Turning the page.

Confronting an increasingly tough business, three heroes of gay and lesbian publishing pass the torch

Barbara Grier wants everyone to know the rumors of her retirement are greatly exaggerated. "I field about 40 calls a day from hysterical customers who have heard Naiad [Press] is closing," Grier says testily. "Well, it's not true." When she decided recently to scale back production at the Florida press she cofounded almost three decades ago with her life partner, 60-year-old Donna J. McBride, many assumed she must be on the verge of shutting down. Grier dismisses this charge, but even she admits it's easy to see how such rumors got started. The changes at Naiad are coming at a time when, as she puts it, "a lot of strange and horrible things are happening" in lesbian and gay publishing.

Richard Labonte, one of the founders of A Different Light bookstores, is retiring after two decades in bookselling, and lesbian publisher Nancy Bereano has announced she's selling 15-year-old Firebrand Books to her distributor, effectively closing the small house's doors. This is an alarming series of events at a time when small presses are threatened by ever-larger publishing giants and small bookstores by chains. Could we be facing the end of independent lesbian and gay publishing as we know it?

Not so fast, Labonte says. "I don't want to give the impression that I think gay bookstores are doomed or that gay publishing is doomed," he says. True, he's leaving the store he helped found, but he insists his decision has more to do with getting on in years than with any fear for A Different Light. "I decided about a year ago that I wanted to take a break. [I've] shared ownership of a 20-acre farm near Ottawa, Canada, since '76, and I've only spent maybe two months there, total, in 20 years. So I decided it's time to go have a sabbatical."

Bereano has a less-happy motive for selling Firebrand. She's selling her press to Chicago's L.P.C. Group in part to help pay off her debts. Although current Firebrand titles will continue to be available (including Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For books), there probably won't be any new ones. Unlike Labonte, Bereano says her decision has everything to do with problems in the publishing industry--specifically with an eroding market for nonmainstream lesbian and gay books.

"Forty-five percent of lesbian, gay, [and] feminist stores have gone out of business in the last two years," she says bluntly. It's a trend, she adds, caused not only by the rise of chain stores--notorious foes of independents--but by an increasingly mainstream-oriented movement that simply "reads much less."

"Assimilation is the thrust of all our political work as a community, and an assimilating community is not interested in reading about lesbian difference or gay difference," she says.

Labonte disagrees. A regular on the gay and lesbian literary scene who has informally charted the number of lesbian and gay books coming out since the mid '80s (when he wrote about books for The Advocate), he points out that more titles are available now than ever before.

"In gay bookstores now, where ten years ago you might have had a chapter on gay parenting in a couple of books, you now have a shelf of books on gay parenting," he says. "Where there might have only been a handful of hard-core titles on S/M how-to, now you have a shelf full of that. The reality is that many good books are being published--and in some exciting ways. There's a large number of small new presses that keep popping up."

Grier has personal experience with the eternal vigor of small presses. At 66 she's been planning for some time to scale back her operation. She found the perfect successor in Kelly Smith, co-owner of the Detroit-area bookstore A Woman's Prerogative and founder of the brand-new lesbian press Bella Books. Grier has given Smith the right to publish most of her authors, but she is keeping on Claire McNab, Karin Kallmaker, and Linda Hill. She will also continue to publish her backlist.

"I have reached the age where I now can occasionally get tired," she says, laughing. "My goal is to work a 40-hour week, like everybody else, instead of 70 to 80 hours."

Grier agrees with Bereano that there are reasons to be concerned about the fate of lesbian and gay publishing. She notes that gay offerings at chain stores are never very diverse, saying, "Bookstores have become like McDonald's or Burger King. We have become `one size fits all.' And it's not true."

Labonte, though, is optimistic--maybe because A Different Light, which has locations in three cities, has remained profitable despite the competition from major chains. "I don't want to fall into the trap of thinking things were better when we were the only ones selling gay books," he says. "Certainly [things] were probably better economically for us, but having as many books available in as many places as possible is so culturally important that even though it undercuts specialty store[s], I think it's good for the community as a whole."

Find more on these gay and lesbian publishing figures and links to remind sites at www.advocate.com

Lehoczky writes regularly for the Chicago Tribune.