Craig Gidney discusses his YA novella, Bereft, and Ed Hermance tells us about the history and significance of Giovanni's Room, the oldest operating queer bookstore in America.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 7 - The Importance of Being Out
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. I wanna wish everybody a happy Passover and a happy Easter and a happy April Fools in descending order, maybe, and let you know that I'm posting a day early, usually I post every other Tuesday. I'm doing this on a Monday because, well, I actually have big news. I'm going to do the first live recording of the Virtual Memories Show this Monday night, April Fools Day, seven o'clock at Parsons, the new school to West 13th Street in New York in the bark room of that building off the lobby at 7 p.m. This interview is gonna be with Ben Catcher, one of the greatest cartoonists of our time who recently published Hand Drying in America, which, if you know Catcher's stuff, you'll find funny. Ben Catcher is, well, like I said, one of the finest cartoonists around. He was recognized years ago with a MacArthur Fellowship Grant, which makes him, quote, unquote, a genius. I mean, that's because you're sort of known as the genius grant, that's the way it goes. Anyway, this means that I will have interviewed three Pulitzer winners and one genius, so I feel pretty good about things. Like I said, that interview is gonna be seven o'clock, April 1st, which is tonight, if you're listening to this in relatively real time, at Parsons, the new school to West 13th Street in the bark room. I don't think we have to worry about the number of attendees coming, so just come there. If you're in New York and you wanna hear a nice conversation between me and Ben Catcher, I would love to have you there. Now, this episode is our first double guest episode of the year. I was really reticent about doing that. I kind of figured I was gonna jinx myself if I used two interviews in one episode, I would end up getting no guests for the rest of the year and feel pretty bad about casting some hacks on the podcast. But if everybody who kinda sorta says they're on for the show actually comes through, then it's really not something I'm gonna have to worry about. In fact, according to the calendar I laid out, I'll only have like four spots left for the rest of the year. Now, our first guest for this episode is Craig Gitney. Gentlemen, I went to college with, who has a new novel out, or a novella out called bereft. Craig's bio from his site reads as follows. Craig Lawrence Gitney writes both contemporary, young adult, and genre fiction. He is a recipient of the 1996 Susan Petrie Scholarship at the Clarion West Writer Workshop, and has published works in science fiction, gay and young adult categories. His first collection, Sea Swallow Me and Other Stories, was nominated for the 2009 Lambda Literary Award in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror category. He lives and writes in his native Washington, DC. Now, Craig is doing a reading this Saturday, April 6th at Giovanni's Room, the great queer bookstore in Philadelphia. The store is at 345 South 12th Street. Craig's a DC man, like I said, but Giovanni's Room is one of the best known gay bookstores in the country, so he's really excited about being there. And after Craig's interview, we have an interview with Ed Hermans, who is in fact the owner of Giovanni's Room. (upbeat music) - Well, my guest today is Craig Gitney, author of "Be Raft." Craig, I went to Hampshire College with your, the second Hampshire author I've interviewed now, which just fills me with rage, that this person after person now from our years, who's actually able to finish a book and get it published as opposed to me in my kind of dithering around. But congratulations on your first novel. - Thank you so much. - Can you tell me about "Be Raft," what it is, where it comes from, and what led you to write it? - Well, it started out actually at Hampshire. I took a course with Andrew Socky, and the story that I used to get into his course was actually a really early draft of "Be Raft." - Yeah, it's been gestating a long time then. - Yeah, it's been gestating a long time. So, you know, I did the Hampshire version of "Be Raft," and then it was workshoped. I guess it sat in a drawer or a file or whatever for maybe 10 years. And all of a sudden, another publisher of mine let me know about an anthology called "From Where We Sit," "Black Writers Writing Black Youth," edited by Victoria Brownworth and put out by Tiny Satchel Press. And she said, "Well, do you have a story about young adults, African-American young adults?" And at the time, I really didn't. I was focusing more on fantasy and science fiction and horror. But I actually had "Be Raft" sitting around. I said, "Well, let me see if I can do something with it." So I tweaked it up and made it so that it was in the 2000s or at least 2010s. - People had cell phones? - Yeah, so I updated it, yeah. And sent it, she liked it. Then it was published. Then about, I don't know, maybe a year later, she decided to do a novella. And she called me up and said, "Could you expand this into a novella?" And I said, "Yes." And of course, I had no idea how I was going to do it. But I was like, "Just say yes." So I said, "Yes." And I did. And so that's where the genesis of "Barraft" is from. - And what's the nature of the book? Can you tell us the, I hate to say plot, but what's it about? - It's about a young guy named Raphael Bannon. And he went to a scholarship to a Catholic school, an all male Catholic school called "Our Lady of the Woods." And he's thrown into culture shock because of that. Because A, he's not from that particular, most of the people at this school come from legacies and they are sort of wealthy. He's not, he lives with his mother who actually has her own subplot in the story. Her mother has bipolar issues. And that actually goes from the original story too. And he goes to the school and has troubles because A, he's gay, B, he's black, and he sort of becomes a target for the bullies there. And because of that, the story basically follows him and how he deals with the bullying issue. - Something I always hate to ask fiction writers, but how much does it mirror experience of your own? - Some of it does, a lot of it does. Not the bipolar mother or even being poor, but yes, being in a not Catholic school, Episcopalian school that was very stuffy really affected me. I wasn't targeted by bullies necessarily. I was way too much of a loner for it, but I definitely saw what had happened to other kids. And I knew that it was only an issue of, they just hadn't had me under the radar. - Yeah, I'm under the radar, but I could be at the radar anytime. - Do you feel, I mean, bullying is a big issue nowadays. Do you feel it's worse nowadays or is it somehow the kids are less able to deal with? I mean, I was a nerd, I was bullied/a