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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13783
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I have no idea whether this link will work. I have an email tracker for gay articles in the New York Times, and it may need a valid login id when someone else clicks it. The article at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/13/opinion/13BAWE.html has an interesting commentary on the closing of a gay bookstore, and draws socialogical conclusions from that closure.
OSLO
When I moved to Norway a few years ago, one of the first things some of my new gay acquaintances would mention to me, when I told them I was from New York, was the Oscar Wilde Bookshop. Since 1967, this establishment, a Greenwich Village landmark that claimed to the oldest gay and lesbian bookstore in the United States, had been an important destination for them on trans-Atlantic vacations, a place to stock up on books that they'd never be able to find back home.
Indeed, at a time when being gay was still, for all but a brave few, a matter of living in the closet and making the occasional anxious excursion to some explicitly gay setting, a visit to the Oscar Wilde Bookshop could feel very much like an encounter with one's deepest, truest self. For a while, there wasn't anything quite like it in the world.
Now comes the news that the Oscar Wilde Bookshop will close before the end of this month. It's not an unexpected development. In recent years, gay bookstores around the country have suffered financially. New York's largest gay bookstore, A Different Light, closed its doors in 2001. Now in all of New York City there remains just one prominent gay bookstore, Creative Visions on Hudson Street.
It would be heartless not to mourn the passing of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop. Many middle-aged gay men and women can remember a time in their confused and anxious youth when, making their way to that tiny, book-crammed space on Christopher Street (the original location was on Mercer), they bought books that helped them understand and accept who they were. I've always resisted the romantic notion of a gay community, but if such a thing ever existed, places like the Oscar Wilde Bookshop were at its center.
Yet sad though it is to lose the Oscar Wilde Bookshop — or, for that matter, any bookshop — the fading of the gay bookstore as an institution is far from a tragic sign. Yes, in part these independent booksellers are a casualty of competition from bookstore chains and Internet booksellers. But their decline is also a reflection of something very positive — namely, the entrance of gay Americans into mainstream culture over the last decade or so.
Increasingly, gay men and women are open, fully integrated members of society. Consequently the need for specifically gay institutions is fading. A generation ago, places like the Oscar Wilde Bookshop were thriving because mainstream bookstores simply wouldn't have stocked a gay book. It was a time when gay novels — that is, novels written by gay people, about gay people, for gay people — were the only way for gay men and women to escape from a world in which they were despised into a world in which they were taken seriously.
In 2003, however, you don't have to read a gay novel to see gays treated decently. The line between gay and mainstream fiction is blurring. Heterosexual writers no longer omit gay characters from their universes; authors formerly categorized as gay writers are now reaching mainstream readers. Michael Cunningham, who not long ago was pigeonholed in this manner, won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel "The Hours," recently adapted into a heralded film. For more and more readers — and writers — a good book is a good book, period.
Today's young gay readers, viewing their homosexuality not as a perplexity or a tragedy, but as a matter-of-fact part of their identity, are less likely to need the affirmation and reassurance (and company) that specifically gay books once provided. Increasingly, they know who they are. They're happy with who they are. They think of themselves as a part of the larger world. They may love to read — let's hope they do — but the hole in the soul that places like the Oscar Wilde Bookshop once helped to fill is no longer there. And that's not a terrible thing.
Bruce Bawer is a literary critic and the author of ``A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society.''
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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Thanks for posting this, timmy. I'm happy to hear that more and more gay people can find what they want to read in the mainstream shops, for sure.
But when I was living in NYC, I was a regular visitor at both the Oscar Wilde Book Shop and "A Different Light". It wasn't just the books. It was the sense of community as well, as the author of the NY Times article said. But back when I was living there (late 70's to mid-1980's), the West Village was much different than it is now. Christopher Street was the sort of gay "High Street". By the time I left, it was becoming a sadly tatty area, drug dealers and the lot. Too bad.
I have only been back to the US twice in more than 10 years. Sad for me to see that former sense of community is changing. Maybe that makes me an old Geezer, indeed.
"Always forgive your enemies...nothing annoys them quite so much." Oscar Wilde
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