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Living Herstory: Women & Children First
by LORI WEINER
2003-06-25

This article shared 2541 times since Wed Jun 25, 2003
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For 24 years, Ann Christophersen and Linda Bubon, co-owners of Women & Children First bookstore, have been a stalwart constant in the lives of countless GLBTQ Chicagoans. From the S&M debates of the early 1980s to the gender continuum of the 21st century and everything in between, Women & Children First has provided a safe space for Chicago's women, children, and men to explore themselves. Linda and Ann took some time from their busy schedules to reflect with WCT on the past, present, and future of Women and Children First.

[Visit the store at 5233 N. Clark, (773) 769-9299, e-mail wcfbooks@aol.com or online www.womenandchildrenfirst.com .]

WCT: Let's go back a few years to your 20th anniversary in 1999. What were your feelings on that day, when you realized the store had become an institution not only locally, but also nationally? Did you expect your business to be so successful?

AC: When we started, I wasn't really sure where it would go. We started doing this because there was a felt to be a need for a place like Women & Children First, and we went into it hoping we could create a business that served our mission and would be successful in the ways we defined it, mainly to be a place where women's words were available and promoted and highlighted, both in printed form and by bringing writers into the store. We also wanted to be a place where women could find things of interest to them, and find their lives reflected.

LB: And serving all kinds of women was a stated goal. It's less of an issue now, but at the time, in 1979, feminist activity in Chicago had been marked by divisiveness. Political and theoretical differences—all kinds of women came together under the banner of feminism in the 1970s, and then found out they had all kinds of different agendas. Some of them were very socialist in their politics, some were separatist, there was conflict over gay and straight women coming together and how big of an issue lesbian rights should be. There was a fear that any one group of women might want to claim the store as 'their' space, and what did we need to do to keep it really open and accepting and a happy place for all kinds of women regardless of their politics. We neither wanted to preach to the choir, nor did we want to offend lesbian separatists. We wanted to provide for their very valid theoretical concerns and practical concerns. So trying to keep everybody happy and trying to make sure that no one group became so identified with the store that it left out other groups. We didn't want to be labeled as the store for seps, the store for moms, the store for white lesbians or young women. So it was, I think, a real concerted effort in the early years to have programming that addressed everyone's issues, to carry books and make sections really clear that all kinds of people were welcome —spiritual groups, political groups. Now, I think that's changed.

AC: There's still the same effort, but some of the particulars are different. We've been very excited about our Young Feminists group meeting here, having monthly discussions. We're excited to program women of color coming to town. We're interested in keeping a varied and diverse event schedule, stocking the books that represent the interests of various political and racial groups. The fact is that I, at least, never did feel, in the early days, that there was a major shift. The strategy and the mission are still the same—to be a place where all women found themselves and each other, and could be together in the same place, at the same time, moreover, and be able to have that experience of discovering shared goals. But I think that's still a dynamic today.

LB: What might be a little different about the dynamic today is that I think among feminists, there's a much greater tolerance and understanding of diverse opinions, and particularly now in the last couple of years, with a really hostile anti-feminist administration in power, and a lot more conservative politics out there. I think feminists of all stripes realize we really have to work together, that there's a much more clearly defined enemy to women out there. Another interesting shift is that in the 1980s, when you talked about women of color, you were largely talking about African-American women who were beginning, through the pioneering work of people like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, to get their books published. In the last four or five years, many more Asian voices have begun to get published, more Latina voices. Certainly there were some out there in the 1980s, but it was slower coming. In the last few years there's definitely been much more diversity of writing by and for women of color. If you look at our schedule these last two months, both Asian and Latina writers are very well represented.

WCT: Have you noticed a similar evolution in your customer base and event turnout?

AC: Yes, generally speaking. But it's still a majority white audience, and it depends on who's programmed. Programming is really important for introducing women to the store who may not have been here before, and when Barati Mukarji is here, more Indian women come to the store. When writers represent a particular community, that's when we see a majority audience from that community. So that's cool.

