We Must Cultivate Our Gardens -- With Help, Of Course

Another easy one.  A friend (who I know knows better) shared this today, from the National Women's History Museum wishing Martha Custis Washington a happy 283rd birthday.  She doesn't look a day over 273, does she?

I commented that I can never read well-to-do white people saying this sort of thing without gagging a little. (Or uber-wealthy African-Americans, for that matter.)  Yes, it's a truism; I can even agree with it to a point, having known numerous people who were materially comfortable and were surrounded by people who cared about them, but still were melancholic.  Yes, even rich people have problems.  Martha Dandridge Custis was already a widow when she married the slightly younger George Washington, two of her four children by her first husband died in childhood, and one of the survivors was killed during the Revolutionary War; her life had its share of misery.  (She and George had no children together.)

But she was privileged and lived comfortably, especially compared to the 100 "dower slaves" she brought with her to Mount Vernon.  "Martha was less ambivalent [about slavery] than her husband and never seems to have questioned the system ... [M]ost of the slaves on Mount Vernon were dower slaves, in whom Martha Custis's descendants had a financial interest." I'm sure she'd have held that her slaves' happiness depended on their dispositions, not on their circumstances. Or the greater part of their happiness, anyway.

With more time to think about it, I thought: Really, Martha Washington as a significant figure in Women's History?  As the first FLOTUS?  Forty years ago Gore Vidal remarked that "there was no phrase in our language which so sets the teeth on edge as 'First Lady.'"'  "FLOTUS" wasn't in use at the time; I'd say it's even more annoying.  As a role model for young women, being a President's wife is right down there with Disney princesses: all of its glamour comes from being attached to a man.  Yes, I know that some presidents' wives carved out their own careers, most notably Hillary Rodham Clinton, but 1) they're the exceptions and 2) they were reacting to the limitations of the role.  I have a lot of sympathy for Presidents' families, as for all politicians' families, thrust under a scorching spotlight of publicity because of somebody's political ambitions.  But those who fetishize First Ladies seem to like having them in that uncomfortable spot.  I've expressed before my sympathy for Michelle Obama, but living in the White House seems not to have improved her character.  (To be fair, it doesn't seem to improve anyone's.)

In Martha Washington's case, the Museum of Women's History sees her significance purely in terms of being satellite to her husband, and the only thing they could attribute to her on her own was this awful platitude.  The comments under the original post are fascinating, too.  A few people wrote the same kind of things I've written here, and the responses to them are predictable. "Just because she wasn't a slave doesn't mean she didn't endure difficult trials." "But, Martha Washington was a product of her times...and I think that attitude definitely makes a difference on how the rest of us handle what life throws at us. So, quit pointing your finger when you know 3 more are pointing back at you." "I'm pretty sure this quote must have come from a private letter or something because she's not known for speeches so lighten up! The fact remains that there is some truth to this quote regardless of who said it." "Instead of ragging on Martha - not here to defend herself - take the sentiment and apply it without baggage. Wake up, smile that you're here, your children (families) are with you, put a smile on your face and Choose to be positive in your daily interactions. Don't be a victim, be proactive and do everything you can to have a great day / life. Random acts of kindness help others but do a great deal to uplift the doer - give it a whirl!"

But the prize must go to this one:

Good grief. Why does EVERYTHING have to be politicized and turned into an argument? Just take the quote for what it is. As a person with a degree in history, it's never fair to judge historial figures by modern norms. In every era, there were a few extraordinary, forward-thinking people. But then, as now, the majority just went with the flow and lived their lives. I think everyone here agrees that slavery is one of the most evil institutions ever established and was a harrowing experience for the enslaved. But you have to put people and their lifestyles in context. I'm sure 250 years from now, there will be people judging our society, too. Just let it be and take the quote for what it is - a personal thought likely meant to comfort someone. Why was the slavery issue even injected into this to begin with? The only goal in doing that was to create a controversy and put a negative spin on things. Why? Should the history be ignored? No. But it also doesn't have to be exploited in order to spark tangential arguments and spread negativity and discord.

First of all, putting Custis's picture on a women's history page, reducing her to her derivative status as a wife, politicizes the matter from the start.  Adding this quotation, stripped from its original personal and social context, also politicizes it.   She was a First Lady!  (She did nothing on her own!  Her status depended entirely on the man she married!)  She uttered this platitude!  (She was a nice good-hearted inoffensive lady, like First Ladies should be!)

