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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (April 1, 1986)
Feast without fear by Lee Lynch I had the honor o f sharing the thirteenth anniversary o f Portland’s A W om an’s Place Bookstore. The store’s three rooms were stuffed with books, periodicals, records and cards. Its staff bustled, its customers perused and picked and paid. It was just-spring and there, on an otherwise nondescript street corner, thrived one of the relatively new species o f flora to decorate the Amazon Trail: fem inist and gay bookstores. The celebration took me back to the be- T H E Place For Us, later to be reprinted in hard cover as Patience and Sarah. Oh, to be a lesbian writer, to inspire others as Miller did me, to be one o f the pioneers! O nce I’d managed the gay bookstore hur dle, and even learned to be somewhat c o m fortable there, I was ready to enter a w om en’s bookstore. Djunabooks, also in the Village, was m y next adventure. I found it even more intim idating. Customers had to ring a bell and be buzzed in, a system becom ing popu lar then with the city’s jewelers, but here it was used to keep men out! At the tim e I thought it a great liberating idea — once I got inside. In tim e, I didn’t even have to travel to New York. B loodroot opened in Bridgeport, C on necticut, W omonfyre ironically near Emily D ickinson's ML Holyoke, and others all over. For a long tim e the shelves remained to me like som eone's precious personal library. Did I dare touch the books? At the lesbian sec tions, which swelled year after year, I wanted one o f each, and went broke indulging my perverted tastes. Because I was hungry — maybe al ways w ould be hungry, for books about me. A bout the gay life. About women. Years before anyone had ever dreamed of Rubyfruit Books in Tallahassee, Florida, W om anbooks in New York, Old Wives Tales in San Francisco, Giovanni’s Room, Fan the Flames, W omen and Children First, Full Cir cle, M other Kali’s Golden Thread and on and on, that hunger led me to my first gay lit on a paperback rack in a card shop. I’d just come out, fifteen years old and lost, really lost. The book was Great. But I devoured it despite the scars it would leave on m y newly form ing psyche and was grate ful for the distorted m irror Radclyffe Hall, truly a pioneer, provided me. Instead of satisfying it, fed my hunger, and led me on to buy Ann Bannon, Valerie Taylor, Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich. Tragic, m ost of these books, and undermining, but they were all we had. (Jntil the bookstores and their intimate re lations, wom en's and gay publishers and presses. Like hardy grasses pushing up through the cracked sidewalks of cities every where, those cultural oases just get tougher. Gay’s the Word of London and Lambda Pas sages o f Miami have endured raids and con fiscations of the books that merely depict our lives. W om en’s bookstores, some bravely facing townsful of threatening bigots, haras sing civil servants and physical damage, re fuse to close down. I know now that I was right — these bookstore people made of spe cial stuff. I celebrate all of them: the under capitalized owners, the generous volunteers, the persistent customers — for creating and sustaining these citadels of our culture, these guarantors o f our future. Sarah Koehl and the staff and board at A W om an’s Place, which also carries gay male literature, tend something very m uch like a garden, and their crop accomplishes som e thing very m uch like feeding the hungry. Nowadays, I can feast without fear. still AMAZON TRAIL ginning o f those bookstores. I’d heard of them early on, but cou ldn 't imagine — what would they be like? W ould the w om en’s bookstores be overgrown libraries of dull political tracts, George Sand and the Brontes where radical collectives w ould discuss to death the political im plications of each purchase? W ould the gay stores be hives of the newly liberated th u m bing through ancient editions o f Renault’s and Corey’s To be ho n e st I was afraid to investigate. Buying lesbian books had always been such a look-over-m y-shoulder ordeal that I cou ldn’t shake the habit. Now I’d be marked, not by going to a certain shelf, nor by taking to the counter one o f books — usually upside down or backwards or with a thum b over the title — I had to worry about entering a whole dam n store! At first I’d slip anonym ously over the Con necticut border into New York City, grateful I w ouldn't have to return through customs. The O scar Wilde Bookstore originally stood just off Eighth Street in Greenwich Village and I skulked past the lingering sixties phenom ena o f love bead stores, hookah stores, poster stores and stoned panhand lers, feeling m ore daring than I ever had patronising a gay bar. Books, words, these were som ehow m ore legitimate, certainly more powerful, than the liquid wares offered at the bars. And I, seeking them where I did, m ust certainly be guilty o f som ething — perhaps theft? D id women, gays, really have the right to ou r own words? Judy Grahn’s brilliant title suggests what is behind our specialized purveyors o f power: Gay Words, Gay Worlds. One leads to the other. The O scar Wilde may well have been the first blossom in ou r springtim e. That location was tiny, but was all the space needed as we had so few books to offer each other! To me, it was a space as sacrosanct as any on earth. If I hadn’t been so nervous, so self-conscious, and the store so crowded (it had to serve, after all, one tenth o f the earth’s English- speaking population and had no competition) I m ight have stood swaying before the shelves, ju st beam ing and breathing the scent o f all that purple paper. I was to o frightened to stay long. Surely the salespeople m ust be made o f better stuff than I, be ordained in a way I could never be. I didn’t care to stay in their way. And didn’t have to. I clutched m y precious prize: the original sm all press edition o f Isabel Miller’s A Middle Mist The Homosexual In America? those now Just Out. April. 1986 The Well of Loneliness. The Well The Ladder, A B O U T LIVING, LO VING , SEX A N D AIDS is a four-hour AIDS and Safer Sex Aware ness workshop offered by the Cascade AIDS Project. NEW ATTITUDES is for all gay men, especially men w ho: — are still practicing unsafe sex (even part of the time), — think they know enough about AIDS, — still have difficulty discussing safer sex w ith their friends or partners, — spend more time than necessary worrying about AIDS, or — want support from other men for making changes towards safer sex and just want to TALK about it!! • The centers For Disease Control has stated that AIDS w ill become the major cause of death for gay men and I. V. drug users in the near future. They think they know everything! • What they don' t know is that gay men in Portland are developing a New Attitude! • We know that AIDS is a preventable disease. The CDC doesn’t think we're brave or smart enough to do what it takes to STOP AIDS. We’re going to show them that we ARE and it’s up to YOU!!! You have an important decision to make. It may be the most important decision of your life. Don't miss this opportunity to inform yourself and to get support from other people confronted with the same decision. TRAINING FOR LIVING are Copyright Lee Lynch. 1966. A SAFER SEX TRAINING BY O N 5 C a a s i C a q Q S E P R O J E C T Saturdays April 12, 26 & May 10 12:30-4:30 p.m. Families and Couples • PATRICIA I. CHANCE, MSW THERAPIST Depression • Relationship Issues Personal Transitions • Incest Survivors Coming Out Concerns Volunteers of America 6th & S.E. Alder FOR INFO RM ATIO N CALL 223-5907 21
