Good Bye Borders

Not too many people are going to be overwrought to see Borders go.  In my community Borders went much earlier this year, maybe even late last year.  I can't remember.  It wasn't all that long ago that Borders book store was more than just a chain.  It was a community support center for liberals and progressives.

In many communities Borders was the first non-adult bookseller to carry LGBT news magazines openly.  In Des Moines, the original Borders, at University and 22nd Street was a regular meeting place for Lesbian groups.  Borders was the first book store that I ever walked into to buy a gay book, and found it out in the open, where regular people as well as people like me could see it.  Prior to that there had been a few book sellers in Des Moines where you could buy our literature, but you had to walk into a private room, where books by Gordon Merrick, Aaron Fricke, John Rechy, Mary Renault, Rita Mae Brown, Dorothy Allison, Pat Califia and dozens of other LGBT authors could be found along side Inches Magazine, Hustler, Penthouse, Jugs, etc. I am tempted to use the term "as if" here, but it would imply that there was some similarity, I intentionally choose to use the term "was", because it is more accurate. To simply to talk of homosexuality was the same thing as to photograph with a closeup lens akin to a microscopic telescope the numerous inner and outer surfaces of human genitalia in a prurient fashion and then publish those photos along side stories about the same genitalia.

Los Angeles had Circus of Books and Washington DC had Kramer Books and Afterwords, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco had A Different Light.  Before Borders came along, we had Reader's World, with their swinging saloon door into the porn section, where you couldn't buy an Advocate News Magazine, without an ID that said you were 18.

Borders went out of their way to make us not have to go out of our way.

There is plenty to be said about the bad leadership of this company, their failure to make a run at the e-reader market until it was too late, and the failure of the company to keep up with the technology of the times.  This is not the progressive forward thinking company it once was, and it has paid the price.

Not without a little sentimentality from a lot of queers my age, for whom Borders was a place to come of age, does this company close.  Under the roof of a company that welcomed me the way that I was, and allowed me to meet up with other people like me, and did so without the suspicious eye, or the forced private patronage required at so many other places, did we find our literary liberty.

I have no nostalgia for the corporate giant that fails under the weight of it's own incompetence, but I have to admit, I'm a little sad for that little place on University where I bought my first copy of City of Night, and relished my freedom to do so with unbounded joy.