LB: And we also see a higher percentage of men for certain programs. Men of color, I think, will come to events and will identify with their sisters out there. So we see men, too, when a particular author is at the store.

WCT: What about creating a sustainable business model? Did that enter into your thinking when you opened? AC: Our first goal was fulfilling our vision, but another was creating a business whereby we were in charge, where we didn't have to be concerned about anyone being on our case because of our sexual identity, or because we were women. We wanted to be in charge of our destiny, as it were. So opening a business and sustaining that would allow us to practice that, to make a living as well as provide a place for other women to make a living in a business environment where they could also fulfill their mission of promoting feminist values and politics. We were engaged in the struggle to learn to be businesspeople and answer all those questions, to be smart about developing this. We didn't have business experience, or formal business training, so we had to acquire that. We had to figure out ways to obtain the knowledge, and this has occurred over the course of the years, scrambling at first and then learning some of the fundamentals.

WCT: Did anything surprise you?

AC: There's the element of change, of circumstances changing. You open in a certain neighborhood—from the very beginning we had certain types of expectations that weren't fulfilled. For instance, we thought our university colleagues would be a mainstay of ours, and they really weren't. They were occasional buyers. We found that some of the stock that we presumed would sell well, didn't really. So we had to make adjustments from the very beginning. On the other hand, sales were better from the start than we had expected. In the course of the first five years, we figured out that we would have to get bigger in terms of product offerings. Otherwise we couldn't sell enough products to really make a viable business.

LB: To really support Ann and myself, and some part-time help, which is really what the early goal was, we had to be bigger.

AC: We saw an opportunity to be more successful. A fundamental feature was that we had to sell more. We needed more space, because there were more books to carry, and adding to our product base only made it more necessary, so in our sixth year we moved from our original location on Armitage to our second location on Halsted.

LB: You have to remember there were no chain bookstores in Chicago in 1979 when we opened. It wasn't until 1986 when Crown opened, which was frightening to us.

AC: There was B. Dalton, and Kroch's. Each Kroch's was more similar to an independent bookstore. It did business in ways familiar to independents. Competition was different—not what it became when chain stores started opening.

LB: There was a whole network in the '80s of independent bookstores who tried hard not to step on each other's toes, tried to work collegially to share the market, stores like ours, Barbara's, Guild Books, People Like Us. We all had our focus, and while there might be some overlap, none of us was really gobbling up a huge share of the market. We were splitting up the pie. It was a very lively time for readers in Chicago. There were a lot of different cool stores to go to, where you could get individual attention and a great deal of expertise from people in all those different places. Some had specialties, but there was a very rich network of independents in the '80s. So the climate really changed dramatically after we moved to our present Andersonville location in 1990. In 1992, when the chains moved in three miles on either side of us....

WCT: Did that affect your bottom line immediately?

AC: Our business plummeted, after having virtually annual growth almost every year since we opened in 1979 until 1993. And then in 1993, our business declined 11%. That's huge.

WCT: Were people still coming in, but not buying it here?

AC: A lot of our suburban customers stopped coming in, and that was a visible difference. Our clientele could never get all of our stock at the Borders in the mall, but they could get some of them at Borders or Barnes & Noble. So the convenience of driving a couple miles and parking in a lot to purchase a lesbian novel, in lieu of driving 25 miles and then hunting for parking in order to come here and purchase that same novel, became a factor. Although, every competitor takes a bit of your business, whether it's Amazon.com or another independent or Barnes & Noble.

LB: We were one of the first bookstores to computerize, one of the first to have a Web site—we've had a site for seven years, and it's been purchasable (customers can pay for books online) for three years. We're fairly cutting edge. And we try to make our Web site have the same atmosphere as the store, but there's no replacement for walking in and browsing, looking at a wall of books, all written by women, all lesbian titles, all gay titles. There's no replacement for that, to be able to come in and have your kids play, and chat with people and walk around and browse. Because of the kind of store we are, and because our customers are looking not only for titles but also an affirming experience, I think what people really want is to come in here, and BE in here. That said, there's no getting around that we've lost a lot of foot traffic.

