Inspired by the legions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people who rallied in Washington, D.C., for the March for Gay Rights in 1993, major publishers became intoxicated by an irrational exuberance for lesbian and gay titles. But by 1997, their optimism gave way to the recognition that sales of lesbian and gay books typically fall in the midlist range. In the years since, publishers at every level have learned from past mistakes, have retrenched and are publishing lesbian and gay books with success. At the same time, recent trends in the larger industry—such as an unstable retail climate for independents and intense competition among media for consumers' attention—have been reflected in the niche and in some ways have exacerbated its quirks.
In the past year, several major houses have focused on books by high-profile gay authors, as well as books with secondary gay or lesbian markets. Christopher Rice's fiction debut, Density of Souls (an August paperback from Talk Miramax Books), hit the New York Times bestseller list, while nonfiction favorite David Sedaris returned to the list with Me Talk Pretty One Day (a June paperback from Little, Brown). Midlist books, like Arthur Laurents's Original Story By (published by Knopf last year and coming in paperback in May from Applause Theater Books), also hit regional lists. Academic publishers that began picking up lesbian- and gay-themed nonfiction as major publishers pulled back from it—Duke, Chicago, Wisconsin, Routledge, Temple and NYU—are holding steady or expanding their offerings. The sole exception, Columbia University Press, cut its list across the board. Meanwhile, smaller presses continue to specialize in humor, self-help, erotica and genre fiction. Some are diversifying their customer base, like Cleis Press, which is now publishing gay male titles in addition to lesbian ones. Others, such as Spinsters Ink and Alyson, are boosting sales by promoting their books in magazines held by their owners.
Passing the Torch
In the past year, no fewer than six doyennes of LGBT publishing have stepped down or significantly scaled back their efforts, highlighting pressures in the market for small publishers and independent retailers. On the small press front, Nancy Bereano, who founded Firebrand Books as a feminist and lesbian press in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1985, sold her company to her distributor, LPC group, last June. She's now working as an executive trainer and looking forward to taking on freelance editorial projects. Meanwhile, Naiad Press founder Barbara Grier reduced her list from 32 books a year to five, having passed along a number of her authors to Kelly Smith of Bella Books in Ferndale, Mich., after Smith spent a year learning the business from Grier in Tallahassee, Fla. And Joan Drury, who was for eight years the publisher of 22-year old Spinsters Ink, sold the Duluth, Minn., feminist press to Hovis Publishing Inc. of Denver, in order to devote more time to her writing.
In the independent retail sector, Carol Seajay, founder, editor and publisher of Feminist Bookstore News, announced last June that she was halting publication of the 24-year-old bimonthly newsletter after nearly 30 feminist bookstores closed down in the previous two and a half years. Based in San Francisco, she made the leap to a dot-com that has since closed. Around the same time, Richard Labonte, the general manager of A Different Light Bookstore in San Francisco, New York and West Hollywood, announced that he was stepping down. He wrote to industry friends that "the passions and the politics which fueled us from the '70s into the '00s have cooled—not personally, perhaps, but politically and culturally." Within a month, rumors emerged that Norman Laurila, owner of the three Different Light stores and an ABA board member for six years, had found buyers for his 22-year-old bookstore chain.
Retail Redux
In an unexpected move that may affect the sales of lesbian and gay titles for publishers at every level, A Different Light's new owners, Bill Barker and Stanley Newman, closed the New York City store in March 2001 (Bookselling, April 16). While many have speculated that a nearby Barnes & Noble may have contributed to the erosion of the store's business, in fact the store moved to West 19th St. several months after the Chelsea Barnes and Noble opened. Keith Kahla, a senior editor at St. Martin's Press who oversees the company's 15-year-old Stonewall Editions series, points out that the city's largest gay and lesbian store was often a promotional powerhouse. "The three locations of A Different Light would routinely outsell both Borders and Barnes & Noble combined," he says. "For example, before the New York store closed, A Different Light sold in excess of 3,000 copies of Husband Hunting Made Easy by Patrick Price at the three stores, while Barnes & Noble and Borders combined sold maybe 2,500 via thousands of locations and active Web sites. The chains just aren't all that good at niche bookselling, which requires a lot of handselling. Their business models just aren't designed for it."
Ironically, the closing of several lesbian and gay bookstores in the past year, such as An Open Book in Columbus, Ohio, have resulted partly from the booming economy of the late '90s—and its skyrocketing rents. Jearld Moldenhauer, owner of Boston's Glad Day, was forced to close his thriving shop in downtown Boston when his lease ran out and he wasn't able to find affordable retail space there or in Cambridge. Reluctant to see the gay and lesbian store's demise, John Mitzel, the store's manager for 16 years, picked up the gauntlet and set to work establishing Calamus Books from the ground up in Boston's up-and-coming Historic Leather District.