loner like yourself. I just don't remember it being suicide inducing the way we see nowadays. What's your take just off the cuff on where you see it now compared to when we were young? - I think what happens now is that it's completely, they can't escape it. Whereas when we were younger, we kind of could because there wasn't the internet. - True, true. - And people will do things like set up a hate page book. Like even if you do a slam book like they did in Mean Girls, it's just a book. There's only so many people who are gonna see it. Whereas the entire world is gonna see so-and-so is a slut, so-and-so is a fag, so-and-so is not the other. I also believe that a lot of the kids that are committing suicide actually probably have other issues going on and that the bullying just is the feather that sort of knocks the entire thing down. - I always go with the suicide as mental illness first and then there's- - Right, so it's not just, so I really don't think it's just that I think that there have been some cases, especially when they're really young, like 11 and 12 and all that people killing themselves because of it. I think a lot of them think about killing themselves, but not to the point of being suicidal. And so it maybe is more of an impulsive suicide sort of thing. - Again with us, it was more reading bad poetry or writing bad poetry, reading science fiction and comic books and that was my little- - Right. - Okay, I'm projecting on this one. It was my escape, I assume other people had theirs too. How much of a departure was this from your previous book, your collection of short fiction sees swallow me? It seems, again, I haven't started reading bereft yet, but it doesn't seem on the face of it to have the fantastic/science fiction aspects of those. - Well, it's a departure in that I had to streamline some of the language, actually, but I actually don't think that it is that far because a lot of what happens in the book happens in his interior mind and the way that Rafe kind of deals with the world is through references to sort of nerd culture. So, for instance, it's called Our Lady of the Woods and there's an actual statue of a Virgin Mary in the chapel. And so he looks at it and he says, "Oh, it looks like Galadriel from Tokyo." He goes to the school and he thinks it looks like Hogwarts. So, I mean, he does connect things to it and also in his inner life, I also have sort of couple of dream sequences that are sort of a nod to the fact that he's thinking about these things that he sort of connects it to that, which is the way that I kind of did. - I think is what we all do. It's, you know, try to find some sort of analog or some, you know, again, method of escape, I guess. Some other fantasy, there are some world that, you know, we have a little more resonance in. - Right. - So, who do you think, well, who do you consider to be your big influences in terms of writing and you're publishing history? - Well, I would say Tony Morrison is a big one. He's really good. - Our mutual friend, Samuel Delaney? - Yeah, I would say. - I figure he's an influence on all of this. - Right, yeah, yeah, I would say Samuel Delaney in terms of, you know, sort of the subtext that happens in here. Both Tony and Sam, or Chip, actually do weave in subtextual things that are in a way that is very evocative and mythic. And they're really good at the resonances of fiction, as well as sort of the foreground of it. I don't sort of consider myself sort of the writer like there's some, a lot of YA writers know how to talk the way kids talk and that sort of thing. And I did, you know, push myself to do that here. But that's kind of like not my strength. I really don't, I've tried to read other YA novels where it's written in the voice of the kid sometimes. And I find that it just doesn't, I have to have that subtext there. Or it doesn't work for me. - In the sense of that interior voice, you mean? - In terms of the interior voice, in terms of, I was reading a book, I'm not gonna tell you what the name of it was, but you know, someone said, you know, you should try this book out. And my problem with it was, because she was imitating the young voice so much that it just fell flat in terms of prose style. It was like, I look at this, it looks like dog B. Well, you know, that sort of flat style. - I just saw someone refer to this sort of stuff as spoken writing or written speech as opposed to, and I thought, oh, that kind of nails the idea of using text messaging as prose nowadays. That it's just this very flat descriptive sort of thing. And that tends to lead to a lack of, you know, introspection, I think, between either the narrator or the author, but that's me and my-- - Right, I definitely have not one of these, what is the term that trans parents prose people? You know, I tried to take all the purple out, but it's lavender. (laughing) - You have to have style. There has to be something that, you know, make you feel happy. - It's the interview that's going up in a few days with a gentleman who interviewed William Gas, who was one of the great, great stylists of our time, and I asked him the person who had interviewed Gas, what's, you know, important in Gas's work, and he said it's the sound before the story. You know, it really is the strength of the sentences over, you know, the plot will work out, but you know, these sentences need to catch you and really, you know, hold you tight. One question I had, which I don't know if you sort of answered at the beginning, why YA? Is it, you know, were you interested in young adult fiction at all, or did it come about because of the editor who was looking for anabella? - It mostly came about because of the editor, but I was playing around with something besides this, you know, sort of a fantasy YA sort of thing, since that's what's selling. But, you know, I would add my own little touch to it, and as I was writing that one, I realized maybe I could sell it as that, but it's not really because it uses, to me, there's a difference between YA, there are two types of YA. There are, there's young adult fiction that's kind of written with the kid in mind, and sort of for that age group, and then there's the type that is where the characters happen to be that age. And I tend to write more towards characters who happen to be in that age group, and it's a fascinating age group because they're changing and everything, rather than-- - You still want to consider it from an adult perspective and have all that level of introspection. - Exactly. - Yeah, I had a disturbing moment a week or so ago as getting some dental work done. The patient in the cubicle area next to mine mentioned that she was starting high school this year, and she's 14, and I thought I'm three times her age, and when she mentioned that she really hates history class, I just wanted to say you don't have history, you don't understand it, it's really important, but I realized we were all 14 once