Second, the commenter pretends that she only objects because this isn't the time or place to "inject" the slavery issue into this.  But there never seems to be a correct time or place for such discussions.  I don't see how the history is being "exploited" by bringing it up -- on a history page, of all places, how dare we!   Clearly the commenter would prefer that it be "ignored" altogether.  But then, so would most white Americans.

Oh, Eris ...

If I dood it, I get a whippin' ... I dood it!

It's easy to make fun of fundamentalist Christian aesthetics, but they don't have a monopoly on bad taste -- there are just a lot of them out there.  But I think one ought to notice the same lapses everywhere, including the village-atheist material that recycles nineteenth-century freethinkers' mistakes and irrationality, or gay males' bad taste.  And yes I agree that good taste is in the eye of the beholder, but I'm the beholder here, okay?

So a gay neopagan Facebook friend posted the above image today, helping out an artist whose work he likes.  Artwork, along with animal rescue material, constitutes a lot of what he posts there, and many of the works he touts are, in my opinion, beautiful.  Not this one.  I feel just a bit bad about mocking it, which is why I'm not linking to the source.  (If you disagree and think it's lovely and want to contact the artist to order a purple pentacle of your own, send me e-mail and I'll reply with a link.  I won't mock you.  To each his or her own.  But I still think it's tacky.)

Laying Layers and the Lays They Tell

Throw Grammar from the Train's post for May argues that the distinction between lie (as in lie down, not as in tell a lie) and lay, is being lost, because it's just too confusing.  Only a few anal compulsive grammar obsessives (like me) ever learned it anyway, and:

That's not because we're a nation of semiliterate texting addicts; lay and lie have never been easy to distinguish.  In fact, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage explains, the verbs were not well differentiated until the 18th-century usage juggernaut got rolling. From 1300 to 1800, “the usage was unmarked: Sir Francis Bacon used [lay for lie] in the final and most polished edition of his essays in 1625.”

This doesn't bother me, because as Jan (the blogger) indicates, the distinction between lie and lay was not a genuine feature of the language but a distinction invented and imposed by people who didn't really understand grammar.  But it does make me wonder about the other sense of lie, the sense of deliberately saying something that isn't true.  I suppose people don't confuse it because the meaning is obviously different. Though have you noticed how many people, when they found they made a mistake, will say brightly -- semi-ironically, I think -- I lied!  Even some of my Mexican friends do it, saying Miento, miento (I lie, I lie) when they realize they misspoke.  It's not a grammatical issue, it's one of semantics, but because lying and truthtelling are also moral issues, it's that as well.

So a friend shared (in the Facebook sense) this meme today.

She didn't actually endorse it.  She added a remark to the effect that she was rushed and would read it later, so presumably she shared it so she'd be able to find it when she had time to read it.  (I often do this, but by "liking" rather than sharing.)  I did some looking around on the Internet and found that the information in the image has been debunked numerous times.  I put those links into a comment to her, and after a moment's thought added another comment, linking to the Ninth Commandment (Exodus 20:16) at a Bible site: "You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor."

My friend is the daughter of a minister, and remains devoutly (though not too obnoxiously) Christian.  Unlike some other people I know, she doesn't get all pissy when I post corrections to disinformational memes she passes along.  But it still never seems to occur to her to check those memes herself.  And you'd think, wouldn't you, that people who take their religion seriously, would be concerned that what they send out into the Intertoobz would be true?  According to very old canons of truth and falsehood, it's not enough just to refrain from saying something you know to be false, hard as that standard is to meet.  You also must try to make sure that what you are saying is true.  This means, among other things, that you have to evaluate what you get from other people and want to pass along. This, evidently, is even harder.  Yet the religious believers I know, be they conservative or liberal, seem to give it little thought, and that was true long before Facebook or the Internet.