WCT: Ann, you in particular have been involved in a grassroots effort to keep the chains from encroaching on independents.

AC: In the early '90s chains started proliferating in the industry. In observing the patterns of where stores would locate, they'd locate in proximity to independent businesses. It's a pattern in chain development. Look down the street here on Clark, and you'll see Starbucks just down the street from two independent coffeeshops. The things that became obvious, over a fairly short period of time, was that these weren't collegial competitors. These weren't like-minded booksellers. These guys were predators. They were going to develop their businesses by eliminating ours. It's hard to feel kindly toward a competitor like that. In the early '90s, around '93-'94, it came to light that there were a lot of illegal practices going on, such as the chains demanding things from publishers and being granted those things that the independents weren't getting, in terms of pricing, co-op money, advertising support, ways of doing business that allow for undocumented returns of stock, practices like that. In total there were 58 discrete, different terms that were anti- trust violations.

LB: Negotiating debt, for example. We have to pay our bill in 60 days, but they run a debt through the year of millions of dollars, and at the end of the year they negotiate to actually pay just 75% of their total debt. What did they actually end up paying? We don't get to negotiate 75% of our bill—we pay 100%. If we get a shipment in and there's a damaged book, we wait for a call tag to send it back. One of the discrepancies we documented is that if a chain store notices a mistake in a shipment, they automatically charge back $75 to the publisher. For ANY mistake, overages, shortages, anything. So almost on every invoice, there's a $75 chargeback. And the chains demanded, and got that. We've always been members of the American Booksellers Association, an excellent trade organization that's really tried to respond to the changing needs of the marketplace.

AC: The ABA started in 1900, and it was originally the trade organization for all publishers and people involved in bookselling. Explicitly, about seven years ago, it defined its needs more specifically to address the needs of independent storefront booksellers. And in 1994, there were 5,000 members of the ABA, and now there are only a little under 2,000.

LB: It's safe to assume more than half of ABA's independent membership went out of business in the past nine years.

AC: One of the situations facing independent bookstores now is not so much that existing stores are going out of business, but new stores aren't opening. So the percentage of stores being opened does not correspond to that of stores closing. The attrition rate is higher than it was, but there's no balancing trend of new businesses opening because the environment is so hostile.

WCT: Can you describe what the environment is like for a young entrepreneur seeking to open a bookstore right now?

AC: I think going into a competitive situation in a marketplace that's oversaturated would be difficult. And when we opened, there weren't a lot of non-bookstore businesses selling books, which is the case now. Not only do you have the competition from the Internet which didn't exist before, but now Target and Wal-Mart sell books, too.

LB: Which Barnes & Noble are complaining about! ... The thought of opening an 850-square-foot store—our current space is 3,400, and most retailers just starting out typically take a space in the neighborhood of 1,000 square feet, an individual storefront— that would just be ludicrous. There isn't a subcategory small enough, and the perception of what a bookstore is has changed so much. It's no longer a cozy little place. It's a place with wide aisles, where you can get coffee and food, where there are many many racks of books, and if you're a kid and you like a certain series, they'll have everything in that series—maybe not real literature, but everything in the series. ... So to open in 1,000 square feet—what are you going to have? It would be very difficult. We carry 35,000 titles, mostly spine out on the shelf, so we can get lots of titles. But even at our size, we're perceived as little. Even though I imagine our children's titles rival lots of chains. Certainly, our gay and lesbian titles are more extensive than what you'd find in most chains.

AC: In summary, it's difficult to be a small entrepreneur. It's not that you can't be an entrepreneur, but you have to have a larger initial investment and be broader in scope than was the case before.