upon a time and we were all much less complex than I think we are nowadays. - I don't know about that, Belle. - We thought we were complex. - We thought we were complex. - We're more complicated now than we were then. I think that might be a little more. - I don't know, I just think that the way that a lot of people, like the texting, and so I do think it has kind of dumb things down. I don't want to get old, old man get off your lawn, but there is something to be said about writing a long, stupid poem that's really dumb, and just writing, I hate him, LOL. Where as to some people, that's it. It doesn't go beyond that. - Are you exposed much to young adult culture? I mean, do you have anyone, anyone's kids, or anyone you're friends with that you see? - Yeah, I mean, I see it, you know, without names. - No, naturally, yeah. - But, you know, I have seen, you know, people where it's just very-- - Yeah, I always assume that it's, you know, we're headed towards idiocracy, but I generally hide out in my little world. - I mean, everyone says, and who's older, things that we're heading towards idiocracy. - But I think every age thinks that, you know. - Yeah. - It was always the golden age before this and-- - I don't think it is the golden age before this, though. I just, I actually do think that-- - It's just a declining action. - I actually do think that there's, because, I mean, I hate to say this, but naming, well, I don't know. I won't name the book, but, you know, the book with the girl who falls in love with a werewolf in the vampire at the same time, and she is written very poorly, she's bland, she's like, ugh, I don't like him, he's beautiful. I mean, just the entire way that that was constructed is completely different, whereas there is a book that I love that author. Her name is Tanneth Lee. And she basically wrote the same book 20 years before, with the idea that this sort of bland, plain Jane girl who happens to be secretly beautiful, falls in love with a robot. If you read that one, the way it's written, it's so rich and magical, and there's all this mythological stuff happening at the, you know, her mother is, there's elements of the Prasapena myth, for instance, in there, and there's all, you know, she hints to pick Malian, but Ginger switches it. And then she also has, you know, for, you know, in the '80s, it was a big deal. A gay character, an openly gay character, who's her best friend. Whereas Twilight kind of, yeah, it is what you get, what you say, it's just there. - Yeah, I do wonder, and between that and the big literary phenomenon last year, though the whole "50 Shades" thing, which apparently was originally Twilight fanfic, that they just-- - Retooled. - Yeah, which I guess is that same readership a few years older, you know, with a little more buying power, and they can just, you know, apparently a quarter of all books in America being bought were some strange Twilight fan fiction. - Right. - Yeah, it's a strange world we live in. - Right, right. - So what's next for you? What comes after bereft? - Well, I'm working on this young adult novel. I don't know where it's gonna go. I have no buyer or anything. But it's kind of going to be set in Washington, D.C. And Washington, D.C. never gets its places being sort of its own city. It's always viewed as the seed of government. But there's an entire world out there in D.C. where people just don't give a shit about government. And they just live their lives, and it has its own flavor and everything. So I'm trying to capture that, talk about the neighborhoods where senators never go, that sort of thing. Because people always think that it's just Capitol Hill, and it's not. - Tourism, that's the same thing. My wife is from Louisiana, so we spend more time in New Orleans now than I used to. And it's, you know, oh, New Orleans is back. But it's this small tourist section of New Orleans. - Right. - It's a much greater city. It's still been hammered. And who are you reading nowadays? - Right now, I'm actually reading this book called, I'm reading a Booker book. It won or was a finalist with a Booker man called Jim Wretch's Menagerie. And it's a historical novel that sort of is like an adventure novel, and it's about a guy who collects animals all over the world, and his particular adventure of collecting a Komodo dragon, which they initially think is an actual dragon. And I guess, technically it is, but they're just like, oh. - That's all it is. Although it's got the toxic, you know, bite and everything else. - It is, and it's not friendly, necessarily. - No flame shooting out, but still. - Right, so it's an interesting story to read. I actually have, well, I shouldn't mention that. I was on an awards panel. I can't mention all the books I read for that. - Yeah, the awards actually get me. - Actually, so I read a lot of those, and they were in mystery. - So how difficult do you find it, you know, well, trying to write professionally? What's the career arc, I guess? - Time. I mean, last year I got the thing to write the book. - And I was working full time, and I was also doing work for a small press, and it all came to an end, and I had to drop the small press, 'cause it was just too much. 'Cause, you know, I would have to go home from work, and I made myself write, maybe an app. I use this thing called Scrivener. - Oh, yes, I've used that program. - Yeah, so I've never finished anything, though, as I told you, but at least I've used it, so that's something. - So, you know, I write 500 words at night, and you'll have something done. - Yeah, you know, Diana was giving me much the same, our other Hampshire graduate interviewee, I guess, you know, you actually have discipline and can work at something regularly, that's how you actually produce something, I guess. - Right, right. And, you know, the longer something becomes, you forget the names of somebody, and you're like, wait a second. (laughing) - Which is always nice, again, with the new programs, at least you can sort of track down what you wrote and when. - Who's the best or the happiest you've ever been about getting a blurb? What author or critic has praised either of your books that you really, you would show not necessarily your mom, but, you know, you'd show other literary people? - Well, I love the fact that Tana Thalee wrote something, and she said, "My language was Dionysian," or something like that, which I loved. (laughing) And it was good because I actually, maybe a week later, got a review from someone who said, "Oh, the language is kind of bland. The stories are okay, but the language is bla--" And I was like, "What?" - It is not it's Dionysian. - It's Dionysian. - It's Dionysian. (laughing) - Tana Thalee says, "Right." (laughing) - So. - I wanna congratulate you on "Bereft." Good luck going forwards, and I hope we can have you on the show again, Greg. - Yeah, absolutely. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - That was Craig Giddney. Like I said, Craig will be reading from "Bereft," his YA novella at Giovanni's room in Philadelphia on Saturday, April 6th at 5.30. It's 345 South 12th Street. If you'd like to go there and show some support. Our next guest is Ed Hermans, who's the owner of Giovanni's room. I've known Ed for a million years now, and I wanted to find out more about the history of the store, as well as how he stays in business in the Amazon age, and well, a million other questions about gay culture and gay literature. And here's a bio I found of him online. It says, "Ed Hermans is the owner of Giovanni's room, the longest operating queer book store in America. Ed was born in Houston in 1940, graduated Dartmouth College in '62 with a BA in philosophy, and Indiana University Bloomington in 1965 with an MA in comparative literature. He taught at Auburn, Indiana State, and Tubingen University in Germany, fearing that he might never escape the closet as long as he remained a teacher. Ed abandoned academia and joined a hippie commune in the mountains of Southern Colorado, still a going concern with a long history of distinguished perennial guests, it says, including Alan Ginsburg, Peter Orlovsky, and John Corso. Ed moved to Philadelphia in 1971 to manage ecology food co-op, a natural foods outlet, and he bought Giovanni's room from its founders with partner Arlene Olshan in 1976. So, I hope you enjoy this history of Giovanni's room, and it's really important place in gay culture in America, and in Philadelphia in particular. (upbeat music) Welcome to the virtual memory show. My guest this episode is Ed Hermans, owner of Giovanni's room, gay book store in Philadelphia. Hi, thanks for having me. - And why don't we start by just talking about the history of the bookstore. Notice it's in its 40th year at this point, can you tell me about its origins and its context? - Sure, the inspiration for Giovanni's room was the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York, which started out in 1968 as the first gay book store in the world, this was of course before Stonewall existed. In fact, the founder, Craig Rodwell, was one of the people who helped organize the community in the wake of the Stonewall riots in New York. And these three guys in Philadelphia were inspired, they, you know, by having such a thing. I think that our generation, that is people who were born in the 40s and 50s, had the common experience of there being no information about who we were at all. No, of course there was, there was Andre Jied and Marcel Proust and some others who, you know, were pretty distant to the lives of most of us. And I think their background must have been similar to mine too, of I had cornered the University of Library where my father taught-- - Where did he teach? - At Rice University in Houston. Since I was in junior high school, and that was, you know, the only thing that I ever found there was aside from a soccer AD's text on how to cure homosexuality, whereas photographs of Greek sculpture, that was the only connection that I could find in years of looking. So that a book store where I represented kind of a revolution and self-confidence of trying to, you know, I had been a college teacher for seven years and after that, I managed to natural foods co-op for a couple of years. And so I had kind of the background to run a bookstore. - What did you teach? - English, I have master's degree in comparative literature, but that means generally speaking, you teach English. (laughing) And so trying to pull together the information about being gay was an extremely exciting thing and offering it to other people. In those days, the first three years of this store's existence that the owners drove up to New York City, picked up Craig Rodwell at Oscar Wilde, who went with them to the book distributor in the West Village and he helped them pick out books. And then they drove back to the books in the car. - I think it said that it must have been trying to find the gay section when the gay section doesn't exist, that that must be... - No, there was hardly anything. The help opened with fewer than a hundred titles. And when my partner and I had a partner for 10 years, when she and I bought the store, that we made that trip to New York twice and it dawned on us that we could not possibly drive to New York City every time we wanted a book. So we did start to open accounts with publishers and distributors and so on. Another aspect of that was important, I know both to Oscar Wilde and to Giovanni's room was being out, being open. That in those days, I don't think there were any gay bars in Philadelphia and most likely not rarely in New York that were clearly gay to passers by. And the idea of this store, which started off on South Street, which is a pretty important street in Philadelphia, was a tiny little storefront, but a plate glass window on the sidewalk that people passers by could see what it was and they could come in, they virtually never did, but at least they had the impression that there's nothing really weird going on in there. It functions like a bookstore, would it, even the night? It didn't have the shaded and obscured view inside. So the store was there on South Street for three years and then when Arlene and I got the store, then we had to move it 'cause the building had been sold to Spruce Street. Another major street, actually, a more prominent location than where we are now, but also completely visible that there wasn't any guessing as to what this was. Then we were there for three years and that building was sold again and the new owners, the new instantly that they did not want this gay bookstore on their premises. And so we were told to get out ASAP with a deadline. And so we went looking for other places to rent and the only places that people were willing to rent to us were on the back streets. One place, not far from here, simply said, you know, we'll, you'll attract too many homosexuals to our building. And of course that was the idea that half the population of that building already was gay, but they either didn't know it or didn't, I don't know, whatever, and so-- - Was it still the '70s or are you into the '80s? - Yes, '79 is when we're moving. That we hadn't ever thought of buying a building because we didn't have any money. And the deadline is drawing closer and closer. And really it seemed like the only option to be public was to buy a property. So we ended up borrowing the down payment for the corner building. The store is made up of two buildings joined together now. We got the down payment for that corner building from our customers, i.e. the gay community. And something over a hundred people helped us renovate that building that is tearing out walls, but then the skylight bill in the cases, you know, volunteer, architect, volunteer, everything. - That's a joke about too many gays doing interior decorating at the same time. I know that's-- - Sorry, but it