I wrote last week about the Tasteful Jesus Lady, who despite her flaunted faith also doesn't care much whether what she's saying is true or not.  But I reached a personal tipping point about this during the 2012 election season, and the worst offenders were ostensibly secular Obama supporters like my liberal law professor friend.  (To be scrupulous, the avowed conservatives were just as bad, but I expected no better from them.  My bias.)  Then there's my fictive nephew, who often shares village-atheist memes on Facebook, like this one yesterday, from something called "The Free-Thinking Society":

This meme has the dubious distinction of being false in almost every particular, from the number of translators who worked on the New Testament to the claim that the KJV was "edited" from "previous translations" rather than translated directly from the original languages, and more.  Some of the errors are insultingly trivial, such as the reference to "scrolls": all New Testament manuscripts, including the earliest, are codices, not scrolls; but whether a document was written on a scroll or a codex tells you nothing about its truthfulness or lack thereof.  (The motive, I think, is to insinuate that because scrolls are totally primitive, what was written in them needn't be taken seriously by enlightened Free Thinkers.)  Since none of these facts are that hard to track down, whoever made this meme should be regarded as, if not a liar, then at least someone who doesn't care whether he or she is telling the truth.  If "Free Thinking" means freedom to make stuff up, I could get that in a church.

Speaking of lies, my friend got the meme about charities from a page called WorldTruth.TV.  When I went to download the meme to repost it here I found this one next to it, a cartoon of a crowd of white adults (weirdly enough; not only all middle-aged adults but all male) in multicolored clothing walking through a portal labeled PUBLIC SCHOOL and emerging all in gray, with this caption:

The public school system: Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority.

There's a lot to criticize about the public school system, of course.  But I know of no indication that private schools are any different.  There's always been a divide between people who think schools should teach children to think and people who think schools should teach children to obey, and in general the latter group has usually gotten their way.  One of the reasons for religious schools is to make sure that the students are indoctrinated with a given cult's dogmas.  I get the impression that many people who complain that schools indoctrinate children really just want kids indoctrinated with their propaganda, not someone else's.

A friend of the friend who posted the Free Thinking meme attacked me for correcting it.  Significantly, he attacked me personally, not bothering to address the factual issues.  That's what most people think debate means, I suspect.  And then think again about the people who, realizing they said something untrue, say I lied.  Their tone of voice indicates they're joking, kind of, but I wonder.  The difference between making a mistake and deliberately telling a falsehood seems to be as difficult for many people to grasp as the difference between lie and lay, and it's a lot more important.

Each to His or Her Own

Funny -- I would rather the exact opposite.

One person who liked and shared this meme on Facebook is a coworker who loves to go camping.  But she doesn't go out into the wild, the real nature.  She and her husband take their camper to campsites that provide electricity and other amenities, where they're surrounded by many other like-minded nature fans.  (She's often remarked on the difficulty of getting a good spot, which must be reserved in advance.)  And of course, they don't go out during the winter.  Communing with nature has its season.

I like green grass, living water, and fresh air myself, but on the whole I prefer to be amongst city traffic and the noise of "man."  I live in a small (though growing) city, and my idea of fun is to travel to a city -- San Francisco, Chicago, Seoul, Incheon.  It's a bit ironic, given my loner tendencies, but even as I live alone I'm glad to know that there are people handy, and I like interacting with other people.  That kind of interaction is a benefit of city life.

Yes, cities have their dangers, but so does Nature.  Before "Man" wiped out many predators, a sojourn in the forest would likely bring you into the proximity of critters that would view you not as Man, but as Lunch.  It seems, in fact, that this cultivated nostalgia for a carefully modified-and-tamed-by-humans Nature is an artifact of modernity.  It's a luxury we moderns can indulge because we can keep Nature at bay.  (Most of the time, anyway.)

Ah well, each to his or her own.  The difference between a city-lover like me and a nature-lover like my coworker is a matter of degree rather than kind, I think.  I wouldn't want to live in a place where there was no greenery, but well-maintained cities should and do have plenty of plant life within reach; parks aren't "nature" in the sense meant by the meme, they're human creations.  Nor would my coworker want to abandon the technology of Man that she and her husband cart along with them into the greenwood.  I'm just a bit bothered by the contempt expressed in that meme for those comforts -- since the speaker in the meme is a human being himself, there's self-hatred in it too.  That can't be a good thing.

You Say "Tomato" and I'll Say "Sequester"

Robert Reich (economist and Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor) posted this on his Facebook page today:

Dinner last night with Alan Simpson (for those of you who don’t remember, he was a senator from Wyoming from 1979 to 1997, during which time he served as Republican whip and Assistant Republican Leader). Alan and I don’t see eye to eye on much of anything – figuratively or literally (he’s 6’7” tall). But he’s one of my best friends in the world. He’s witty, big-hearted, able to listen and willing to change his mind if he thinks he’s wrong, and incredibly generous. (He and his wife Ann trekked from Cody, Wyoming to San Francisco yesterday to help raise money so Jake Kornbluth, who directed "Inequality for All," and I can make more videos and films.)

