Another Loss

When I was a teenager, a friend and I went to New York City for the first time. One of the first places we went was to the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore. She bought a button that read "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle," and I bought a Tshirt that had the word "faggot" in small and handsome cursive over the left breast. We also bought books, stickers, little flags... who knows what all?

Wearing that Tshirt as a freshman in a small town high school got me put in a trashcan and rolled down a hall. It was still worth it -- we were not alone, we belonged to a community, we had our own bookstore!

The owner of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore announced on February 6th that, after 41 years, the store will close for good by March 29th of this year.

As citizens of Seattle, we've already watched our own GLBTQ bookstore close. Women's bookstores, gay & lesbian bookstores, independent bookstores have been disappearing for the past decade or more. And what, if anything will replace them? Connecting here on the Internet is all well and good, but we are losing our actual cultural institutions, our meeting places, our communities.

Remember, GLBTQ books didn't come into being as a viable part of publishing because the demand was so great, our books came to be our books because we as a community demanded a place of our own; in literature, in publishing, in media, in retail.

Neglect the institutions that taught us how to be and we'll be back to being nowhere, just so many strangers passing along the dark halls on Manhunt, meeting one another in tired bars, learning who we are, and what we might be, not from our community and our ancestors, but on the school yard, and from our enemies.

Is that the future we want?

Meanwhile, our hearts go out to the good people at the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore. Thanks again for my life.