Saying Goodbye

I had to get a haircut today, so I went a bit early in order to see what was left of the inventory at A Different Light Bookstore in West Hollywood. For a number of reasons, the store will be closing in April, leaving Los Angeles without any gay bookstore other than ones that specialize in porn. There will be no more browsing for titles of new and old books by favorite authors, no rummaging through the shelves of used books at remarkable prices, no readings by gay and lesbian authors. All gone now.

I can still recall many of the trips that I've taken over the years to A Different Light. I've purchased many books there, all in the name of supporting our community. It's where, for example, I purchased all of the Tales of the City books (seven of them so far) by Armistead Maupin, an author whose work has been such a fond part of my life. I know I could probably find the same books cheaper on Amazon, but it was important to me to feel what a friend of mine in college used to call "all that great queer energy" you found in a bookstore like A Different Light. I can also recall most of the readings I've attended, and I still have signed books as my souvenirs of those days. One of my most prized possessions is a signed copy of Afterlife by Paul Monette, another of my favorite writers, that I got at a reading there only a few years before his passing.

The store was almost empty this morning. Only two other customers came in while I was browsing. Most of the books are gone, sold already to other people who want to take advantage of their last chance to own an item from the store. I still managed to pick up about a dozen books, some of which I had thought about buying for years. I know it's too late to make a difference, but I hope my purchase is a somewhat appropriate way to honor the legacy of A Different Light. I might go back just once more to look around and see if there's any way I can retain a sense of what the store once meant to the community. Even the fixtures are on sale, but I have no place to put a display rack in my living room.

Ironically, today I read in Out magazine that the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York City is also closing. That was one of my first destinations when I visited New York. It was the oldest gay bookstore in the United States, and it too had a strong sense of history to it. Now it and A Different Light will be gone, and our community will probably never have spaces like them again. (Yes, I still have the books I purchased in New York as well. I do keep books, perhaps longer than I ever need them.)

I realize that it's perhaps better that gay books are available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Borders. That way, people in cities and towns without strong gay communities still have access to literature about themselves. Somehow, though, it's just not going to be the same for me to go browsing "the gay shelf" at Barnes & Noble. I won't find a copy of an out-of-print novel like Butterflies in Heat or Franny, the Queen of Provincetown or the campy novels of Joe Keenan (who later wrote for Frasier) or the "Buddies" series by Ethan Mordden or the hardcover version of Jeff Hobbs' The Tourists. I picked up all of these and a few more today. That's not likely to happen again any time soon outside of a used book sale somewhere.

Maybe we're too technologically advanced to need bookstores any longer. Or maybe we don't read as much as we used to, and books are going the way of the dodo bird and I'm going to be the only (gay?) dinosaur with a library. Perhaps gay people would just rather congregate in bars and clubs; there's actually one on either side of the ADL site in West Hollywood. Whatever the reason, I will miss A Different Light. It was like saying goodbye to an old friend today, one whose equal I'll likely never see again in this town.