Simpson and I respect each other’s different points of view, enjoy each other’s company, and laugh a lot. Why is it so impossibly difficult for Democrats and Republicans do this anymore?

This is the kind of thing that gives liberals a bad name. Simpson, for those of you who don't remember, was appointed (along with Democratic Senator Erskine Bowles) by President Obama to co-chair his Catfood Commission, intended to provide a rationale for the destruction of Social Security and other vital social programs in the name of lowering the Federal deficit.  Though on one level it failed -- the Commission couldn't muster the votes needed to ratify the desired conclusions -- on another level it succeeded, for the co-chairs wrote their own report, which President Obama and most other politicians and the corporate media media accepted as the "conclusions" of the Commission.  Despite this, "during the spring of 2012, a Budget Resolution based in part on the Simpson-Bowles plan was voted on in the House of Representatives. The plan was voted down 382-38" (via).  A later consequence was the "sequester," which imposed spending cuts that were deplored by just about everyone, including its chief architect.  As you can see, it's not so impossibly difficult for Democrats and Republicans to laugh together after all, as long as they're laughing at the plight of the general public under their policies.

But enough of the dead past.  Professor Reich is, I must say, confused.  No one is obligated to respect anyone else's point of view, only to respect their right to hold and express their point of view.  As the philosopher Paul Feyerabend put it,

Nor does one become illiberal when denying truth to a Puritan. Liberalism ... is a doctrine about institutions and not about individual beliefs. It does not regulate individual beliefs, it says that nothing may be excluded from the debate. A liberal is not a mealymouthed wishy-washy nobody who understands nothing and forgives everything, he is a man or a woman with occasionally quite strong and dogmatic beliefs among them the belief that ideas must not be removed by institutional means. Thus, being a liberal, I do not have to admit that Puritans have a chance of finding truth. All I am required to do is to let them have their say and not to stop them by institutional means. But of course I may write pamphlets against them and ridicule them for their strange opinions.

I don't consider myself a liberal except in the limited sense Feyerabend adumbrated here.  (It comes from his reply to criticism from his fellow-philosopher Ernest Gellner, which -- the reply, I mean -- was reprinted in Feyerabend's Science in a Free Society [Verso, 1978].)  Reich, however, does, and as a political scientist he should know better than his remarks indicate.

I myself have friends whose politics are sharply opposed to mine.  I don't pretend to respect their opinions, nor do I expect them to respect mine.  In general we agree to disagree, and if we enjoy each other's company we can agree not to discuss our differences.  This can become tiresome in time, and it has its perils.  The Peck's Bad Boy of academia, Stanley Fish, toured college campuses with the corrupt right-wing political hack Dinesh D'Souza in 1991-1992, debating Political Correctness and similar chimerae.  Fish remarked (I believe it was in the book where his half of the debate was published) that they got along well, to the extent that Fish danced at D'Souza's wedding.  That's touching, I guess, but Fish allowed their bud-ship to compromise his critical judgment, when a decade later he contributed a blurb to one of D'Souza's books, calling it "witty, informed, learned and lively," committing four errors in five words.

There have been quite a few famous odd-couple friendships that crossed political or other divides.  Hunter S. Thompson and Pat Buchanan were drinking buddies.  Need I mention James Carville and Mary Matalin?  The writer Brendan Gill and the academic Joseph Campbell were friends for many years despite Campbell's racism and anti-Semitism, though unlike Reich, Gill didn't feel obligated to respect his friend's point of view:

His bigotry with respect to Jews was of an equal odiousness [equal to the bigotry he displayed toward blacks, which included agitating -- unsuccessfully -- against their admission to the college where he taught] and seemingly uneradicable.  By the time I came to know him, he had learned to conceal a few of its grosser manifestations, but there can be no doubt that it existed ... He avoided manifesting his anti-Semitism in my presence in order to avoid my attacking him, but a friend we had in common told me that Campbell, proud to be a member of the New York Athletic Club, often recounted the tricky means by which Jews were prevented from becoming members.  This was ironic because, apparently unbeknownst to Campbell, the New York Athletic Club in earlier days had been every bit as violently opposed to Irish Catholics as to Jews.  Campbell's father had been in a position to arrange for his son to become a member only because, in the Great Depression, the club had come so close to bankruptcy that its WASP members had grudgingly consented to elect the first of an army of what they called "the Irish swine" [Gill, A New York Life: Of Friends and Others (Poseidon Press, 1990), 48-49; bold type mine].

