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  • Giovanni’s Room in the LGBT* Movement
  • Ed Hermance (bio)

No one ever ran a gay bookstore to get rich. Giovanni’s Room certainly never provided more than a modest income for its owners and paid staff. So why do people open and operate gay bookstores? In my case, for personal as well as political reasons.

The personal becomes political.

I was born in 1940 and so the first thirty years of my life were a time when homosexuality was, as Oscar Wilde said, “the love that dare not speak its name.” The only comments about it were expressions of fear and contempt, fear of contamination of self and society, and contempt for weak, unnatural perverts. Homosexuals were seen as threats to the family and the continuation of the species.

Yes, homosexuals were known to have contributed to high culture—Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Michelangelo (maybe), the ancient Greeks, and in our own time Jean Genet, Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monet, Gertrude and Alice. They were known among the educated classes, but their like were not familiar to the overwhelming majority of Americans. Homosexuals were an alien, unknown species.

Both my parents held master’s degrees, so books were a constant presence in my life and I was a reader, finishing off three encyclopedias by the time I was 14. My father taught at Rice University in Houston, so I had access to its library until I left for college. At Rice I found a few titles through the card catalog’s listings on homosexuality, but those books were about close-binding mothers and distant fathers and recommended therapy. I certainly knew that it was dangerous to let anyone find out that I was strongly attracted to males in the way it seemed to me that males were supposed to be attracted to females. [End Page 91]

In my first term in 1958 at Dartmouth College I got D’s, for the first time in my life, in French. So I sought help from a college psychiatrist. After I found out that I was one of only three in that class who had not had at least a year of French in high school, I continued to see the psychiatrist because I was concerned that I was sexually attracted to men. At what would be our last session, Dr. McKenna, clearly bored with me, asked if there was anything else I wanted to talk about. I couldn’t bring myself to tell the truth. In 2013, I learned that during the same period at Dartmouth another psychiatrist had given a student a device he was to squeeze every time he had homosexual thoughts so that he would give himself an electric shock.

I remember only two times that homosexuality was mentioned at college. The first was during a psychology class taught by the department chair. He asked the twenty or so in the room if any of us planned not to marry. It came as no surprise that no one raised his hand (it was an all-male college in those days). The professor then said that 10 percent of us should not—with what I considered a smirk on his face. This, about ten years after the Kinsey Report shocked the nation with the finding that 10 percent of American men were mainly or exclusively homosexual.

The other time was during a Proust seminar taught by Professor Ramon Guthrie, an American who had been a volunteer fighter pilot for France during World War I. The most attractive man in the novel, Robert de Saint-Loup, beats up a man who had offered to give him a blowjob. The professor commented, “He could have said, ‘No, thank you.’” Later Saint-Loup appears as a customer in a boy whorehouse, thus being the first example I know of in literature of “homosexual panic,” attacking in another a characteristic of oneself.

During my first year teaching, at Auburn University in Alabama, I had the nerve to tell the Episcopal priest at my church about my homosexuality problem—and, miracle of miracles, he put me in touch with a psychologist in Montgomery who did not try to suppress my urges but...

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