Curious Times

A Lesbian Bookstore - Part 1

What the heck got into me that I wanted to be the proprietor of a lesbian bookstore in Dallas, Texas, in the 1980s?  I was clueless when it came to customer service and running a business. Though I did know what it was like to be an award-winning investigative TV news reporter – an intrepid truth seeker.  And, after coming out of the closet half a dozen years earlier, I also knew what it was to be a lesbian – both personally and politically.  I figured I could use what I did know, figure out the rest, and lean on my new girlfriend and co-founder, who knew some things I didn’t.

The story is a bit twisty and involves a handful of elements – gay boys peddling patriarchy, lack of lesbian visibility, heartbreak, and the melding of sexual tension and power.

Let’s start with the latter and twist our way from there.  

In the early part of 1986, I met a gal – we’ll call her Storm – at a gathering of lesbians interested in local politics in Dallas’ gay community. She and I hit it off (lots of sexual tension), which turned into long, intense conversations and planning sessions about how to help build a lesbian community (power).  

The night I met her was the beginning of a journey that would reconfigure me by further entrenching me in queer politics and offering me some lessons in lesbian love and the art of omission.

As I drove home from the gathering with my window down, the night breeze warm and soft, I prayed to the goddesses I’d be able to quickly downshift the gyrations in my head and tamp down the nervous beats of my ever lovin’ heart.

I was now ten minutes from home, where my partner was expecting me. I held out hope the goddesses would lend assistance as I opened the front door.

My partner – we’ll call her Dee – and I had been living together for probably three years by this time. Our home was cozy, on a neighborhood street corner, nestled in deep carpet grass and big lovely trees. Dee and I loved traveling to Mexico, once for two months. Our life and times together had grown into a beautiful thing, and she was a catch — very creative, soft strawberry red hair. The love we shared is always with me, still. Pasamos muchos momentos maravillosos y amorosos juntos.

I parked in the driveway, and sat there for a minute, taking some deep breaths to bring me back to reality. My gal was home – through the living room picture window I saw her walk into the hallway and turn towards the bedroom we shared. I gathered my thoughts.  Do I talk about the topics discussed at the meeting, suggesting it was all pretty boring?  Do I tell Dee about Storm, and that she and I had a drink after the meeting?  Do I walk in, say hello, make a quick bee line for the bathroom, and in passing say, “I really have to pee.  Back in a sec.”

When I finally walked up the one step to the front door and put one boot over the threshold, I still had one boot back at the bar, finishing my drink with Storm.

Months went by.  Storm and I continued to plot. We were convinced our starting point was to open a bookstore on Cedar Springs, in the heart of the gayborhood. 

There had been a lesbian/feminist bookstore, Half the Sky, in another area of town several years earlier, but it had been shuttered.  It was a smallish space that survived a couple of years – a comfortable and cozy reading room of sorts, with its sofa, comfy armchairs, and offerings of coffee and tea.  Customers were encouraged to stay awhile and read.  While it was supported in spirit by the lesbian community, the shop’s offerings were limited, and the rent was draining.

As Storm and I sketched out our bookstore, making well-laid plans, fostering high hopes very early on, we were also turning up the heat on our intimate relationship. Titillating, alluring. We lived and breathed the building up of a woman-centered community.  But for all the good that would lead to, sadly enough, hearts were destined to be broken along the way.

In this case, it wasn’t Storm’s heart.  She was single. And it wasn’t my heart.  Not yet — that would take its sweet time.  The initial broken heart belonged to the sweet woman with whom I had shared a home and a life.  Oh, those many times my heart whispered, “I love you” in her ear and she whispered the same back to me.  But our bond strained as Storm and I spent more and more time together as clandestine lovers. 

I worked to dismiss the undercurrent of nervous tension between my partner and myself, clinging furtively to the notion that I was successfully deceiving her with my omissions.  But my chicanery wasn’t working.  I felt guilty and sensed that Dee was picking up on my state of agitation, a cluster of hand towels wadded up, sloshing around in a washing machine.

I did not know what to do. I was in deep, trying to juggle a situation when the only thing left to do was make a choice. Efforts to spare more pain or humiliation was senseless.

Storm tried to convince me that Dee knew exactly what was going on and did not shy away from the topic of me leaving my relationship so she and I could spend more time together, and maybe even move in together — an option I was not keen on.  I thought it might be too much for our new relationship to bear and too much to add to the disruption of the undoing of my existing relationship with Dee.  (How “thoughtful” of me.) 

“How will you explain your reason for leaving?”  Storm asked me one day. 

“I’ll tell her I want to get into lesbian politics and move out on my own,” I suggested, knowing all too well I would leave out the part about the bookstore and my love and lust for Storm.  

“Well, we’ll see how that works,” Storm mused in that sardonic way of hers.