I've shown insufficient respect to my own racist friends, which they reciprocated.  One, for example, a woman a few years younger than I who attended the same high school, was fond of posting racist memes on Facebook.  I criticized the memes, and her for posting them, to her indignation.  But we continued chatting with each other online, pleasantly enough, mostly about our respective sex lives.  I said I'd take her out to lunch the next time I came up that way.  Last winter she was in a terrible auto accident that nearly killed her, and the posting and the conversations stopped while she was in a coma in the hospital.  But a few weeks later, the racist postings resumed, and after some hesitation I decided that if she'd recovered enough to post this crap, she'd recovered enough to take heat for it.  She was, again, indignant: Why do you have to keep talking about politics? she demanded.  I replied that if she didn't want to talk about politics, she shouldn't post political stuff to her timeline.  She unfriended me, as did a mutual friend who said I was being mean to her and I needed to develop a sense of humor.  I have a sense of humor, but I was being mean to her, just as I'd be mean to anyone who talked about shooting Mexicans for the target practice.  Maybe Robert Reich wouldn't like my attitude, but it seems to me that not being mean is a two-way street.  I suppose that Simpson keeps his politics out of their socializing.  Since my friend refused to do so with me, I saw and see no reason to respect her point of view -- more important, no reason not to disagree with her.

This has some suggestive implications for some recent controversies, such as the protests against Condoleezza Rice's delivering a commencement address at Rutgers, which have engendered an ocean of crocodile tears about freedom of speech among the chattering classes.  (No doubt the same people who declared their intention to protest a commencement address by Eric Holder at a police academy in Oklahoma City, leading Holder to back out.  And no, I hadn't heard about it either, until I read the Los Angeles Times article I just linked to.  RWA1, for one, who was furious about the opposition to Rice's appearance, was silent about that one.)

How much respect am I obliged to give to people whose opinions I not only disagree with but oppose?  As I asked not long ago, must I vote for a Tea Party Republican political candidate just because he happens to be gay?  Are liberal-ish gay political groups required to endorse and support such a person, just because he happens to be gay?  Must I buy Condoleezza Rice's books just to show how even-handed and open I am to differing views?  How about the works of Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, or Ann Coulter?  Must I subscribe to, say, The National Review?  And if I must, aren't all the right-wingers I know obligated to subscribe to The Nation or In These Times, and to invite Eric Holder or Hillary Clinton to speak at their alma mater's commencement?  No, freedom of speech is all very well, but that would be going too far.

I do business with RWA1, despite his politics; I've even worked, part-time and irregularly, for him from time to time.  But I also disagree with him, as he disagrees with me.  I have no idea whether he respects me or my opinions; I know that I don't respect his.  I suppose there's some mutual personal respect, but that doesn't seem to oblige us to treat each other's politics with kid gloves.

On the other hand, the blogger Ampersand was upset during the Brendan Eich controversy when a new GMO-free grocery was targeted for boycott, because the owners had posted on their Facebook page that they opposed same-sex marriage and "one of the store’s co-owners linked to a libertarian article arguing that stores should have the legal right to refuse to serve gay customers."  It seems to me that since the owners took pains to state their beliefs publicly, it's acceptable for gay and pro-gay potential customers to react to those beliefs.  In particular, if the owners of a business declare publicly that they want the "right" not to serve me, I have the right to take them at their word, and not give them my business.  If they don't want my money, far be it from me to give it to them!

I haven't been able to find the comment by someone who attacked other people for seeking out people with unacceptable views to pick on.  This is a common distracting tactic, I've found.  But no one cornered the owners of that grocery and grilled them about the purity of their politics: they went out of their way to publicize their views.   What do same-sex marriage and sexual orientation have to do with running an organic food mart?  We queers are often accused of dragging our sexuality into everything, usually by people who are obsessed with our sexuality and won't shut up about it.  (We're also often accused of looking for bigotry.  Alas, we don't need to go looking for it -- it comes looking for us.)