Sadly, the loss of lesbian and gay bookstores may have a dampening effect on the niche. While a few general independents go out of their way to stock and sell LGBT-themed books, most don't. Among the best are Chicago's Women and Children First and Unabridged Books, along with Left Bank Bookstore in St. Louis, Mo., where co-owner Kris Kleindienst reports that self-help books on gay families are popular, along with novels like Eileen Myles's novel Cool for You (available in paperback from Soft Skull Press) and Jeanette Winterson's The Powerbook (published by Knopf last October). Having visited many major independents across the country over the years, Kahla says that many stores have poorly maintained gay sections, if they exist at all. "I've heard an astonishing range of excuses from 'We don't have much of gay client base' (this from a store in a heavily gay section of Los Angeles) to 'We don't want to offend our other customers,'" he says.
Glass Half Empty or Half Full?
Will Schwalbe, newly promoted to editorial director of Hyperion, sees the situation from a different angle: "I just don't see gay men reading much or getting excited about books. In addition to movies, they're watching cable programs like Queer As Folk and TV shows like Will and Grace." Citing a lack of coverage of gay books by the mainstream media, he suggests that gay people "aren't buying books in sufficient numbers to make the media pay attention. We shouldn't have to write ourselves out of our books to get an audience. But on the other hand, we need to buy more of our own books."
Despite Kahla's and Schwalbe's pessimism, some newcomers to the category are more upbeat. John Scognamiglio, has worked at Kensington Books since 1992 and began acquiring gay titles in earnest in 1999, when Laurie Parkin became publisher. He has eight gay titles scheduled for 2001 and even more for 2002. Explaining that Kensington is a niche publisher, content to advance around 15,000 copies and net between 7,000 and 10,000 copies, he reports more success with fiction than nonfiction. For example, The World of Normal Boys, K.M. Soehnlein's account of coming of age in the New Jersey suburbs in 1970s, published in hardcover last September, was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and hit the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list as well as gay lists.
Tricks of the Trade Publishers
Given the current retail landscape and the apparent indifference of the mainstream media to gay themes, major New York publishers are increasingly repositioning titles that might have been categorized as gay or lesbian in the mid-'90s. One recent example is Fraud, David Rakoff's collection of comic essays coming from Doubleday in May. While the book is bursting with the wit that distinguishes his monologues on public radio's This American Life, there has been no mention of the book's gay content in advance publicity materials.
Literary agent Charlotte Sheedy says this gradual shift in the positioning of lesbian and gay work reminds her of the way women's history became increasingly accepted as solid scholarship, and no longer viewed as the skewed work of a few renegades. "Perhaps [lesbian and gay] subject matter that was once considered marginalized has become acceptable. Perhaps this is something to celebrate," she muses. In fact, Sheedy continues, lesbian and gay experience is no longer the literary province of gay and lesbian writers alone. This season, Houghton Mifflin will publish Paul Kafka Gibbons's Dupont Circle, a novel about gay marriage and adoption rights written by a heterosexual man.
Patricia Johnson—who, as v-p and associate publisher at Knopf, has handled such recent and forthcoming titles as Dazzler, Steven Bach's biography of Moss Hart; the collected works of poet James Merrill; and The Practical Heart, a volume of four novellas by Allan Gurganus due in August—concurs with Sheedy's take on the industry. But she also acknowledges that publishers face a dilemma in calling attention to lesbian and gay content. "Online booksellers have the distinct advantage of being able to shelve their books in numerous locations on their site. It's a luxury that does not exist in physical bookstores. As publishers, we don't want these books to be sold solely in the gay and lesbian section of the bookstore. They have—and deserve—a broader audience and should not be seen as marginalized exotics."
For his part, Kahla attests that books that are marketed as gay and lesbian face neglect. "They don't always make it onto the shelves at the chains and into review publications, whether they are by major literary writers such as Paul Russell or Mark Merlis or by younger writers," he says. With significantly fewer gay and lesbian publications than there were a decade ago, it adds insult to injury that one of the most influential magazines, Out, has reduced its review coverage from about 75 brief reviews a year to 36, while increasing coverage of titles from Alyson, also owned by parent company Liberation Media.
But publishers' attempts to play down the gay and lesbian aspects of their books may hold hidden dangers. Brian Perrin, a features editor at barnesandnoble.com, is generally enthusiastic about the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian work and sees it as a route to greater sales, but he admits that "closeting the content does increase the amount of work that needs to be done from a bookseller's side. Online sellers use key words or 'meta-tags' to shelve their books and must now rely more often on reading galleys and reviews to decipher which books are gay and lesbian." As a longtime bookseller, John Mitzel of Calamus Books reports that only a practiced nose for sniffing out lavender prose from catalogue copy and marketing material has allowed him to discover books appropriate for his market. Sometimes, he only finds out about books after publication.
