Get back to gay bookstores.

It's an epidemic of startling proportions, a dramatic die-off that threatens the future well-being of the gay and lesbian world. No, I'm not talking about AIDS or breast cancer or hepatitis C. I'm talking about the commercial virus that's killing off our gay and lesbian bookstores. The bad news is, it's spreading faster than the flu. The good news is, there's a simple cure within everyone's grasp.

How bad is the problem? Real bad. In cities across the country, once-bustling shops that just a few years ago were crammed with customers now stand half empty. Shelves that were once rightly packed with thousands of titles now have plenty of room for artful displays of books lying faceup, with space to spare in between. Specialty sections like poetry, social sciences, AIDS, minority fiction, and queer studies--once crammed with practically every important title ever published--have entirely disappeared in some stores, while in others they've been reduced to a smattering of new releases and maybe a handful of perennial best-sellers. Of the stores that still look healthy, many have kept the wolves at bay by becoming hybrid gift shops or by stocking the shelves with sexy magazines and nude photography books.

Even more upsetting than the problem itself is the cause--namely, us. According to industry experts, gay people have cut way back on our once-laudable habit of buying gay books in gay bookstores, and we seem to have plenty of excuses.

In the early and mid 1990s, the big chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders began expanding their gay sections while offering price discounts no independent shop could match. They also went out of their way to host readings for gay authors, who used to be welcome to read only at the gay bookstores. Then Amazon.com got into the act, offering gay and lesbian titles at even steeper discounts, delivered right to your door. It got to the point where you could browse the gay bookstores, decide what to buy, then skip over to the big chain or home to the computer and buy it for less. The gay shops became browsing zones. Actual buying was done elsewhere. Something had to give--namely, profitability.

Some might call the mainstream vendors' embrace of the gay and lesbian market a form of progress, part of the Will & Grace-ing of gay life, and I suppose it is. Having healthy gay sections in major chain stores does have advantages, especially in small towns. It exposes straight people to gay books and provides a place where nervous or questioning youth can browse. But those benefits are small potatoes compared with the poverty that faces gay intellectual life if most indie bookstores really do fold.

During the golden age of gay bookstores in the 1980s and '90s, these places were gay community centers for the life of the mind, intellectual adventure zones that exposed us to authors, genres, ideas, and fellow browsers we could probably never encounter elsewhere. They also helped to spark a gay publishing boom, since publishers knew that gays maintained a huge network of vibrant bookstores where mid-list titles would be prominently displayed, promoted, and sold. Best of all, these shops routinely kept a huge number of books in stock long after they were dropped from other stores.

By contrast, the gay section of your average chain store stocks a couple of hundred titles at most, all of them either hot new releases or long-standing best-sellers. And while Amazon has zillions of titles, you can't really browse or read a few pages before buying, and you certainly can't derive a sense of community, hear an author read, or cruise that smart-looking stranger with the wire-rim glasses and the large but sensitive hands browsing the queer theory shelves. Alas.

Is there anything we can do to turn things around? Sure. Go back to buying our lesbian and gay books exclusively at lesbian and gay bookstores. Yes, we'll pay a bit more, but think of it as a little tax, an investment in our future. For just a teensy fraction of what we pay for travel, clothes, cable TV, or what we contribute to gay organizations, we can easily keep these stores alive and healthy. Seems a small price to pay.