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New York's Oscar Wilde Bookshop to close!
The Oscar Wilde Bookshop – New York’s last remaining specialist gay and lesbian bookstore – announced this week that it will be closing at the end of March.
Some blame the credit crunch, others say that increased integration has rendered specialist bookstores, even specialist gay sections superfluous. Not so! argues Nick Alexander.

So the Oscar Wilde Bookshop has thrown in the towel, after 41 years! A similar fate threatened London’s beloved Gay’s The Word almost exactly a year ago. It was saved by the tireless efforts of the owners and a wide ranging mobilisation of clients and authors, all determined that it should survive.

IIncreasingly I am hearing that specialist gay stores, or even the simple gay shelf in existing bookstores, no longer have reason to be. Now that we are accepted, the argument goes, we have no need for a special niche.

But despite what some may think (wish for?) integration isn’t about our vanishing into thin air. It’s about being visible and being accepted.

A gay teenager who wants to find a novel that describes people like himself, a life he may end up living, that discusses the specific problems and opportunities he is likely to face, can look until he’s blue in the face on the bookshelves of Tesco or Asda, but he will not find what he is looking for.

In a traditional bookstore he has a little more chance, but without either a gay section or a gay author list what are his chances? He could ask of course, but to a nervous youngster, what does the lack of any provision for his specific needs say about the attitude he is likely to face from the booksellers?

A while back I went into an independent bookshop in the middle of Kemptown – Brighton’s gayest district. I asked the owner where the gay section was and he replied, quite coldly I thought, “We don’t have one.”
I immediately felt a little uncomfortable. It struck me that not having a gay section in one of the few areas of Britain where gay clients outnumber heterosexuals is something of a statement in itself. But being in my forties I bravely persisted... “OK, can you point me to any good gay novels?” I asked.
“What do you mean by gay novels?” the owner replied.
“Books with gay characters,” I said, starting to feel tetchy. “Books with principle characters who are homosexual.”
“Do you have any specific authors?” he asked vaguely, turning away to tidy a perfectly tidy pile of books behind him.

And therein lies the problem. For without a gay section a heterosexual buyer has no reason to even be aware of what is happening in gay literature. And without a gay section, the uneducated buyer doesn’t know where to even begin to look.

I began of course by looking for another bookstore. One which wasn’t making a statement by not having a gay section.
The gay section in Waterstone’s had, at least, the merit of existing. At least its presence meant that I could actually ask for advice without fear of rebuttal. They even had some of my own novels on the shelves.
But just as nothing but the sales potential of the UK’s top twenty novels is statistically worthwhile for a large supermarket, nothing but the top twenty gay novels are ever going to be worthwhile for an enlightened but
largely heterosexual bookstore. The truth is that in mass market book terms, there just aren’t that many gay buyers out there. Or at least, that’s how it is perceived. It’s not homophobia, it’s economics.
Amazingly Brighton's biggest selection of gay literature turned out to be by far the well stocked shelves of the St James street Prowler store... right between the porn DVD's and the underpants...

So in order to access the full range of gay literature, we need gay sections, and we need gay bookstores, and when we fail to support them, surprise surprise, they disappear. Oscar Wilde is on it’s way out. It will be sadly missed.
And the main reason for its disappearance will be our laziness as consumers – the insurmountable effort required to walk into a specialist store rather than clicking on a link on Amazon or throwing a copy of the latest mass
market dross into the trolley at Asda.
One year on from the near demise of our own treasure – Gay’s The Word – it is also a timely reminder of that old dictum. Use it or lose it.

Gay’s The Word can be found at 66, Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury, London.

Nick Alexander’s new novel Better Than Easy will be published by BIGfib Books on the 5th of March, 2009

Read more about Nick Alexander <here>

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