Thursday, August 19, 2010

LGBT bookstores

September's Quill and Quire has an interesting article about LGBT bookstores in Canada. As you may have heard, This ain't the Rosedale Library seems to have bitten the dust (left its longtime location for Kensington Market, then got evicted from there for unpaid rent). Now Toronto's Glad Day needs help, and Q and Q observes it is only one of three LGBT bookstores left in Canada. The others are Ottawa's own After Stonewall and Vancouver's Little Sister's Books and Art Emporium.

Q and Q makes a goof point that these places are in many ways community spaces not merely bookstores, and it seems to me that the closure of each one is kind of especially sad because of this...

Glad Day co-manager Sholem Krishtalka calls his first trip to one a "revelation: a store full of books written for me. A small shelf at a chain bookstore cannot provide that kind of validation, and neither can Internet surfing."

2 comments:

  1. I know I'm going to feel like an idiot when you tell me what LGBT stands for.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trangendered.

    But some people have added other terms on the end too which I now forget so you're not the only one confused...!

    ReplyDelete