Ampersand drew a distinction between choosing not to patronize a business whose owners have views one abhors (which is okay) and making others aware of the owners' abhorrent views and presenting a more or less united front of people who choose not to patronize that business (which is not okay); I'm having trouble grasping where the difference lies.  It's not as if we're talking about someone's personal, privately-held political beliefs; we're talking about someone's beliefs that they publicized on their business's Facebook page, thus advertising their politics along with their business.  It's they who chose to connect their business and their politics. Ampersand argued that a boycott is not a good way to persuade the owners that they're wrong; well, an antigay declaration on Facebook is not a good way to persuade potential customers to patronize one's business. One commenter complained that a boycott isn't meant to persuade but to coerce and punish; I think he's right, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing.  Again, Ampersand doesn't mind my taking my money elsewhere, and I wouldn't be doing that to persuade them either.

Along the same lines, am I being punitive if I run for office against an incumbent because of his or her policies?  Or even if I work in the campaign of their political opponent, or merely vote for someone else? Wouldn't I do better to try to persuade Alan Simpson or Hillary Clinton to change their views, instead of punishing them by throwing (or keeping) them out of office?  This may seem absurd, but remember the right-wingers who say exactly this about right-wing gay or female candidates: their critics and opponents are hypocrites who don't really believe in diversity, or we'd vote for them!  And it's not that far from the Dems who attacked Obama's left critics by accusing them of racism, of giving aid and comfort to the Rethugs, of not voting and of trying to stop others from voting.  I have no doubt that we'll see the same behavior in 2016 if Hillary Rodham Clinton runs for the Presidency.  The idea that one could vote for a candidate, perhaps as the lesser evil, yet still point out their faults, is unthinkable to party loyalists.  I think Reich is probably coming from a similar place.

I'm not sure there's a correct solution to this, in the same sense as the right answer to an arithmetical sum; we need to think about it, and discuss it, if possible with the people on the other side.  That's why it's bad when a Condoleezza Rice or a Brendan Eich or an Eric Holder refuses to engage in debate, just takes their ball and bat and runs home.  Luckily, the debate goes on anyway, without them.

A Minor Occasion

I was out of town last week on the seventh anniversary of this blog, and I forgot to notice it.  I'm gratified that I've kept going this long, and I'm grateful to all those who read my rants and raves, especially to those who have let me know that they like what I'm doing.  I mean to go on doing it as long as I have something to say.  Thanks to my readers!

Every Bookstore's Closing Diminishes Me

Rolling Stone ran a story recently about the closing of Giovanni's Room, a GLBT bookstore in Philadelphia.  I quibble with its characterizing Giovanni's Room as "the oldest gay bookstore in America," since the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York City was founded six years earlier than Giovanni's Room, but it closed five years sooner, on 2009. 

Giovanni's Room is only the latest gay-bookstore casualty, as many other such stores around the country have closed.  But so have general-purpose brick-and-mortar bookstores.  I have mixed feelings about this.  On one hand, I always enjoyed visiting a new city and having the local gay bookstore to check out, and I'd often discover new works there that had been unknown to me, or that I hadn't been able to find before.  The loss of these places saddens me, but I remind myself that it's because I'm a bookworm, and there are plenty of GLBT resources left.  So, on the other hand, I'm glad that books on homosexuality are readily available everywhere, and there are a lot more of them now than there were when I was growing up.  To kids growing up outside of cities even now, a gay bookstore in New York or Chicago or San Francisco isn't that much use; it's much more important that they be able to find resources in their local library.  In the small town where I grew up, population about 8000, the public library -- an excellent one, by the way, which speaks well for the town -- has plenty of books and DVDs on GLBT subjects.  When I was a young fagling, there were none except perhaps for books marketed to the mainstream, like Mary Renault's historical fiction.

The Rolling Stone article stresses the value of Giovanni's Room as a general resource apart from, or in addition to, the products it sells.  The owner, Ed Hermance, told the reporter, "The store has played a critical role in so many people's lives ... Coming in the store can be like coming out to yourself."  It can be, and it's important that such places exist, but there's no reason they need to be bookstores.  (Hermance also told Rolling Stone "sales have been declining since 1992.")  "'With all the money in this community,' says Rita Adessa, former executive director of the Pennsylvania Lesbian and Gay Task Force, 'there's no reason for Giovanni's Room to go down.'"  That's true, too, but I hope that with all the money in that community, there are other resources available for people who need to come out to themselves.