Anxiety drove me the next day when I dropped it on Dee that I had  decided to leave and move into my own place.  Of course, she asked why.  “I want to immerse myself in lesbian politics.” I responded with all seriousness.

 “Well, you can do that with me, in this relationship,” she said. With that statement alone, she opened the door for me to speak the truth.  She raised the subject and I had my chance.  Instead, I chose to twist things around.

“Well…” I paused.  Seconds passed in slow motion. Glancing up from the wood floor, I looked at her.  “Well, I have to do this on my own. In my own place.  I have to be by myself.”  I looked back down at the wood floor, my heart pounding, her heart breaking from the hurtful nonsense that rolled off my tongue.   

And not only did I lie to Dee, I lied to myself, believing with all my heart that I had met somebody else and it was l-o-v-e, love.  But all of us U-Haulers, looking back, know it was fueled by pure lust.  The love, darlins, was in our dreams.

So, I departed my relationship with the snap of a finger – my leave-taking incredibly lacking in grace and empathy. I could blame it on my youth, vim, and vigor, but that doesn’t come close to excusing it.

Me leaving wasn’t the end of the dreadful blunder.  I made good on my plans to find an apartment for myself and made an effort to stay quiet about the address.  So I had no qualms about inviting Storm to my new place – one half of a small duplex in University Park.  

“To discover that one has been lied to in a personal relationship… leads one to feel a little crazy.”     -- Adrienne Rich, feminist writer 

There was a knock on the front door.  Unexpected.  Storm and I were just sitting down on the living room floor to watch TV and eat take-away Thai food from a restaurant in East Dallas.  The garish red boxes remained unopened.  A second knock. I glanced at Storm, a questioning look on my face.

Opening the door, I drew in a breath when I saw Dee. She gasped, staring past me to Storm, then turned her back to walk away, crying, sobbing, heaving.  I stepped outside and turned to close the front door for privacy as she took steps across the front yard and then fell to her knees.  Her breaths were deep and uneven.  “You…didn’t tell me.  About her.”    

I exhaled.  “I’m sorry.  I am so sorry.”  I was empty of any other words to speak. I had not considered this consequence.  How could that be?

“Lying is done with words, and also with silence. The woman who tells lies in her personal relationships may or may not plan or invent her lying.  She may not even think of what she is doing in a calculated way.”    ~Adrienne Rich

I cheated.  Why couldn’t I allow myself to have a conversation in the complete context of the situation, to let my partner know I was attracted to another woman, at the very least, maybe even before the libido won out? But truth-telling was a scary thing to contemplate and filled me with fear. Growing up, I learned that telling the truth would only get me in trouble.

“Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler — for the liar — than it really is or ought to be.”    ~ Adrienne Rich  

I said I was so very sorry.  I apologized, feeling as if I were crawling on my hands and knees across broken glass.  Over several years time, I apologized on at least three separate occasions.  I proffered amends, lit candles, smudged my surroundings.  It was all so very long ago, but it still stings, and I keep finding an occasional shard of glass in the palm of my hand.

My rear-view mirror streams a slew of missteps that reflect poorly on this journey of my reconfiguration — the leave-taking from one relationship in order to jump into another.

No old lesbian on Earth would be surprised that Storm and I moved in together, lickity split.  Of course we did!  Once the truth was revealed it seemed silly for us to live separately, and it was cheaper, too.  So, after finding a place we got on with our plans to finally open a lesbian/feminist bookstore in the gayborhood.

It was not an easy task for lesbians to find books and literature that catered to them back in the 1980s. Even if such books were available in small shopping center bookstores in large cities, many closeted women felt it was too risky to attempt to buy one in such a public venue. They feared a shaming at the checkout counter, or whispers from the folks in line.  If you were unable to find the book you wanted – Macho Sluts, for example – did you really want to ask out loud where it might be?

While Dallas had sprouted a gayborhood by this point, it was still a lesbian desert. In fact, everyone referred to it as Boy’s Town, and the queer guys were peddling pure patriarchy. Even the Dallas Gay Alliance, the political arm of the gay community, refused to use the word lesbian in its name.

Crossroads Market on Cedar Springs had a respectable range of books for gay men, while lesbian reading fare was limited to a miniscule collection.  I occasionally went inside looking for a particular book somewhat begrudgingly, always noting how much boy stuff dominated the space.  That same male-centeredness applied to magazines, greeting cards, and sex videos featuring straight women pretending to be lesbians having sex — imposters.  Certainly not the videos that clueless lesbians should be trying to learn from. 

Due to the dearth of lesbian literature in the gayborhood in those early days, Storm and I saw the need to expand that universe, make sure there was a bookstore stocked with feminist literature, relationship advice, spiritual guides, and lesbian romance novels that weren’t dark and depressing, like they had been in the before times. 

Part 2. Coming Soon.  Meanwhile, I invite you to read some of what I’ve already published by checking out my archives.

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