Last week the Bay Citizen reported that A Different Light, the iconic bookshop in San Francisco’s Castro district was closing down. It was, it reported, just another example of how gay book stores in the USA are going to the wall.
This is of course not just a ‘gay thing’. Independent bookshops have been finding it harder and harder to maintain a customer base over the last ten years. The Internet has long been cited as the downfall of these small, shabby wonders. And what Amazon did to the Internet, it has now done with e-readers. This is made even worse in times of austerity. Increasingly difficult it is to justify spending more money locally when the same book can be ‘whispered’ to you through the air for far less. Our moral capital might lean on us to buy from the indie’s, but our financial capital often overrules.
But is there another reason that contributed to the demise of A Different Light – and indeed to the erosion of bookshops in gay neighbourhoods on both sides of the pond? And at this point I have to confess that this thought is not mine – but rather came to me by way of my other half, a close friend of ours and a chatty bookshop worker in London’s soho. So I’m ‘borrowing’ it here only because I want their excellent thought to be recorded somewhere.
What are gay bookshops? Well they are bookshops that sell materials that are of interest to gay people. This material typically includes fiction and non-fiction books, magazines and perhaps even journals. But it also often includes gifts, cards and erotica. And in many cases it also includes pornographic videos and DVDs. It may also include sex toys and other paraphernalia. But it is the porn that’s the important issue here. Because according to my ‘sources’ it has been the back room – that cramped space behind the curtain – that has been keeping the front of house afloat.
The more puritanical (yes, there *are* gay puritans) or high brow and elitist among us might not like this, but gay porn has been crucial to the ongoing success of gay bookshops. The skin trade has kept the book trade on track. And now that support is waning.
It is a misnomer to think that nobody buys gay porn DVDs anymore. A recent survey that I ran in Brighton demonstrated that there was still a market for DVDs – not everyone likes to get off in front of their computers. But that same survey also showed just how important digital ICTs were to gay men’s accessing of pornography. With declining sales in DVD porn, producers of content are having to make tough business decisions regarding whether to go to the trouble and expense of issuing a DVD of their latest release.
In the UK, for example, such costs include the submission of the film to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). Failure to gain a certification from the BBFC would mean that the DVD could not be legally sold in Britain – and, I believe, could not be sent via the Royal Mail. Other private postal / courier services also place restrictions on what can and cannot be shipped using their service. Given the increasing centrality of the Web within the adult entertainment industry – and the cost of doing this properly – it becomes less and less likely that studios will invest in a medium that appears to be on the wane. And if the DVD sales begin to go, so do the bookshops.
But why should we be bothered? Why is this an issue? So we can’t go and buy books from a gay bookshop down the road (and these have only ever really been down the road in cities and some towns) – we’ll get our books the same way we get our porn – online.
But we are missing something in this pursuit of individual satisfaction. Gay bookshops and gay porn have gone hand in hand since before the advent of Gay Liberation. And these spaces have not only been a place for men to purchase gay porn, but have been sites for interaction with other men – be that sexual or otherwise. Of course, you could say that this interaction is also catered for online, but it’s not all about sex – and bookshops have long acted as informal community hubs for gay men of all ages. What can be learned in a gay bookshop does not lie only between the covers of a Hollinghurst novel or a Wilde play. The owners, in my experience are a walking encyclopaedia of local gay knowledge and history. They connect people, bring them together, provide a focal point and a space, and a time for chat, gossip and sharings. They are a rare and precious phenomena – a commercial enterprise that genuinely has a social benefit and social conscience.
I remember an old gay bookshop in Brighton, no many years gone. It was a funny sort of place – the owner was a leatherqueen and I, a naive and shy young gayling found it a slightly intimidating space – but even though I was nervous I gravitated to this space because I knew it was safe, it had the materials I wanted to read and because in that bookshop being queer was being normal.
It will be sad if gay book shops become a thing of the past – as nostalgic and romantic as this might sound, I think we’ll be losing a really important part of our subcultural history if they do disappear from our streets.
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