Of my time spent living in Atlanta, GA, I remember few good things other than a handful each of people, days, nights, and businesses. For the most part, my life there was fraught with my struggle to avoid plummeting into depression, meth addiction, and total self-destruction, ultimately culminating with my precipitous fleeing from the city with as much shit as I could carry in my new Pontiac Sunfire.
A bright spot of my life in Atlanta was the time I spent wandering around Outwrite Bookstore &Coffeehouse on the corner of 10th and Piedmont during my days or evenings off from work. A denizen of bigger cities with brighter lights and better integration of the gay community, Outwrite was one of the few places in Atlanta where I felt like being gay wasn’t just about gaudy parades, drunken bar tours, and starring in one’s own version of a pre-Bravo “Real Houseboys of Atlanta.” This was a place where you could go to meet up with friends the day after all of that nonsense to catch up over coffee, pick up the latest in gay and lesbian literature (yes…actual books), and step away from Burkhart’s and Blake’s to regroup before fighting traffic on the 75/85 split on your way home.
This week, Outwrite shuttered its doors and sold its inventory and fixtures with no plans to reopen in a new location at this time, and with its passing, I feel it only appropriate to mourn the loss of one of the last bastions of gay book lovers in America. What was once a staple of city life in larger metropolitan eras has fallen victim to the same problems that have confronted independent bookstores for the past decade – a poor economy, stagnant incomes, the proliferation of online book retailers, and the increased availability and popularity of eBooks.
I will be the first to admit that I love eBooks. Before purchasing my iPad 2, I owned a Nook Color, primarily because of what I learned after spending so much time and money at Outwrite Bookstore – owning a lot of physical books is great if you never plan on moving…ever again. Otherwise, it’s just a hassle, as my mother so kindly reminded me, recently, while she packed up her garage in anticipation of her move back northward. The hundreds of dollars I spent filling countless bookshelves with gay fiction, non-fiction, biographies, satire, and history books are scattered around the eastern seaboard, some left behind in others’ apartments or houses, some lost on tour busses or airplanes, and countless others packed away in some long lost or forgotten box likely moldering in some humid basement, garage, or attic never to be discovered or appreciated again. It is this reality that makes me appreciate the value of eBooks, whose only storage requirement is measured in megabytes and gigabytes instead of shelves, cases, and stacks.
While I have made the 80% transition to electronic books, there will always be a place in my heart for the gay bookstore. I am of the opinion that no city can count itself among the “Top (--) Gay Cities in America” without having at least one gay-owned and operated bookstore wherein no less than 70% of the inventory is dedicated to actual books as opposed to the novelty clothing, kitschy memorabilia from the 1950s/60s, and endless array of Pride stickers, decals, license plate outliners, wind chimes, candles, decorative beads, and various other sundry bullshit that litters the shelves our most of our nation’s gay “bookstores.”
When cities complain about not being included on whatever arbitrary list makes its way around the internet and boast about their endless number of carbon copy gay bars, coffee houses, gift stores, and parades, I think back to the many afternoons I spent sitting on the patio of Outwrite Bookstore smoking a cigarette, sipping a soda, and sifting through the pages of my latest purchase, watching the citizens of Midtown Atlanta drive, bike, and walk by holding hands, sharing stories, or simply moving on their way to their next destination. I remember the evenings I stopped in to see what was new before heading over for drinks at Blake’s on the Park, calculating how much money I could spend and still afford enough drinks to make poor decisions later that night.
Most of all, I remember Outwrite as the one place in all of Atlanta where being gay was just about being Marcus, and forgetting for just a few minutes that my life in that city was tumbling around me in shambles.
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