Giovanni’s Room in the LGBT* Movement

Abstract

No one ever ran a gay bookstore to get rich. Giovanni’s Room certainly never provided more than a modest income for its owners and paid staff. So why do people open and operate gay bookstores? In my case, for personal as well as political reasons. The personal becomes political. I was born in 1940 and so the first thirty years of my life were a time when homosexuality was, as Oscar Wilde said, “the love that dare not speak its name.” The only comments about it were expressions of fear and contempt, fear of contamination of self and society, and contempt for weak, unnatural perverts. Homosexuals were seen as threats to the family and the continuation of the species. Yes, homosexuals were known to have contributed to high culture—Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Michelangelo (maybe), the ancient Greeks, and in our own time Jean Genet, Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monet, Gertrude and Alice. They were known among the educated classes, but their like were not familiar to the overwhelming majority of Americans. Homosexuals were an alien, unknown species. Both my parents held master’s degrees, so books were a constant presence in my life and I was a reader, finishing off three encyclopedias by the time I was 14. My father taught at Rice University in Houston, so I had access to its library until I left for college. At Rice I found a few titles through the card catalog’s listings on homosexuality, but those books were about close-binding mothers and distant fathers and recommended therapy. I certainly knew that it was dangerous to let anyone find out that I was strongly attracted to males in the way it seemed to me that males were supposed to be attracted to females.