Throughout the 1980s, Giovanni’s Room had trouble with bricks. As the gay rights movement swelled and AIDS steadily ravaged the community, every now and then a single brick would come crashing through the bookstore’s front window. There were about 17 to 20 bricks in total, and owner Ed Hermance has no idea who threw them. But this stream of vandalism didn’t get him down — he took the bricks home and used them to build a walkway in front of his house. “The reason I took them home is because they were good bricks,” he told a reporter in 1993. “What was I going to do, drop them in the trash?”
Now, nearly 40 years after the store opened at its original location on South Street, the country’s oldest gay bookstore is having brick troubles of a different kind. In July, it was brought to Ed’s attention that the building’s front wall was in danger of collapsing, and for a tiny niche bookstore in the age of Amazon.com and book superstores, the price tag posed a significant hurdle. “The store is not in the position to borrow that money and then pay it back over time,” says Ed. “It just doesn’t make that kind of money.” But the wall would have to be fixed, and Ed was glad to learn of the problem early. He managed to pay the repair fees and pledged to raise $50,000 in the next year to break even.
Since that day in July, the store has scrapped together $36,000. The Philadelphia gay community has rallied behind the struggling shop and opened its pocketbooks to keep it afloat. From one day at OutFest in October that raised thousands of dollars to tiny bake sales across the city that continue to raise a few hundred each, the store is on track to hit its threshold. The funny thing is, Ed and his co-workers don’t seem that upset about the damages. “If someone had plunked down the $50,000 check it wouldn’t have been nearly as good for the store as what has happened,” he says. The store’s crusade has made headlines in Philadelphia and across the country, and more people than ever before are curious about what’s inside Giovanni’s Room.
Ed sits on a leather-backed chair next to a non-functional fireplace in the upstairs reading room. His graying hair matches his bushy eyebrows and he wears a flannel shirt over his broad shoulders. Nearby lies a binder titled “35 Years of Giovanni’s Room” with pictures of him as a younger man, and while he has lost a mustache and gained a pair of glasses since those days, his wide and constant smile is still the same. Near the top of the stairs three men stand looking through large picture books with titles like Tom of Finland XXL or The Story of Morgan and Nash, Texas Twins. None acknowledges the others’ presence, but it’s not out of embarrassment — there’s no hesitation when it comes to paging through images of naked men. Besides books and DVDs, the room is plastered with gay and lesbian movie posters, ranging from the critically acclaimed like Brokeback Mountain to racier selections like Girl Seeks Girl (The L Word with a Spanish Lilt). Downstairs there are rainbows everywhere: rainbow flags, rainbow candles, even a rainbow disco ball. Near the cash register is a wall of gay pornography of all varieties. A basket of free condoms sits by the door and shelves of lubrication border the porn. Peppered throughout the store are fliers for book clubs, health clinics and social groups throughout the gay community.
Before stepping foot in Philadelphia, Ed was a comparative literature graduate student who enjoyed what he studied but felt like he didn’t fit the mold. “All of my peers my age were married and had kids, and that didn’t appeal to me at all,” he said. So with half of a PhD, he ran off to the mountains of Colorado to join a “hippie commune.” He and his friends owned land together and built their own property. One day, when Ed was “tired of hauling water and chopping wood,” he packed up his VW Bug and drove to San Francisco, where he lived with a cable car conductor and his family for a few months before landing a part-time teaching job. This job couldn’t sustain him, however, and he soon ended up in Germany teaching English at an American college. In 1971, he met a Quaker woman who was working for the American Friends Service Committee — “the Vatican of the Quakers,” says Ed — and she lured Ed to Philadelphia with the promise of a place to stay and work at a West Philadelphia food co-operative.
After a few years in Philadelphia, Ed met a man named Bern Boyle at a merry-go-round that doubled as a gay cruising ground at 21st and Spruce Streets. After getting to know him, he learned that Bern was one of the original founders of Giovanni’s Room. He was also a member of a gay literary collective called the Gay Alternative, and took Ed to a meeting of the group held in the basement of Penn’s Christian Association. For Ed, this was an eye-opening experience. “When I walked into that collective, that was the first time I had ever been in a room with other gay men who were not basically cruising each other. It was the first gay social situation I’d ever been in,” he says. This experience spurred Ed to dive right into gay Philadelphia, and soon he became the treasurer of the Gay Alternative. Ed was also asked to be on the board of a new gay community center, and he accepted the position of treasurer there, too. It was on this board that he met Arleen Olsham, an artist who specialized in leather-working and made prosthetic limbs for a living. The two grew close and in 1976 they were presented with a special opportunity.
