ABSTRACT

Commerce has played an important role in establishing gay community: without gay bars and bathhouses and bus and train stations, it would be hard to imagine a gay community at all. Indeed, the first clear sign of the emergence of a same-sex male subculture is in the molly houses of London in the eighteenth century. Today there are gay restaurants, gay cruise lines, stores that sell gay leathergoods and sex paraphernalia, and of particular interest to me, chains of gay bookstores. In fact, gay bookstores were among the first venues not specifically linked with sex in which gays and lesbians could meet. I'm not saying that there weren't pickups at gay bookstores, but gay bookstores were the first clean, well-lighted places in the gay community.