LB: Or you'd have to find a location where there truly is nothing else around you. I talked to a bookseller from a little town in Montana where there's a concentration of high-tech medical businesses, and research libraries. And it happens to be in this smallish community, with a very high percentage of PhDs and serious readers. It's not an area where a chain could—there's just not enough people there for a chain to ever go in. And he's got a high percentage of readers.

WCT: Small presses have also been affected by this trend. Firebrand is one of the best known presses to have problems.

AC: They've apparently been purchased within the last month or so. There aren't any books yet. I don't know the current status. All of Alison Bechdel's old books are unavailable right now. We sold out our last copies and can't get any more. This is also a trend which dovetails with the development of the chains. There is, in our business, the creature of returns, whereby a bookseller can purchase books and return them under certain conditions if they don't sell. So one of the things that happened to a lot of small presses, who typically do very small print runs, maybe 3,000 copies of a popular title, is that chain stores would buy several copies of these small press titles for each of their stores nationwide. Well, the small press has spent money printing and shipping those books. And if the chain doesn't sell them, and they're returned, substantial returns for a small press is fatal. If you print 3,000 copies and get back 2,500, you're dead.

LB: Then you don't have the money to pay the printer for the next book. Small presses would get into the position of having to do a second printing of a book, because their first printing sold out, and never get paid for the books that went out to the chains, and three months later the books all come back.

WCT: Which lesbian publishers are no longer with us?

AC: Firebrand was the most significant casualty in terms of its size. Naiad Press is now going out of business, but that's a retirement issue—that's not due to business conditions. They did spin off some of their business, but the new press is going to struggle to make itself successful. They're coming on the scene at a time when so many feminist bookstores have closed. Feminist bookstores, and lesbian and gay bookstores, account for a great many sales for these publishers, because we have comprehensive sections, people know the books, people sell the books, which is something that happens much less at chain stores. So they're not in their right homes anymore. Not only is there the phenomenon of the large returns, but part of the reason for it is that there aren't good, developed sections in many cases, where those books can fit in, and the staff don't sell the books in many cases. They aren't making new readers for the books, which accounts for the returns. Cleis Press is still around, Seal Press, Feminist Press ... they're still here. The Kitchen Table Womyn of Color Press is no longer with us. But here's an important question. What new feminist presses are springing up, new lesbian presses? It's part of the same phenomenon as the bookstores. Who's opening a feminist bookstore? They're just closing. Nobody's opening. On the press side, this trend is less true for lesbian presses, but more true for feminist and political presses. A lot of those feminist presses from the '70s and '80s published fiction, but also cutting-edge feminist literature. And that worries me the most about what's been lost.

LB: Remember Crossing Press?

AC: Yeah, they were good.

LB: But Crossing made a decision to publish a lot of cookbooks and some lifestyle books.

AC: They really changed their character.

WCT: Women & Children First was involved in litigation against the chains?

LB: The ABA's first response, in defense of independent booksellers, was to target the six major publishers who were giving these extra deals, secretly, to the chains. Those lawsuits resulted in five settlements by publishers, and one publisher, Viking Penguin, paid $25 million to independents via ABA.

AC: The ABA decided to disburse it among stores who sold product by Viking Penguin.

WCT: Did you benefit from the disbursement?

LB: Yes—that's how we got our awnings.

AC: The ABA settled the grievances out of court, and then Viking Penguin was found to have violated court orders, and that's why they were penalized.

LB: After that initial lawsuit was settled, there still seemed to be a lot of violations. The ABA made the decision to take the chains directly to court on behalf of a variety of independents around the country. We joined in that suit. That was 26 independents, including us.

AC: It was filed in 1998, and concluded in 2001. The suit was against Borders and Barnes & Noble, and we settled out of court. We got some money.

LB: We went to court, actually.

