In part one of this series, Cal McCarthy talked about how bookstores can help oft-introverted readers find community in their shared love of books, which I’m sure many of our readers can relate to! Cal also went into how, of course, there’s a political aspect to this: bookstores have become essential in today’s climate, where many people not only find entertainment, but also find comfort and safety.
Historically, bookstore communities have risen spectacularly to the occasion in times of crisis, and they continue to do so. This is especially true in bookstores that focus on specific minority identities, such as the Black and queer communities. These communities have faced, and continue to confront, threats from a prejudiced world that targets them.
During the AIDS epidemic, bookstores became havens for the LGBTQ+ community in a world that was actively hostile to them. The larger world ignored the disease that was ripping through the community. Bookstores provided not only books, but education and support. When the world ignored the HIV/AIDS crisis while horrifying numbers of people became sick and died, queer bookstores published and distributed pamphlets full of what health information quite literally kept people alive.
In an article from the Bay Area Times, Jason Villemez says “in the early years of the AIDS crisis, most medical and government establishments refused to share the most up-to-date information for fear of promoting or associating with homosexuality. [Activist groups and bookstores] created pamphlets that explained transmission, symptoms, and how to get tested [and] printed a bibliography of all known books on the disease. A person caught with such literature, even if they were not infected, could be fired from their job or ostracized in their community, so bookstores . . . gave people a protected environment to take in the information.”
In these warm and welcoming communities, LGBTQ+ people found safe spaces that not only shared vital information they needed to protect themselves, but also encouraged relationships to blossom and provide mutual support through the ongoing crisis ravaging their community.
Similarly, out of the Civil Rights movement, Black bookstores emerged not only as some of the only spaces where one could find art and writing from Black creators, but also as safe gathering spaces in which the work of such people could be performed and celebrated. And, of course, when the world censored Black artists, Black bookstores published their work.
“Their history runs deep,” says Katie Mitchell, author of Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores. “[They] have sustained us through unspeakable oppression . . . in the shadows of slavery and segregation, [they] created cathedrals for Black Art, ideas, and resistance.” Black bookstores are just as vital now as they were during the Civil Rights movement of the fifties and sixties, as in recent years we again see racism, which never really went away, become much more loud and proud in the US.
Both queer and Black bookstores, and those of other minority identities not mentioned here, have a history of rising brilliantly to the occasion when catastrophe threatened them. In our modern political crisis, which once again targets these communities, bookstores are rising again to show their considerable power.
If you’d like to find community at Black and queer bookstores in the Portland area, here are some of them:
Third Eye Books, Accessories, and Gifts
Sources
“LGBTQ History Month: Authors and activism: A history of LGBT bookstores” by Jason Villemez.
Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores, by Katie Mitchell.