was something that was savored patiently, like a gourmet meal or a good sex scene with a partner willing to go beyond slam, bang, thank you ma'am. Whether you experienced it reading out loud or silently, the act was both individual and communal.
In the past, going to a bookstore meant you were both browsing alone but also doing it physically, in a public place where you could, without incurring suspicion, hang out for hours. Going to a LGBT bookstore implied you were also part of a community of shared values, and you not only showed your affinity my physically hanging out there, but also by purchasing a physical source of knowledge and values and taking it into your home environment. Even if you had to hide the book or magazine, it became something sacred because it was taboo, and thus a tangible, living connection with the deepest part of your identity.
Social media is fast and convenient and works wonders to connect others with shared values in crisis situations, but what bothers me about it is that the word element gets lost: the word as both language and also something that a live person embodies in an “I-Thou” dialogue. Kind of like Judaism's idea of the Torah as the eternal voice of God or the Christian theology of the Word made flesh. Something that needs more than a tweet or a non-verbal instagram to express.
Joan Didion predicted something this dynamic would happen in her study of the 1960s counterculture, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, where she decried that the reliance on images and quick fixes (slogans like" All You Need Is Love") to complex problems, caused a loss of critical thinking: “The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.”
In those 1960s, feeling groovy meant you needed to “slow down, you're moving too fast, gotta make the morning last.” In the 21st century, where and when can you even slow down? Definitely not in a tweet. And sadly, no longer in a bookstore.
The bottom line in the above: A woman who is not or no longer attractive to straight men supposedly hangs out with gay guys and even hopes that she can somehow “reform” him. Think more like what the comic Roseanne said: thank God for gay guys because fat girls would have no one to dance with. Not exactly the Will and Grace dynamic, as Grace was young and attractive to straight men, more the ditzy young sidekick than the aging lonely dowager. Another fictional embodiment of this relationship, Robert Rodi's novel Fag Hag, humanizes the stereotype, he still maintains some of its brutally campy elements in the character of Natalie, the young overweight girl hopelessly in love with her gay friend and out for revenge when he finds the love of his life. Let's just say she makes Glenn Close's methods in Fatal Attraction look surprisingly amateur.
All those celebrity gossip sites had heard rumors of a secret wedding, but Suzanne Sommers confirmed it: yes, the soft rock icon of the 1970s had married his longtime manager, Garry Kief.
Now, from what I saw, it's not like he is always putting on a plaster cast (remember how exciting it was when you are a kid, at least I remember, that you got to sign someone's cast or get yours signed); some that he wears seem to be made of some cloth-like material.
