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You are here: Home > Forum > A Place of Safety > General Talk > Ingrained prejudice
icon10.gif Ingrained prejudice  [message #66651] Mon, 26 March 2012 15:58
timmy

Has no life at all
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13739



I have just come back from making a donation to our town's new pet project. Our bookshop closed and the town, wisely or unwisely, started a Community Bookshop run by volunteers, selling old and new books. My wife is a shareholder though we each, privatley, think it will fold. We wish it well. And so we took some books we no longer wanted to the Community Bookshop for them to resell. This was our donation. My wife asked me to drop the books in because she was concerned that they would see one, Kama Sutra, and draw their lips tight over it.

I went in with a load and asked them to check whether each book was likely to sell. If not I was going to take it to the local animal charity shop. They were two ladies, one about 10 years older than me, one about my age, and they worked through the books with glee.

"I don't think we want this one," said the older one. "It's published by the Gay Men's Press!"

I wondered, gently, why not. I mentioned that we have a gay mayor, we have gay shopkeepers, we have a gay couple running one of our local tea shops, and that it didn't seem an unusual thing at all to me. I didn't want to turn it personal by saying "I'm gay!" because that would have made a different point, and badly.

"Oh, I suppose these things don't matter nowdays," she answered.

Shed been happy with Kama Sutra, she'd noticed only that Beautiful Thing was a play script, she'd not recognised Me Talk Pretty One Day as a gay book at all. She had just been drawn to the publisher's name.

Unless she's thrown the books away now, I think I may have made a quiet point successfully. I just wonder what was going through her mind

[Updated on: Mon, 26 March 2012 16:03]




Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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