COVERING UP

Seems I’ve spent too much time hiding what I read.

I remember checking out E.M. Forster’s Maurice from a Dallas library and being relieved that it was one of those old hard covers without any illustration or adornment. Title, author, that’s all. (Maybe that’s where the expression, You can’t judge a book by its cover came from…a time when you, quite literally, couldn’t.)

I wasn’t one to check out a lot of gay fiction from libraries. Fear? Perhaps. But back then I wasn’t much of a novel reader in the first place. Newspapers, magazines and way too many textbooks provided enough—too much—reading for my liking. I filled much of my free time watching hours and hours of television.  Maybe that proved to be a good thing. If I’d read even a few gay novels, I might have concluded that, once out, my social circle would consist of gay prostitutes. I might still be in the closet.

Somehow I mustered up the gumption to buy Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic while still living in Dallas. I don’t remember where I bought it. I can’t imagine twenty-three-year-old me doing it without having to take a shower as soon as I got home. No doubt, I bought a few other books—never read?—at the same time so I could sandwich The AIDS Book in between them. Maybe the cashier wouldn’t notice the word AIDS in bold letters on the cover. Maybe he or she would see the word Band and think I was a musician. But maybe not. This was 1987 in the midst of the AIDS crisis when people talked about getting it from toilet seats and water fountains. Call it an act of enlightenment that the clerk didn’t put on a pair of latex gloves just to handle the book. (I’d have remembered that.) I am certain I was red-faced and sheened in a layer of perspiration by the time my books were bagged and I rushed for the exit.

When I moved to L.A. two years later, I could buy books without embarrassment at A Different Light bookstore in West Hollywood. A gay bookstore! How wonderful to browse without having to wander away for a single Gay and Lesbian shelf in the Self’-Help section of regular bookstores. (The message I took always away was that, if you were gay, you needed help.) Still, I appreciated having a plain paper bag to take the books back to the car.

I’d also pick up a copy of Edge, the free gay newspaper of the time, whenever I was in West Hollywood. No bag to hide it from view. I was not so ironically on edge about Edge as I carried it back to my car. I worried that the wrong person might see the name on the front cover. If I folded it so the back cover was in sight, things were worse. Invariably, the back had a full-page advertisement for a gay chat line with an alluring image of buff boys in jock straps. I felt like I presented a clear target for anyone venturing to West Hollywood wishing to bash a fag.

Fortunately, I’ve evolved. But then so has society. In fact, my ability to buy a gay book—even one with a let’s-be-clear title like Two Boys Kissing—without going red in the face may be more about society’s enlightenment than my own personal comfort level. The lion in The Wizard of Oz oozed courage than I do.

I felt shame again today as I stepped up to order a Frappuccino at Starbucks. I had about an hour to kill before my appointment with my psychiatrist and I had pulled my current read from my backpack. While paying, I set the book on the counter. The barista glanced at the cover and I realized the title was in clear view with an even clearer title: Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me. I quickly flipped to the back cover. An obvious signal that I didn’t want the guy to read it, right? Well, he went out of his way to bend over and read the spine. I was momentarily mortified.

And then I regained composure and shrugged it off. So what if he saw the title? Why should I care if he concludes that I have a mental health problem? My problem, true enough, but in this context, not my problem.

Maybe there’s a smidgen of personal growth. Give it another decade or two and I won’t give a flip what people think about my books…assuming books still exist as we know them!

BOOK ENDS--Part 2

A recent trip to Vancouver’s Little Sister’s Book & Art Emporium left me disheartened. The “Book” in the store’s name might as well have been blacked out. The meagre selection appeared disorganized, an afterthought to the PFLAG souvenirs and kink memorabilia that overtook most of the floor area.

I suppose I should be relieved that Little Sister’s still exists as a physical space. Good on Vancouver for keeping a gay bookstore open when similar establishments in big cities have already shut down. It saddens me to walk down Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood and no longer have A Different Light to pop into. Pronounced dead: March 2009.

Its San Francisco location on Castro held on until 2011.

The Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York City’s Greenwich Village expired in 2009.

Washington, D.C.’s Lambda Rising closed in 2010.

Part of the downfall can be attributed to the rise of big box stores that lured savvy shoppers in with 30% off new releases and fancy home decor pillows. (Just books?! Don’t be mad!) As an avid Meg Ryan fan (before she became a slave to Botox), I am reminded of the movie “You’ve Got Mail” in which sweet Meg’s Shop Around the Corner is done in by the latest big box installation of Fox Books, the chain’s territorial desires humanized by the always affable Tom Hanks. Poor Meg doesn’t stand a

chance. Heck, she even falls in love with The Enemy. Damn you, Fox Books. Damn you, Tom Hanks. (Disclaimer: Peter Scolari forced me to write the preceding sentence. Don’t hate me, America.)

But the bookselling scene has become more complicated and, yes, bleaker since 1998’s “You’ve Got Mail”. Whenever I stumble on the movie while flipping channels, I stop and linger, viewing it as a time capsule as much as I cherish it as one of Dear Meg’s final cutesy performances. I chuckle at the state of technology as I hear that prehistoric dial-up modem and I see the primitive blinking cursor and simple Internet screen.

So much has changed so fast. The internet is now so omnipresent that is has lost its capital letter, no longer a proper noun. Despite the considerable shipping costs—I tried to buy a $17 book online last week, but canceled when the final tab included $23 in shipping—ordering books or downloading them has changed the marketplace.

I have no doubt that internet accessibility has allowed people in remote areas and questioning teens to download gay literature and nonfiction that they may never have gotten their hands on. Hurrah. Still, it is a significant loss to see gay bookstores shutter their doors. A bookstore, particularly an independently owned one with knowledgeable staff, can be a gathering place for readers seeking to connect with The Next Great Read and to engage in face-to-face conversation about recent picks and pans.

Maybe I’m too nostalgic, but I cherish the times I ventured into West Hollywood’s A Different Light bookstore in broad daylight, risking being outed to...well, other gay men. (I feared so much then. Given a recent post, I may not have made much progress in the past two decades.) I checked out other men while paging through possible purchases. I wouldn’t call it cruising as my bashful demeanor rarely if ever conveyed any true sense of interest. Still, I hoped for any glimmer of interest. After all, Sally reconnected with Harry in a bookstore. (Yes, I have too many Meg Ryan references in my life.) Even though love never blossomed amid the book stacks, it was thrilling to be in a literate setting where “my type” of books filled the entire store, instead of being relegated to a shelf between Psychology and Self-Help. (By the way, there are no self-help books for Meg Ryan obsessives. I’ve looked.)

As LGBT members make gains in being accepted in society, some may say that gay bookstores are obsolete even if technological advances did not occur. Why segregate? Haven’t we earned our spot in the mainstream? I understand the thinking, but I can’t shake that jingle from “Cheers”: “You wanna go where everybody knows your name.” If not my name, then at least a place where I completely fit in. (And just to complete the “Cheers” line of thought, that never was the case in gay bars.) Gay bookstores were always about more than just books. Sadly, the more has become leather thongs and temporary rainbow tattoos.

Progress? I wonder.