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Charis Books and More, in Decatur, Georgia, was launched a year later. Founded in 1973 in the City of Brotherly Love, Philly AIDS Thrift Giovanni’s Room-honoring James Baldwin’s queer classic-is perhaps the oldest surviving LGBTQ and feminist bookstore in America.
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Ditto for Under the Umbrella Bookstore in Salt Lake City, Utah, forthcoming this fall.īut LGBTQ-owned bookstores have been around for decades. And more are on the way: After a successful crowdfunding campaign, The Salt Eaters in Inglewood, California-a literary hub centered on the stories of Black women, girls, femmes, and nonbinary people-is set to open its physical location later this year. In early 2020, Tombolo Books-so named for the bridge that connects an island to the mainland-opened in St. Montgomery, Alabama’s 1977 Books opened in September of 2019, as did Minneapolis, Minnesota’s The Irreverent Bookworm. Her store's name is a nod to the progress being made, and was created to be a beacon of Elk Grove’s increasing diversity.Ī Seat at the Table and hello again books are just a few of many LGBTQ-owned stores we spoke to for this article that have sprung up within the past two years specifically. Their hometown, a “quiet little suburb” 20 minutes outside Sacramento, has not traditionally been a bastion of progressivism, but that is rapidly changing, with Autenrieth as one of the entrepreneurs at the forefront of that shift.
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“Visibility is everything in small towns, where books are some of the only windows to a more accepting world.” “Visibility is everything in small towns, where books are some of the only windows to a more accepting world.” Still, the pair saw an opportunity-a need, as Elkavich told Oprah Daily, to “serve as an inclusive and safe space for those who seek one,” to make their community a more welcoming and friendly space. Located along Florida’s “Space Coast,” known for its proximity to the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral, Cocoa Village is an eclectic community with clothing boutiques, gift shops, restaurants, and craft breweries once upon a time, there even used to be a gay bookstore and bar, but those had long since closed when Elkavich and Burgess moved there. With the early part of the 1960s shaped by the black Civil Rights Movement that was led in part by homophobic African-American ministers, and the latter part of the '60s shaped by the Black Power Movement that was built on the most misogynistic and homophobic strains of black nationalism, black LGBTQ sexualities were perceived as a threat, not only to black male heterosexuality, the black church, and the black community but to the ontology of blackness itself.In March 2020, married couple Amy Elkavich and MerryBeth Burgess were getting ready to launch their independent, LGBTQ- and woman-focused bookstore, hello again books, in their cozy little Florida nook of Cocoa Village.
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By the 1960s, known queer spaces in black urban communities like Harlem had for the most part disappeared. Many of Harlem's prominent LGBTQ denizens, who enjoyed a relative openness about their sexual orientation from the 1920s through the 1940s, were driven into the closet. Edgar Hoover's FBI and the police department kept a running list of us. Special attention was given to LGBTQ Americans because J. By the '50s the country was on a campaign to restore traditional gender roles that had been disrupted by World War II, and McCarthyism was its policing mechanism.