Retha Powers, co-editor of InsightOut, the online lesbian and gay book club, underscores the concerns raised by Perrin and Mitzel about the perils of obscuring lesbian and gay content. She and co-editor David Rosen rely in part on the reading they do for Book of the Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club to find titles that might have otherwise have escaped their radar. In fact, many of the titles that have been most successful in the InsideOut program, such as David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day, make little mention of their gay and lesbian content in marketing materials. Having established an online presence, Powers and Rosen are in the midst of implementing a monthly mailing to their 11,000 members. While Rosen cites particular success with fiction, humor and university press nonfiction, he claims the club has had great success across the board in its first year. Sarah Waters's Affinity (Riverhead) and Lea Delaria's Lea's Book of Rules for the Real World (Dell) have both sold quite well. The trend toward lighter, overtly gay mass market books, such as the titles coming from Kensington, have also impressed Rosen.
University Presses Press On
As they seek trade publishing niches, university presses have found serious nonfiction titles with LGBT themes, which typically advance in the 3,000- to 8,000-copy range, to be profitable. Lacking commercial pressures like the high overhead and profit margins of corporate publishers, they are able to take on books aimed primarily at a LGBT audience. Duke University Press editor-in-chief Ken Wissoker claims that the press's two lead titles for the spring came from their gender studies list: Amber Hollibaugh's My Dangerous Desires and Esther Newton's Margaret Mead Made Me Gay. Raphael Kadushin, editor of Wisconsin University Press's Living Out series, also reports that sales of his lesbian and gay titles exceed those of many of the press's general interest titles. Books such as Tobias Schneebaum's The Secret Places, a memoir of a gay, Jewish New Yorker who traveled among the tribes of New Guinea (published in hardcover last September), and An Underground Life, the memoir of gay Holocaust survivor Gad Beck (published in paperback last August), have attracted readers beyond the primary gay audience. As for review attention, Kadushin has been "delighted by reviews everywhere from the Washington Post to the New York Times."
Taking an approach that's more scholarly than Wisconsin's, the University of Chicago began publishing gay books in 1981 with John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality. Nonetheless, executive editor Douglas Mitchell is as optimistic as Kadushin about the potential for mainstream review attention. In addition to Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality by Jonathan Ned Katz, on 19th-century homoerotic friendships among men, Mitchell has high hopes for two books on his fall list, Dan Healey's Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia (Sept.) and Emilio Bejel's Gay Cuban Nation (Nov.). Bejel's book, he says, reflects a trend at academic houses toward books that appeal to ethnic and minority subcultures.
Small Press Synergy
While lamenting the closing of Firebrand and of Feminist Bookstore News, Naiad Press's Barbara Grier acknowledges that small presses are run on "blood and bone" and says she believes it's inevitable that they will come and go. In addition to Grier's unconventional arrangement allowing Bella Books to publish many of Naiad's authors as the older press has downsized, a more straightforward change of hands has sustained the country's oldest women's press, Spinster's Ink. Now based in Denver, the press is an imprint of Hovis Inc., which also publishes The Women's Yellow Pages and a monthly newsmagazine, Colorado Women News . With a circulation of 100,000, the magazine offers important leverage for owner Katherine Hovis and her partner, Sharon Silvas, to promote the press's books and authors, like Val McDermid, whose Booked for Murder is up for a Lambda Literary Award this year. Currently focused on reprinting backlist bestsellers like JoAnn Loulan's Lesbian Sex and Lesbian Passion, Hovas and Silvas will publish an expanded edition of Look Me in the Eye a study of an aging lesbian couple by Cynthia Rich, and Voices of the Soft-Bellied Warrior, a new novel by Mary Saracino in September. More than a dozen books will follow in 2002, including a new science fiction trilogy by Sally Gearhart.
Another small press that has benefited from being part of a mini-media conglomerate is veteran gay and lesbian publisher Alyson, owned by Liberation Publications, which advertises and reviews the press's books in its magazines, such as Out and the Advocate. More focused than ever, the press devotes about a third of the list to erotica titles, with mysteries, self-help and humor making up the balance. Literary titles such as Louis Bayard's Endangered Species are more of an exception before, but the press has also taken on more lesbian books than any other publisher that's not lesbian-identified. While Liberation Publications didn't go through with its announced merger with Planet Out, publicist Dan Cullinane is hopeful about the house's future. Titles have been selling well, especially in the humor category, he says, and the house received the most Lambda Literary Award nominations of any publisher. "The online companies have been supportive, gay and lesbian bookstores continue to sell our books and Barnes & Noble's program for small presses to affordably buy space in 94 select stores has given Alyson a chance to have a stronger, more visible presence at the chains," he enthuses.
A Queer Future
Even as publishers at every level of the industry stake out commercially viable positions in the niche, the state of gay publishing remains in flux. While a number of key players have stepped down, leaving the future open to others who may reinvent their roles, the dilemma about how to market books with LGBT content is likely to persist into the next generation. One of the enduring questions in the lesbian and gay movement is to what degree lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people should integrate into the mainstream. And in the world of lesbian and gay publishing, the question also remains: if gay and lesbian content is not labeled and sold as such, will it be found by the people who most want to read it?
