I’m being stared at by a former fuck buddy right now in Peet’s and can’t think of a good title

In Out magazine they wonder why gay bookstores are closing. In particular, A Different Light Bookstore in the Castro closed recently and this appears to be a bellwether. There are the usual suspects behind the failings of small bookstores like Amazon.com. Sure, that seems like a likely cause. Or it could be that people are buying less books, reading less books, and all this digital blah blah blah that people love to talk about. The end of books and all that. But what is unbelievable is the owner of A Different Light who says that the reason gay bookstores are closing is because people are tired of books with gay story lines. He says something like the gay story can only be told so many times. Are you kidding? So there’s no end in sight for straight stories, but somehow it’s different for gay books? The “gay story” told by a shitty writer can only be told so many times, that’s true. People lament the closing of A Different Light Bookstore, but in the last few years they only offered the most pointless books available, like another Tom of Finland coffee table book or maybe Kitty Kelley’s biography of Oprah. Presumably, the owner thought that this is what gay people wanted to read–all the horrible products of gay culture in printed form. People who would actually be interested in the content of these books probably don’t really read very much. So it’s really not that surprising that this bookstore would close. Gay people will read gay books and go to gay bookstores if they’re offering something interesting, it’s not that difficult. Stereotypes and cliches and bad writing can only be tolerated for so long, out of desperation for lack of anything else. Pulp fiction was popular because it filled a need due to the limitations of publishing at that time. We don’t need mass market drama anymore. There are plenty of good queer books being published or that could be published if, perhaps, stores like A Different Light carried them and marketed them. The closing of A Different Light doesn’t mean anything except that people don’t want literary garbage with a “gay” label on it, they want to read some really good queer books!