It’s hard to overstate what those books meant, growing up in the American south, or the solace I took from them and from their vision of queer life as possessed of a measure of human dignity. I chose books almost at random, based on their titles, I guess, or their covers, a method that led me to Edmund White, Yukio Mishima, Jeanette Winterson, Baldwin. As a student in Kentucky’s public schools, which means I wasn’t getting much of a literary education, I didn’t have any idea what names to look for. I have mixed feelings about lesbian and gay sections in bookstores now, but it was a wonderful resource for the pre-internet kid I was. This store had a section dedicated to lesbian and gay literature, tucked away in a back corner, and each time I went I would spend a few sweaty minutes there before I snatched a title and carried it to another part of the store to sit and read. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and there was a wonderful independent bookstore in town, a place called Hawley-Cooke, where, since I was a bookish kid, I spent pretty much every Friday night. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first discovered Giovanni’s Room, but I was quite young, maybe 14 or 15.
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