worked. (laughing) - So Al, and of course that experience of the home of folks throwing us out of one property and the other home of folks refusing to rent to us was the salvation of the store 'cause we would never be able to afford the rents in the center city, Philadelphia now. That, you know, so that we thank them directly (laughing) for their hostility. - I guess, I guess there are a couple of things I would like to say more about the history of the store. One is that it was the guys that started off this store on South Street, they were terrified of what was gonna happen with that big plate-class window on the street. They had no idea how public was gonna react to that. - In terms of violence, yes. - As far as I know, that window was never broken nor were the windows on Spruce Street, but when we got over here in '79, then I would say for the first 15 years, occasionally. Every great once in a while, we would get busted windows. Maybe even in a period of two weeks or I'd get three windows and then go for a couple of years without any. And it's always struck me that these broken windows all happened in the dead of night, two or three or four o'clock in the morning. And the similar sort of thing it used to be is that it stopped, that we haven't had a broken window in 15 years now, but a similar sort of thing happened when people would pull up the traffic light on the corner. And then when the light changed to green, they would squeal off shouting, "Faggot at the top of their lungs!" You know when you think, "Who's the sissy here?" (laughing) The people who are throwing these bricks in the dead at night for fear that somebody's gonna see 'em and screaming, "Faggot, is they run away?" (laughing) But I think in general, Philadelphia has, certainly said, Center City has an atmosphere of its own, in the neighborhoods. Many people know only their own neighborhood. Another large section of the Philadelphians know their neighborhood and Center City, but really nothing much more. And so that when Philadelphians come to Center City, it's almost like, "Well, this is a different part. "The more rays of my neighborhood "don't necessarily apply here." And so it's been, we've really had a pretty easy time. And now for the last 10 years or so, there's really no difficulty at all. - And I saw in 2011, I recall you got the marker from the Historical and Museum Commission. What was the story behind that? Or what's the significance of the marker that they laid out? - Well, it's a, I'm sorry, but I'm so cynical about these things. But it's a tourist industry effort. That was who spearheaded it. They wrote the text at the application. You know, they didn't want my input, basically. - Oh, really? Okay, I sort of assumed you guys would have pushed to add some recognition. It was really from there on. - Yeah, it was 100% from their side. - Which again is-- - It was nice to have the mayor here dedicating it. And so, you know, it's a good thing for the store. But nevertheless, I'm kind of, you know-- - And bivalent? - Yeah, you know, like there's, for example, by contrast to Oscar Wilde, the first bookstore in the world, doesn't have a marker. (laughs) And we, the second one, and it's the second, in many historic events in gay and lesbian, by trans history, took place in Philadelphia. But we're only the second after the demonstrations, the market honoring the demonstrations that it impenates all from '65 to '69. And, you know, again, it's, I would have more respect for that award if it had been, we had been selected by a group of historians. There's some people who had some oversight as to what's important. (laughs) And I hope we'd still deserve it, but I know that other things deserve it too. - Sure. So how long you been in Philadelphia, yourself? - Since '71. - Okay. - One other thing I want to tell you about the store is that this has to do with the comparative literature background too, so that I have been in Europe. In fact, I had lived there a couple of years. And so in the early '80s, when the first LGBT bookstores in Europe opened, then for a period of about 15 years, we were the supplier of American lesbian and gay books to the stores in Europe and Australia and New Zealand. So that was, you know, really kind of a thrilling time of these international connections and, you know, making friends, which I still have today from those relationships. We still sell some overseas, but not nearly as much as we used to. You know, I thought we were going forever that when the sales got to 150,000 a year, which, you know, sales like a large number to me, but of course in the real world of wholesaling, that's not a very big number. But it was, again, a lot of fun. There are several stories that come out of that. Of we were the NIAID press, which was by far the largest lesbian publishing publisher for many, many years, handed over their export wholesale business to us. And as a result, they forwarded this letter that's on the wall over here because they simply didn't pay attention to where it was from, because it was perhaps, because it was in Latin. - That letter is? - And the letter is an order for NIAID's most successful book ever, "Lesbian Nuns," which is a collection of personal essays by nuns and ex-nuns. And it's from a Vatican library ordering a copy of that book. And the same time we were in the IASM, well, I need you to be repaid as I am. (laughing) And so we got another letter, so at NIAID got a letter and we have a letter. And the same time this was going on, the editors of that book were in Dublin. No, and it appeared on a late night radio interview show. And when they got back to the hotel at two or three in the morning, the hotel threw them out on the street because they didn't want that filth in their hotel. - I was gonna ask, 'cause one of our previous interviewers actually talked about the index Prohibitorum from the Vatican, so I'm wondering if this ended up on their list too, after they got a chance to read it. - Which could be a good selling point, frankly. The Vatican doesn't want you to read this. That's good. - It made it all the way to paperback an international bestseller. There were the Italian edition had the grossest cover you could imagine of say, 16th century, none with exposing a breast. (laughing) - They got a cell. (laughing) And you know, it's very, the editors and the publisher got into a row because, oh, they didn't want to be exploited like this, and-- - Judging a book by its cover. - Yeah, what effect do you think the stores had on queer culture in Philadelphia and more broad than that? - Well, for all of those years when we were exporting to the-- - Free world. - Yeah, then that was kind of like, that was part of what they had to offer their customers, the stuff that came from here. So I think it was very important. And because two American books were, there were more of them than there were coming out of any other country, so it's a significant part of