Giovanni’s Room had been for sale for about six months, and at the time the state of gay literature was limited. There were only about four or five gay novels when the store first opened — James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room was the most widely known among the gay community, hence the store’s name — and it was impossible for the store to make much money. At the same time, Ed was coming to a point in his life where he needed to make a choice: “I knew I had either to stop doing gay stuff, which was what I was doing every evening and every weekend, and get a career together, or I had to figure out how to make money being gay,” says Ed. In 1976, Ed and Arleen decided to throw caution to the wind and buy Giovanni’s Room from its current owner. That same year, gay book culture began to blossom. “It was dumb beginner’s luck,” says Ed. “That year happened to be the moment when there started to be enough books that you could actually think about making money.” The store moved to a Spruce Street location for three years until it was thrown out by a homophobic landlord — “I don’t know, they just didn’t want us on their property because we were ‘disgusting people,’” says Ed — and Giovanni’s Room was forced to scope out a third location. It settled at its current spot on the corner of 12th and Pine Streets in 1979. Over 100 volunteers pitched in to renovate the space, and as profits and demand grew, the store expanded into a second building next door.
Later in the week, Ed is sitting at the upstairs desk surrounded by shelves of DVDs. Beside his desk is a sign that reads: “My advice, if you have any money at all, always spend it on books. – Gertrude Stein (and you just know she would have never shopped at Borders).” As Ed slowly pages through book company catalogues, a younger man in his mid-twenties wanders through the reading room, stopping now and then to investigate the shelves.
“Do you have any foreign LGBT books?” asks the customer. Ed admits that the foreign language collection is small, but that with his connections he could track almost anything down, especially German books. The customer clarifies that he’s looking for a French book. Ed ponders this for a minute and begins suggesting a particular French gay bookstore located in Paris from which he would be able to order a book, but the customer interrupts him before he can finish. “That’s okay,” he says. “If I want to order a French book I have an account on Amazon.”
Ed’s smile refuses to give him away, but Giovanni’s Room has a chip on its shoulder when it comes to Amazon and stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders. Not only have these megastores driven countless local bookshops out of business, they also do a disservice to those interested in LGBT literature, according to Ed. For instance, if you search for the word “homosexuality” on Amazon, the first book that comes up is A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Why? Because it’s the most-purchased book by those who looked up that word. “There is no conscience at all, it’s only sales,” says Ed. Last year, it was revealed that Amazon had labeled tens of thousands of gay books as “adult.” Officials claimed that it was a programming error and later called it a glitch. “What in the hell does that mean?” asks Ed. Amazon also takes away from Giovanni’s Room sales. Ed says it’s common for people to walk into the store, see a book or movie they like and write it down to order on Amazon when they get home. “I’m scared to death of them,” says Ed. “Not only for this business, but what they’re going to do to this culture.”
That culture of community and customer service is where Giovanni’s Room hopes to hold on to the market. In the store’s first years, its main purpose was “just to accumulate what you could find in one place so people didn’t feel so bare,” says Ed. “It was like we didn’t really have any culture.”
But as more books were published and the history of American gay life was made public, Giovanni’s Room became more than just a repository of limited information — it was a social and cultural hub. When the AIDS crisis hit in the 1980s, the store was a hub for information on sexual health and a makeshift psychologist’s office for those who had recently been diagnosed and needed resources or friends to lean on. When a movement to combat rape and sexual assault against women spread across the nation, the store adapted to become just as much a feminist bookstore. Today, it still serves as a meeting ground for friends and fans of gay literature to volunteer and share what they love, something Ed argues you won’t get from typical social venues. “When you go to a bar or a mixer, there’s no obvious topics of conversations. It’s all kind of, well, artificial,” says Ed. “When there’s an activity like volunteering here, there’s something naturally you’re going to be interested in.” It is the expertise and personal approach of Ed and his staff that keeps the regulars coming back every Saturday or the new visitors impressed enough to come back again.
The future? Ed’s unsure. He notes that Borders and Barnes & Noble are struggling. The former oldest gay bookstore in the country, The Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York City, closed in early 2009, and Lambda Rising, a gay bookstore in Washington, D.C. closed this past summer. But within Philadelphia, Ed has high hopes. “We’ve got a lot of good writers here, but they’re not in print — that’s the problem,” he says. “Maybe we’re gonna have a little Philadelphia Renaissance?” Assuming the store raises its final $14,000, Ed believes he can stick it out for as long as the books are being written and the customers keep coming through those rainbow doors.