I wish I had a better sense of how young gay kids are coming out these days, even in my own city.  Indiana University's Office of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Student Support Services is doubtless useful to many, and I'm glad it's there, despite my old gay-liberationist distrust of GLBT professionalism.  It's a niche that some people can relate to, so I'm glad it's there for them.  No single resource will appeal to everyone.  Other people come to IU already out from their high school days, and the main thing they need is finding a social environment.  There is one gay bar in town, but it's of limited use to people under 21.  There have been many attempts to build alternatives in the more than forty years I've been in Bloomington, but they soon falter for lack of support, which also means use.  I've often tried to get people to explain what they are looking for in terms of resources, with little luck.  Many people weren't interested in the dances and coffeehouses of the seventies because they didn't serve alcohol; that was never important to me, but it's noteworthy how many people weren't even interested in places where they could meet other gay people without using alcohol.  Booze is, after all, a social catalyst in American society generally, not just among gay people, so that's not surprising.  There wasn't a specifically gay bar in Bloomington until the late 1970s, and it wouldn't have survived if not for the straight people who also went there for the dance music and the ambience.  Many gay men from Bloomington went to Indianapolis and the bars (and baths) there, so that they wouldn't be seen by people they knew -- unless they were also going to Indianapolis.  Despite all the talk about community, not all gay people are interested in community.  I'd like to know how much this has changed, if it has.

But, along with the lopsided competitive advantage, online retailers, Hermance notes, aren't as attuned to the quality, rather than quantity, of the sales they make. Search on Amazon for "gay fiction" and the first result to come back is Sebastian, a book with a shirtless man in cut-off denim shorts on its cover. A few of the other top-10 book titles showing nearly-naked men included: Feeling No Pain and Naked Hero – The Journey Away. There is no contextual guiding hand nor emotional intelligence to these recommendations. 

A look at the photo of GR's stock in the article shows that this isn't an issue limited to online booksellers, and I wonder how often the "contextual guiding hand" and "emotional intelligence" got a chance to do its job in gay bookstores.  There was always a lot of erotically-oriented material, not to mention porn, in the gay bookstores I had the chance to visit, and I bet such material paid the rent better than the more respectable books and magazines.  (In the same way, heterosexual non-chain "mom and pop" video stores that have survived usually have porn in a back room, and they couldn't survive if they didn't rent such material.)

Again, Rolling Stone reports:

"There was a golden age when feminist and gay bookstores helped elevate the quality of reading," says Phil Tiemeyer, Lambda Literary Finalist this year for Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants. "Employees might say, 'Oh, you came in for Sci-Fi but did you also see our Philosophy or History section?"

When Tiemeyer's historical work appeared on the Top Five on the Amazon LGBT nonfiction list, he says it was couched between two sex guides – How to Have Anal Sex and The Ass Book: Staying on Top of Your Bottom. "There's something really problematic about that from an intellectual point of view," he says.

Oooh!  That sets off my bullshit detector.  I'm amazed that Tiemeyer's book -- published by an academic press and not written for a general audience -- appeared in a Top Five bestseller list at all.  As I recall, the best-selling gay male books have always included stuff like The Ass Book.  Lesbian bestsellers have included soft-core porn in the form of romances.  For that matter, the current New York Times nonfiction bestseller list puts Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-first Century at number 1, followed by Heaven Is for Real by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent; the number one fiction bestseller is a mystery by James Patterson with a cowriter.   I wouldn't be surprised if many people who bought Plane Queer hoped for hot parts, and were disappointed to find academic jargon instead; I'd be surprised if most who bought it finished it.  As Mark D. Jordan wrote of John Boswell's famous Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1980, it, "and, to a lesser extent, [Boswell's Same-Sex Unions] are talismans more than books. People own them much more often than they read them, because mere possession is enough to allow one to benefit from the results."  Kinsey's Sexual Behavior books were bestsellers too, but how many people actually read them?

I wish more people would read more serious stuff, but that they don't is not news nor a sign of general cultural (or subcultural) decline.  I stress "more" there, because there's no reason why serious books should be all that people read.  I read more academic writing than most non-academics do, often with pleasure, but I also read a lot of lighter work, as do academics themselves.  One reason why feminist scholars began analyzing romance fiction and Gothics was that they were embarrassed by their own fondness for such fare, and then questioned their embarrassment.  But it doesn't work the other way much, and that's too bad.  I believe that people would get a lot out of history and philosophy and political writing, if they'd just give it a chance, but they won't.  I hear a lot of excuses, some of which are probably true enough (not enough time on top of their job, they fall asleep when they read, etc.), but I don't think they're the whole story.  What to do about this, I don't know.