The oldest gay and lesbian bookstore in the country, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York's Greenwich Village, is planning to close its doors this week. The demise of the 35-year-old bookstore, which predated the "official" start of the gay movement (the 1969 Stonewall riots) by two years, produced the usual outcry of sadness within the publishing community. But one veteran bookseller, Deacon Maccubbin, owner of the Lambda Rising chain of gay and lesbian independents with headquarters in Washington, D.C., spent part of the month of December trying to keep the store alive.
What Went Wrong
According to Oscar Wilde Bookshop owner Larry Lingle, the bookstore has lost money every year since he purchased it six years ago. "I've lost approximately a quarter-million dollars, including the renovations I made when I bought the store," Lingle told PW by phone from Houston, where he also owns the 29-year-old Lobo Bookshop. Those renovations included new fixtures and maximizing the 600-sq.-ft. space. "Previously, the back office was bigger than the sales floor!" Lingle said he also took on quite a bit of debt with the purchase. "The previous owners, who inherited it from the founder, had been sued by a vendor, and he'd ignored the suit, so the court issued a $10,000 judgment. I assumed the judgment and paid off existing debts."
Lingle said he had been considering closing the store since its lease ran out in October 2001. "After September 11, sales really dropped," he continued. Still, Lingle never put the store on the market. Instead, the bookstore approached the local media to spread the word that the store might close if the community didn't support it. Unfortunately, that publicity drew readers only to a one-day sale this past November. "That sale gave us a good month," longtime manager Kim Brinster told PW. "It was one of the best business days we've ever had. It was a good reminder to people that we were still around and waiting for company. We had a good month, but it didn't carry through. There was no significant increase in traffic for December."
As a result, December sales were down 20% from the previous year, Lingle told PW, and that year had been "way down" because of September 11. "I made up my mind about closing when the landlord mentioned our lease had expired, and we would need to renew. Since June, word on the street had been that the store would probably not be around much longer, but I didn't receive a single nibble on buying it."
What Went Right… Almost
Maccubbin has quibbles about nibbles. "I'm puzzled by this comment," Maccubbin said. "At the time of the BEA in New York City, I was told the store was not for sale." On and off during the month of December, Maccubbin said, he e-mailed Lingle. "I wanted to discuss the possibility of buying it or setting it up as a nonprofit," Maccubbin told PW. "I made similar overtures to A Different Light when they were in financial trouble. Three years prior to their closing, I offered to help them find out where money was bleeding in their business and offered help with managerial tips. I told them that if it came to be, I would be interested in buying it. Then, one day, they sold their business without advertising it for sale. It amazes me that people don't put things out for an offer."
Lingle remembers Maccubbin's approach at the beginning of December, but thought it was "a casual interest. It would have been a long, drawn-out process, and the bottom line was that he would be offering to buy the store for less than the value of the inventory."
"It was a serious interest," countered Maccubbin. "I hadn't made an offer because I got no raw data on the store's inventory and sales for the last two years, which can be gotten easily by Xeroxing the sales tax reports for the last two years. I wanted to know the cost of rent and utilities. It would be different if it were a profitable business, where I'd have to project profits for the next five years. But this would be simple financial reports on which to base an offer."
The "he said/he said" continued. Maccubbin said he made another e-mail overture to Lingle after it was announced that the store would close. "Once again, I expressed my interest in trying to find some way to keep Oscar Wilde operating," said Maccubbin. "And I also clarified a couple of the misconceptions that had apparently arisen regarding what I might be able to offer or what documentation might be required. His reply the following morning made it clear that he had no interest in anything but shutting it down."
Although Lingle repeatedly told the press that he welcomed offers to buy the store, his (in)actions tell another story. He never listed the store on the market; he admits he was never able to get together paperwork ("the bane of existence," he said) requested by a potential buyer; and he also peppered conversations about a potential sale with comments like "I'd need to find someone with more money than brains to buy [the store.]"
"I'm willing to keep it open if I can stop pouring money down the drain," Lingle told PW. "It's not my obligation to keep suffering a loss so the oldest gay and lesbian bookstore can stay in business. I have given more than my share to the gay and lesbian community."
There was another last-minute twist just as this article was going to print. "I was just told that my landlord is going to approach the owner of the building to see about getting a rent break if we can make a go of it for a couple more months," said Lingle.
Oscar Wilde will not have a going-out-of-business sale. "People are always looking for bargains, like vultures circling," Lingle said. "If people can't support us when we were in business, we're not going to let them get below-cost bargains from our misfortune. I'm cutting my losses by bringing the remaining stock to Houston. I'm literally going to load it into a truck and drive it back."