their inventory, of, for Philadelphia, you know, I think just the stability of the store is the, you know, in the old days that was, you know, a safe space. Well, it still is, of course, a safe space, but it was a place where we were open seven days a week and, you know, it was information central. And, you know, that function has diminished in, you know, over time, over the last 40 years, that from being the only place to being one of several places, you know, it's still though one of the very few places where people who are not of drinking age can go and hang out. So it still serves that function very much. I think, you know, this is also just far beyond Philadelphia is that our website, thequeerbooks.com, we update every week with new arrivals going back to 2006. So that, and these are categorized in, you know, like young adult books for young women, or you can go back each year for the last, what is that, six or seven years, and see everything that we know about in that subject. So that it's just a much more effective corralling of information than you can do by, you know, a random sort on Google or Amazon or anything else. Just an example of how important this sort of thing is, is that for the last three and a half years that I've been looking, I don't know how long before that. If you search the word homosexuality on Amazon, the first book that comes up is a parent's guide to preventing homosexuality. Now you and I would suspect that, well, that's because the people who looked up that word tended to buy that book. But a 13 year old might be kind of freaked out. Oh my God, maybe I should get this for Mom. And again, you know, just anything that's run by algorithms is at a disadvantage to something that's run by an application of intelligence. - Well, that's an idea of human curation of these things and editing, and it's, you know, again, the importance you guys bring, especially with your historical perspective of, again, gay culture, gay literature, and what an audience is actually looking for in this. - Yeah, and we send out, you know, every week, or ideally every week, announcements of new things that we've received as emails, so that, you know, and we're trying to do descriptive topics like men's poetry, and so that if you're interested you can look if you're not, and you don't have to look. - I think the term is curious, I don't know about it. (laughing) The philosophically or historically for you, what has your life been like in terms of the transition and the greater acceptance of homosexuality in America and the world? What was that like for you? - Well, this last, when it was, it May, that Obama announced that he was for gay marriage. That, and there was no uproar. You know, that is stunning to me, that this country has come so far, that it's not like everybody loves us, that's for sure, but it's come so far that they don't feel like this, they're prerogative to go around smashing things and threatening people when there is a public support. - Again, you get a historical marker instead of bricks through the window now. That seems to be a big change. Similarly, how did you feel in the second inaugural speech when he gives a shout out to Stonewall in the midst of the larger contact? It's probably my generation, but it's a little, this is not a very nice thing to say, but I feel I'm embarrassed, frankly, that black people in this country have a much more vicious history than LGBT years. There's not gay and lesbian bias and trans haven't suffered, but at the scale, and women suffering has gone on for millennia. And, you know, it's just in both cases that, you know, it feels to me like there's current situation is certainly much better than it used to be, but it's, you know, I feel like we're LGBT-ers, first off, we can hide. We don't have to be black, public or female in public. So there is that built in, you know, defense. So I am, you know, I'm a little humbled by that comparison, so. - But sort of honored in the process, or just-- - Say it again, honored, a little, or do you again, just feel a little, hey, you know, we're-- - Well, honored, yes, you know, and I don't think I'll ever get over the surprise of people speaking in public about this at all. (laughing) - Again, it's one of those things, your historical context, you're coming from, as you've said from the '40s and '50s at age where life was largely closeted, you know, being able to see outside of, you know, the, the, the Gaborhood that you're in and areas in New York, you know, seeing it much more accepted in the suburbs, or one of the indicators, I fall back on the local convenience store in my little suburban town in Ringwood, has out on the newsstand, or at least it did a few years ago, I assume they're still publishing. And the idea that that would have happened when I was in high school in the mid '80s, you know, that's, that doesn't happen. I mean, they had, how far we've gone in 20 years, not in terms of, you know, not getting bricks thrown through a city window, but in terms of greater acceptance out on the suburbs in more non-hip areas, I guess, it's sort of amazing to me. So as long as we're talking about the changing times and, and, you know, era to era issues, how difficult is it operating a bookstore of any kind in this day and age? It's, it's really hard that just, I have really only my perspective to support it in some extent by what I can pick up from the American Booksellers Association as to what's happening. The Booksellers Association, I think, has done an amazing job of giving us the tools, namely the, you know, the website hosting and the support of, you know, having that website connected to the database of Ingram Book Company, which has 5 million titles on it. So on our website, you can get any of 5 million titles. And the Booksellers Association has also made the arrangements that we now have on our website access to 3 million e-books, a million of which are free. And unless you have sold your soul to Amazon and Kendall or to Barnes & Noble and Nook, then any other thing that can read e-books can read the books that we offer. But, you know, there is an enormous problem that, to date, the United States has allowed Amazon to sell at and below cost. And for the last, what is it, 10, 15 years, almost every state has allowed Amazon to skip collecting the sales tax for that state. Which is, they're starting to find out that they need the tax revenue. They have looks like most states are trying to push them to-- And one, for your New Jersey listeners, you might like to know about that a year ago, the state of New Jersey did a deal with Amazon that if Amazon did indeed go on with their plan to build a warehouse in New Jersey, then Jersey would exempt Amazon from collecting the sales tax until this coming September. And the rationale for that is incredible. You know, that here they are exempt-- that Amazon is competing in New Jersey with the companies that are operating