The End of LGBT Bookstores - a Good Thing?

Gay Rights takes note that the reason so many gay bookstores are closing are because gay equality is upon us.

From the piece...

Surely big business has squeezed out the little guy, gay and straight alike, but not everyone sees the closings as necessarily negative.

Deacon Maccubbin, founder of Washington DC's long-running bookstore Lambda Rising, also had to shutter his beloved business this year. Instead of fretting, though, he saw the end as an achievement.

"The phrase 'mission accomplished' has gotten a bad rap in recent years, but in this case, it certainly applies," he said last January. "When we set out to establish Lambda Rising in 1974, it was intended as a demonstration of the demand for gay and lesbian literature. We thought... we could encourage the writing and publishing of LGBT books, and sooner or later other bookstores would put those books on their own shelves and there would be less need for a specifically gay and lesbian bookstore. Today, 35-years later, nearly every general bookstore carries LGBT books..."

Suddenly the dollars and cents of these businesses appears to be something else: a much larger discussion over whether it's best to have a "gay only" space safe from a sometimes hostile world? Or would it be better if gay become blasé, and we were fully integrated in the culture at large? Does self-segregation serve a purpose, or should the end goal be complete, seamless assimilation?

At their inception, gay bookstores weren't simply about wordsmiths. They were an organic outgrowth of a repressed culture, the manifestation of a collective need and want; they were part of a revolution.