"I wish I had the money to buy it myself," said Charles Flowers, associate director at the Academy of American Poets and co-chair of the Publishing Triangle. "I think it's an incredible loss to the community, and I applaud Kim Brinster's efforts to keep it going as long as she was able. I wish the community could have responded more strongly to support gay businesses. I think the online convenience of Amazon.com has hurt them more than big chains."
Changing Times
Brinster said she believes that the store's demise relates to a combination of factors. "There's never one answer," she told PW. "There're the chains, online competition and the fact that people don't read as much as they used to. Also, we're very neighborhood-oriented in New York; people tend to shop where it's convenient, at the store around the corner." Brinster tried to combat the store's small size, which made in-store events nearly impossible, by working with outside organizations and events to supply books.
Six months ago, a New York Times profile of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop made it seem like the landscape of gay and lesbian bookstores was a doomed one. While there are still gay and lesbian bookstores with healthy financials (such as Giovanni's Room in Philadelphia; Outwrite in Atlanta; and A Different Light stores in San Francisco and West Hollywood), some are facing what Random House senior title manager Jim Vivyan calls the "homogenizing of the gay community into mainstream society." Vivyan, who was a manager at the defunct A Different Light in New York City, noted that gay and lesbian material is readily available at most mainstream bookstores. "The affluence of the gay community has spread past just the bookstores. The community doesn't feel that it needs to support gay businesses. Originally, gay/lesbian bookstores were more than bookstores. When I worked at A Different Light, tourists from around the world came to our store as an information center—where to go, where to eat. Now we have free weekly magazines like HX and Next giving all that information."
"People who came to the city would buy hundreds of dollars of books to carry them over the next six months until their next visit to the big city," said Dan Cullinane, marketing manager at Alyson Books. "With the advent of the Internet, it's easy to search for and make those purchases online. It's a damn shame that the culture of New York can't support several bookstores. With the closing of Oscar Wilde and A Different Light, what kind of gay culture will the Village have besides leather shops and bars?"
The difference between the generation of the '70s—which saw gay bookstores as a safe haven—and the current "out and about" generation was echoed by Flowers, who said, "The older generation supported these bookstores, but the younger generation either doesn't have the same desire—which is a nice way of saying they don't care—or they grew up with chains and Amazon.com and are distracted by other media like music and movies. I wonder if we're still a community of readers—I want to believe that."
Cullinane said he thinks there are still many gay readers, but that they aren't as starved for representation as they were three decades ago. "As a publisher, we're seeing a cultural shift," he told PW. "The urge to read a book about the gay experience is not as strong as it was in 1967, when there were only a couple dozen books on the topic." (Deacon Maccubbin remembers opening Lambda Rising in 1974 with an inventory of 250 titles. "That's all there was at the time," he said.) "Every year B&N, Borders and Amazon.com become a bigger part of our business, and independents and gay and lesbian bookstores become a smaller piece," Cullinane continued. "It's very rare that B&N will skip one of our titles; they pretty much buy them all."
Bruce Bawer, author of A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (Touchstone), wrote in his January 13 New York Times editorial that as sad as it was to lose Oscar Wilde Bookshop, "the fading of the gay bookstore as an institution is far from a tragic sign... their decline is also a reflection of something very positive—namely the entrance of gay America into mainstream culture over the last decade or so."
"I find Bawer's statement ridiculous," said Ron Hanby, gay/lesbian sales specialist as the wholesaler/distributor Bookazine. "There's no way a superstore or chain or even independent can offer the full spectrum of product offered by gay/lesbian bookstores. They're still restricted by their customers' prejudices. I wish gay/lesbian bookstores could expand their non-gay-and-lesbian topics. Stores like Unabridged Books in Chicago, We Think the World of You in Boston and Outwrite in Atlanta have expanded their topics because they know gays and lesbian also like to cook. I think it's easier for gay bookstores to bring more customers into their stores than for mainstream stores to bring gays into theirs."
"I think we're just in a phase," Vivyan commented. "[Gay and lesbian] stores will fall out, but Barnes & Noble won't increase its number of gay books. And when people can't find gay books in their cubbyhole section of a big store, new bookstores will crop up again."
Hanby agrees: "I have new gay/lesbian bookstores opening as others go out of business. A lot of these stores reopen in the same location as the ones that went out of business, and they do well. Why? Because there's new blood, new energy and new owners that are a new generation, who are savvier about what a gay market wants now compared to what they wanted 10 years ago."
New York City still has two gay and lesbian bookstores: the 11-year-old Creative Visions in Greenwich Village, in the same site as the original A Different Light, and the three-year-old, volunteer-run Bluestockings Women's Bookstore on the Lower East Side.