in New Jersey. And they are putting those companies out of business by selling at and below cost. They are in all in town so that they're putting out of business the people who are, in fact, collecting sales tax. And there was a report this last-- I think it was probably the end of 2011 about the Amazon warehouse in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where people were feigning because it was so hot, their minimum wage, short-time employment so that there's no benefits. And so New Jersey is-- We want some of that. Yeah, we're going to put all of these people out of jobs. And we're going to replace them with these, you know, short-time employment folks who don't make any money at all, really. You know, at least when Walmart puts out, let's say, a jeweler out of business, then the jeweler can go and work at Walmart and still have-- you know, he's not going to make as much money presumably. But he still can apply his expertise to some extent. But an Amazon warehouse is not a place where a bookseller is going to go. Do you find a lot of showrooming by customers here looking for things in the store and then ordering elsewhere online? Or are you-- I think that happened more in the past than it does now. You know, you probably heard about the Amazon this a year ago offering people if you find the same price. And we'll give you a $5 or $10 first dealing the information from a store, you know, it's totally cynical. How can they get away with it? I can't sell at below cost because I can't afford to. How can Amazon do that? Well, their investors don't care as long as their Amazon is increasing its share of the market, approaching that day when they will, in fact, own the market. And they-- you know, ebooks there, I think they're already at 50%. Well, they started much higher. Their e-book shares dropped significantly thanks to Barnes and Noble jumping in, Kobo, and iBooks. So it's helped a little. In the early days, they were almost 100% of the e-book market. Well, if Amazon were a Chinese company, the government would do something about it. You know, they would say, you can't sell below cost. And how-- and you take out that price advantage. And Amazon shrinks to its natural size. And in France and Germany, independent bookstores are doing just fine. And I was in Berlin this last May. And in the space of two blocks, there were three large independent booksellers-- stores that were larger than Giovanni's room, which is about 3,000 square feet. And they're all clearly doing well. In two blocks, three big ones-- Philadelphia has some small ones that are kind of not in the center setting. Well, there's one in the center setting. This is quite small, specializing in art. But in France, the publishers weekly did a story about-- the French bookstores doing just fine. And why is that? Because the governments in France and Germany will not allow Amazon to just slash the prices to drive the competition out of business. Why that's allowed in the US and Canada and the UK? I don't know. I don't know. I think that in the first days of this internet chopping, you know, the wisdom was, feeble as it is, that, oh, it's a new industry, it needs to be supported by all those bricks and mortar people that are paying the taxes, paying for the streets, the cops, and everything else. And Amazon, oh, they don't have to pay for anything. So it's coming along. But I think that we are heading to an actual disaster. And the effects is not simply on retailing. And it's vastly advanced among publishers, too, of, you know, Amazon is bigger than all of the publishers combined, so that they essentially can tell the publishers, OK, you're going to get this much money. And as a result, publishers are not as strong as they used to be. They don't have the editorial staff that they used to have. They don't have the marketing that they used to have. And so, you know, in Amazon, of course, is directly competing with them now with publishing children's books that publish and, you know, going after the big name authors to bestseller authors here. Again, you know, and they announce, OK, hardcover, fiction brand new out of the box as an e-book is going to be $9.99. And, you know, convincing the world that that's what a book is worth. So I think the day is coming when an author is going to get a dime. And the publisher is going to get $0.25. And Amazon has got to charge whatever it thinks it can get. And how do you work with, again, how do you work to attract customers, I suppose? How do you work to keep people loyal? I mean, you mentioned having the extensive website, but, you know, is it more of a local audience outreach? Yes. Yeah. Well, the reason that we're still here is that our customers are more loyal than the customers at other stores. There's a store about five blocks from here with a very similar situation to ours that the owner and his family had owned that building for since the 1930s. And actually, they had an additional store that closed down at the same time that borders arrived in town. And he closed up finally, firmly, definitively on December 31st of this last month. And the only difference, really, was that our customers, I think, is are more loyal than his were, even though he was really a remarkable bookseller. What sort of bookstore was it? It was a general book store. But he ran for many years of the 10-day African-American literary festival and had really all the big names come to town. And, you know, I don't know, it didn't work. How has LGBT or gay or queer, whatever we want to call it, literature changed itself? How the quality of the books or the profusion of authors out there, how has it sort of changed in the time that you've been selling? Well, there is definitely a big difference between the old days when every book was a revelation. In some ways, it seems similar in the transgender world now that everything that's done on that subject is the first time anybody has ever done it. And it's really thrilling. It's like selling to the European stores that we are breaking ground here, and we are spreading information that has never been available before. And so every kind of novel, the name of this store came from the fact that there were only like four or five gay novels in the world, and the well-blownliness didn't sound like a very good title for a bookstore. And "City in the Pillar" didn't sound-- "City of Night" didn't sound very good. But now, of course, there are literally thousands of novels. You know, when things come and go, like for many years, we had the room below us a very large bookcase that was devoted to AIDS. What impact did that have in your experience in the '80s here? I assume that's the main time frame. Well, in some ways, it's the most poignant story that the store has to tell is that in those days, when no level of government, city, state, federal, would touch safer sex for fear of being accused of promoting homosexuality, and the gay community was