Word

i'm clearly a glutton for punishment. once again i found myself looking for some gay fiction, worth the $17.95 i'd pay for it, at Barnes and Nobles on Staten Island. yeah i know, this puts me in the same class of denial usually found in big haired, white-trash, trailer park women from red states who continually go back to their unemployed, NASCAR watching boyfriends who get ripped to the tits on Schlitz and then beat them within an inch of their lives. it's a total excercise in futility and a waste of time and gas, but what can i say: i'm am optimist.
Barnes and Nobles' SI has a Gay/Lesbian section that holds, roughly, 50 books. of those 50 books 45 of them are "erotica" (let's call a spade a spade: they're porno without the pictures), the remaining 5 are titles like "You're Out of the Closet...Now How About the Rest of the House" and "Finding the Boyfriend Within"; in short: self-help nonsense. if you want to find fiction that doesn't include coupons for free tubes of Wet Platinum, you have to walk through the sections and hope for the best. that's what i tend to do: walk through the Fiction section and wait for a clever sounding title or gay looking cover to jump out at me. i'll be honest, i've found some really good books that way, but it's really like trying to find a straight girl at a Melissa Etheridge concert or someone who's sat through all of Glitter sober: you know it's possible, but is it really worth all the work?
what Staten Island needs is a Gay bookstore. someplace where the literate fags and dykes can go and pick up real novels, poetry and essays; works of fiction, non-fiction, history, sociology, coffee table books, and recent issues of Out, the Advocate, HX, XY, and Next. someplace that carries all the rainbow stickers and paraphenalia that we all roll our eyes at, but still manage to own one piece of. i know i'm no the only gay guy on Staten Island that reads. there are three colleges on Staten Island which means there are at least 300 queers in training bursting to find out more about our culture and heritage and. plus there's all the fags and dykes that are already out of college and the closet, surely they're eager for someplace where they don't have to special order David Stukas' murder mysteries, Armistead Maupin's "the Night Listener", anything by Robert Rodi or <insert random lesbian fiction title here> , right?
i guess B & N is my only option, till such a store opens on SI. I'll go in hoping that this time it will be different; that maybe they got a buyer who has a slightly less conservative view on fiction. i'll go in hoping that mayber this time i'll find that limited edition copy of LIttle Me, only to be disappointed and hurt again, till the next time...

"we all came into this world naked, the rest of it is all drag," ~RuPaul