AC: Yes, and we settled. It was sort of a draw. What we got out of it, we didn't get what we wanted. We were hoping to get damages for the stores that had suffered because of the illegal trade practices that chain businesses were engaged in. It was a very complex case, and we knew it would be a very difficult case to win. It's very difficult to sue the buyers—it's much easier to sue the vendor who sold the product duplicitously. But the organization (ABA) felt that we had to do something to try and stop this. We need to make this, at least bring to light, the practices of these businesses. And we did succeed in at least bringing it to light. We ended up getting about $5 million.

LB: Which was all devoured by court costs.

WCT: Did any of the stores which went out of business prior to the settlement receive any funds?

AC: No stores got any money—the ABA used it to pay court costs.

WCT: Has the situation changed?

AC: Yes, it has. Over the course of these two cases, the publishers are much more circumspect about leveling the playing field, and ensuring discount terms and co-op and advertising terms are more uniform. Those were the two big areas. Nobody thinks this is now finished and we have no more problems, however.

LB: But the chains have stopped discounting.

AC: The chains have significantly revised their policies, which one can infer had something to do with the litigation. They're perhaps not getting quite the same advantageous terms.

WCT: What does the future hold? You're approaching a silver anniversary in 2004. As possible retirement approaches, is a succession plan in place at this time?

AC: We've started to think about that. I attended some workshops at last year's ABA Convention on succession planning, and this year's convention will have some more of that. A lot of booksellers are actually of our generation, because there are fewer new stores being opened by young people in their 20s and 30s. When you look around at the ABA conventions, there are way too many of us in our 50s and 60s. So this is an issue of concern to a lot of businesses out there. We haven't addressed it in specific terms, but we know we need to soon. And we want it to go on, and providing for that is going to require planning. We want Women & Children First to outlive our management of it.

WCT: Over the years, many feminist and lesbian bookstores have not survived the vicissitudes of the marketplace. Yet Women & Children First continues to thrive. What's your secret?

LB: That's a question with a complex answer. It's not just one thing. There's a lot of factors. One thing is that the loss of sales that happened in the '90s, and the loss of walk-in business, we compensated for with things like textbook sales to women's studies students at DePaul and Loyola, a little bit at Northeastern and Northwestern. We're working harder on corporate orders and school orders, multiple copy orders. We started developing that business four or five years ago, and it's becoming significant. Without it, we'd absolutely be in much worse shape. And the textbook sales in particular occur at times of year that are not retail busy—September, January. We also do an enormous amount of outside-store sales at conferences. Just this morning, I took a call—the Women in Engineering and Science are having a conference and we're selling books there. ... Last week we went to Women Employed's 30th anniversary luncheon because they had Eleanor Holmes Norton and her biographer there.

Because I do 90% of the textbook deliveries—and we literally take them to the classrooms, put them up on the desk, and invite the students to come up and buy their books right there—I started lifting weights. I thought, I'm going to be 52. How long can I drag around 50-pound cartons of books without hurting myself unless I get in shape to do this?

We've [also] got terrific employees who are not our age and our generation, most of them, who keep young people coming in by what they pay attention to—our music section, our magazine section. They're aware of concerts and musical events in town. One of our employees started an acoustic music night once a month, another employee started the Young Feminists discussion group once a month. Those kinds of things keep the next generation of feminists coming into the store, and the women's studies departments are helping to create that next generation. Another factor is where we are. We're in Chicago—we're not trying to do this in Peoria or New York City, where rents are skyrocketing and it's impossible for a small bookstore to survive. We're doing it in a city that has affordable retail outlets and is a real crossroads, and has media, so authors do come to Chicago in quantities. And we have really made a name for ourselves in hosting big author events.

One of the reasons we get Isabel Allende and Hilary Clinton [Saturday, June 28, 10:30 a.m.] is because of the relationships we build with publishers and publicists as well as the authors themselves. We're willing to host that first-time novelist that we'll spend $150 advertising, for an audience of maybe six people and selling three books. We clearly take a bath on that, but it's part of a comprehensive picture of being a lively cultural center where authors come. And that first-time author might well turn out to be Sara Paretsky or Sandra Cisneros in 20 years. So you invest in that program of signings. And it's paid off.

