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
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P R O J E C T
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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
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Volunteers of America
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FOR INFO RM ATIO N CALL 223-5907
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