Inside Out - Hudson Valley
July/August 2005

Left Lane

by Alix Olson

My first baby-dyke job was at the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, New York City's LGBT bookstore. It was a year plunged into queer literature—erudite classics, junky lesbian summer novels, stirring autobiographies, male porn magazines, gay European travel guides, the sagacious poetry of Sappho and Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt, Edmund White's entire collection—and ripping eagerly into the boxes of morning UPS deliveries.

Most especially, I looked forward to the tinkling of the little bells as the front door eased open and a new customer entered—"just coming out" timid steps, or "just came out" robustly bursting in, or the slow swaggers and struts of the neighborhood butches and queens who recounted Stonewall stories with deliberation, sadness, and enduring ferocity. Then there were my favorites, the straight families stumbling in to peruse Oscar Wilde titles, freezing quietly as the store's flavor became apparent. I liked the knowing grins exchanged among the other customers in the store as the parent slinked out, rushing their children ahead. I cherished organizing the author readings, carefully turning cover after cover in preparation for the autograph signings. I enjoyed flirting shyly from behind the counter, geekily regaling girls with my newfound queer-lit knowledge., and I enjoyed watching the astute boy flirtations in front of the magazine racks. I loved that the Pride parade galloped past our store, and—silly as it may sound— I reveled in entering my workplace beneath a tremendous waving rainbow flag each day. Queer bookstores came to me as a profoundly personal revelation and a profound community staple.

In the next year, however, as my spoken-word career began to accelerate, I was forced to leave Oscar Wilde. Ironically, my enthusiastic foray into full-time queer artistry also initiated my awareness of the decrease in community support for bookstores. First, Oscar Wilde itself was due to close a few months after my departure; upon my first visit back, I vividly recall the manager scrambling to order a myriad of gay Ken dolls—in her words, "the only bread and butter left of gay bookstores. All they buy now are the tchotchkes." A year later, Boston's New Words Bookstore—which not only boasted a fine collection of queer resources and a fantastic gay gathering space, but had also hosted my first Boston appearance—closed its doors. My second national tour, delivering us at the midway point to Oakland, Calif, also brought us directly to Mama Bears Bookstore's final day. "Everything's on sale! Doors closing!" greeted us as we drove up to the store we'd been looking froward to patronizing all the way across the country. I took a commemorative picture of Alice, one of the co-owners of 20-plus years, and asked her to smile. "Nothing to smile about on this day," she lamented. "If you can't keep a feminist bookstore going in Oakland, California, there's just not much to smile about anymore." I took two photos of a heartbroken lesbian veteran, bought as many books as my credit card could shoulder, and drove home weeping.

Last night, after Albuquerque, N.M.'s Wiminfest opening night, the organizers sat around, crunching frustration into nachos puzzling, "Where, oh where, has our community gone?" In addition to waning festival attendance, Albuquerque's only LGBT bookstore, Sisters and Brothers, closed this year. "Simply not enough support," one of the owners shrugged. "I suppose there's this perception we've assimilated into mainstream culture." "They're at home watching Will and Grace," one of the festival organizers muttered, "and on the Internet ordering books from Amazon.com."

Mainstream culture? Assimilation? In a sociopolitical age when U.S. mainstream culture is defined by nauseatingly colossal coverage of the woman- and queer-hating Pope's funeral and Britney Spears' pregnancy, anti-gay marriage initiatives, anti-sodomy laws, "Don't ask, don't tell" policies, and the racist, imperialist invasion of countries around the globe by an intellectually and morally bankrupt administration, do we have the privilege of considering assimilation progress?

Moreover, what do we sacrifice in the name of that amalgamation? It seems clear to me that each time we balk at supporting our queer/feminist festivals, bookstores, magazines, sex-toy shops even in favor of Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Borders, we not only hand-deliver our economic future to the rolling corporate monoliths, but we eviscerate our community's grass-roots potential for developing and promoting revolutionary ideas, young authors, and upcoming queer concerts, as well as keeping in stock those past works and ideologies essential to evoking our herstory and, thus, our radical future.

In my humble opinion, the stunning, struggling identities of the people I meet around this country, and the ferocious backs upon which they were built, deserve more than a "section" in an otherwise contemptuously "mainstream" bestseller bookstore. And besides which, the clueless clerks behind those conventional counters aren't nearly as cute.