really on its own, that there was literally no support from the government whatsoever. And I remember, well, and so that the gay community was creating the information that was being distributed, that was public health information, was produced by the gay community. And one of those things was a little booklet, a cartoon, on safer sex that accordion fold. And Jesse Helms famously waved it around at the Senate, saying, oh, look at the government promoting homosexuality, waving this little thing around. Of course, the government had nothing to do with it. And there's a city health clinic, three blocks from here. And the workers at that clinic were forbidden to give out safer sex information by the city. You're not going to do that, because we're going to get hit for promoting homosexuals. And so those workers would come over here and stuff their pockets with these little brochures and take them back and give them to the people that they thought could use them. So at the risk of their jobs, they were spreading the word about them. This is how you get it. So fortunately, we don't have that kind of need anymore. Of course, it was an extraordinary time of people dying right and left, and people turning absolutely brilliant purple. And it certainly affected the gay community ever since. I had the impression, based on the folks I know who died, that it was like, really, many of the best folks were killed in that epidemic. And where would we be now? That those folks would now be in the absolute prime of their lives, if financially it's the peak of their resources. And what that would do, of course, for the store, but also for the culture of our time. Yes. You've seen a lot of change over the years. Yes, and I think this is related to this Amazon problem, that so many are people self-published now, that being a bookseller is very hard because they don't understand what the business needs are. In terms of marketing, in terms of pricing their books, how do they distribution, that it's sustaining when they think, oh, you can get it from Amazon. And there's news to them that Amazon is not in the bookstore distribution. That's not what they do. And if I bought from them, you could buy from them, the same price. And these books are really so many of them. They've only been read by the author, and the author is the only person who knows anything about them. The author is the only person who has any money in it. And they're all hoping that I'm going to buy their one book and keep it on the shelves. And you can't do that. We got 7,000 titles in this store right now. And you can't buy one title at a time. You can't do that. And so it feels like-- and again, this is that algorithm thing. If you do a search for gay fiction, one search I did recently that 725 items came up. And of looking through them, 85% of those were gay romances. And I don't know if you've run across this new genre of gay romances written by straight women. There's even a book explaining this phenomenon. But that's what-- 750 books, of course. Again, it's just algorithm. So there's no discerning anything. And most of them are these real amazing romances. That's new. In the last two or three years, that's come up. And some gay men actually enjoy reading those. But they come out there, so many of them. It's like every month, there's 15 or 20 more. And so you can't reorder just more stuff coming. It's almost like publishing magazines instead of books or carrying magazines. Just to close out, what are you reading? What do you read? I do like gay books. I don't know. But me real best customer. Like Christopher Brann's Emmet Outlaws. Oh, I'm mixing that up. Oh, which is a history of gay literature from the '30s, which takes the point of view that it was actually the writers who created the gay sense of self. That was really the foundation of anything like a movement or a community, is that people had to imagine what being gay was before you could be gay. Interesting. Emmet Outlaws, that's the name of it. And I enjoyed Vargas Yos' novel came out this last fall, I think, about Roger Casement, the Irish revolutionary who actually began his life by exposing the slavery and the Belgian Congo, and then later in Amazon. Both situations oddly enough. Both territories based on rubber plantations of just the destruction of the native populations in both of those places. And then it dawned on him. He was doing this on behalf of the British government. Then it dawned on him. Well, this is actually what's going on in Ireland. People look a little different. So he ended up being executed for trying to participate in the Easter uprising. And he was probably executed because they discovered his diaries, which recounted many, many sexual encounters with the natives with him. Catarosexual or-- No. OK. I was assuming, but you know, I still thought maybe you were crossing over. I know it's true. And of course, to Imperial Britain, having sex with or being penetrated by those racially inferior people was not tolerable. It's a wonderful book. But you know, I just got this. I'm not excited about it. It's a caliph of Cairo, which is about the caliph from, yes, from 1021, year 1021. You know, so I'm very disappointed that I didn't get to go to Syria. I bought a plane ticket 48 hours before the shooting started three years ago. I'm going hot and cold about going to Egypt. Yeah, it's almost like it's not going to be stable for a while. But as long as they're not actually at war, it's probably a great time to go that everybody you'd run into, I'm sure, would love to see you because-- You're getting outside perspective? Well, a little money, you know. That's somebody with something on there in their pocket. At Hermans, it sounds like you've had a great run here over almost 40 years and yourself with Giovanni's room. Good luck in the future. And thank you so much for coming on the show. Oh, thanks for having me. And that was at Hermans. If you care about books, duet and the world, the favor, and buy from your local independent bookstore. And if you enjoyed Craig's interview and you're in Philadelphia, try to get to Giovanni's room on Saturday, April 6th, and there is 5.30 reading from bereft. And if you're listening to this before the end of April 1st, and you'd like to attend the first ever live recording of the Virtual Memories Show featuring that conversation with Ben Catcher, then get to Parsons, the new school, two West 13th Street in New York City at the Bark Room off the lobby before 7 p.m. You can find the virtual memories show on iTunes or at our website, chimeraobscura.com, or its Tumblr site, virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. You've been listening to the Virtual Memories Show, I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. (upbeat music) ♪ And I just wanna have you and I'll speak ♪ ♪ And I just wanna write a message to me ♪ ♪ I just wanna have you and I just wanna write a message to me ♪ (upbeat music)