AC: Plus, we have a history with author signings. We've done it for 23 years. And the publicists we work with have in some cases been with the publisher for that entire time, which frankly is a rarity. Publishers talk to each other, and if we have a great event with the Gores that's well-attended and sells lots of books, then they know we can pull it off. And we dove into that part of the business in 1979 when we opened, asking for writers and demonstrating that we can do what the publishers request and make the authors happy at the same time.

LB: What happened with the chains and authors is very interesting. When they came in with the predatory attitude of putting us and other independents, like Barbara's and Kroch's that were doing lots of author signings, out of business, they had to do author signings. They demanded all the authors—but what happened was many authors weren't happy about the way they were treated, and the publicists weren't happy with the results. Customers even complained. Publishers and publicists need to keep big-selling authors happy. And they want them to be treated with respect, they want the people that greet them to have read their books, give them a nice introduction, to move chairs, to set up something really nice for them, not simply tell the author to go ahead and start reading, and it isn't even obvious to the customers that the author has started reading.

WCT: Ann, tell us about your experiences with the ABA. What's that been like for you?

AC: I'm the president of the ABA right now. It's been about as much work as I expected. The work is at its highest level ever because of the challenges we face. But we have a great staff. There's a board composed of nine booksellers from across the country, representing different kinds and sizes of stores. Then there's a staff, which carries out policy as recommended by the board. My main role is seeing to it that our board does its job and does the policy. And it's a pleasure to work with very competent, ambitious, hard- working professionals. My other roles are to be the spokesperson for the board and the association, and to engage with members over issues large and small, and to be well-informed about all of our programs. What we're focusing on is really developing programs that we started in the last five years.

One of the things members are doing to survive is to work cooperatively and to create programs that can provide benefit to member stores that make a competitive difference while still maintaining what makes us better stores. And one of the programs designed to help us do that is collective marketing, where we do advertising as members and promote the identity of the independent bookstores under the rubric of Booksense, an independent booksellers organization. One of the features of Booksense is being able to use a central marketing Web site, because that's technology no store our size can afford on its own—it's multi-million-dollar technology. 75% of our members are small to mid-size stores, though some very large stores, like Powell's, also participate. And another thing we're working on is making sales tax collection equitable. For examples, Barnes & Noble and Borders have Internet stores and physical stores, but the Internet store doesn't charge sales tax. So this has been a long, hard haul, but we're getting very close. And we're also working on a gift-card program. There are a lot of complexities in getting 2,000 independent stores to accept a single gift card, and that's the challenge.

LB: From the beginning, we joined the ABA and went to their booksellers' school, and we took advantage of this organization, and have always participated in it. It's brought us a lot of national recognition with Ann on the board, and she's also the first feminist bookstore president of the ABA as well as the first lesbian president. It's just one of the good effects of seeing yourself as part of a larger group, and working collectively with people to educate the public, to make yourself known, to feel like you're part of something and not part of a losing or dying effort, but rather you're part of a thriving community of smart, creative people. We don't miss a convention.

AC: I think a lot of independent booksellers believe strongly that we're better at what we do. A lot of us are much more optimistic than in years past. Frankly, we don't pay a whole lot of attention to the chains anymore. We did a good job at exposing and changing the industry in ways that gave us tools to become more competitive. The good news has been in the last four years, we haven't lost any more market share. And officially this year, Barnes & Noble and other chains are really suffering. I really think we're at a moment when people are sick of the chains—not just chain bookstores but everything.

WCT: What do you like best?

AC: What I still like the most is just the opportunity to be around books, see what new is coming out, read books, talk to people about books. And I really do still get a thrill around being a community place where people come in and find things they like, and talk to us and each other, and are satisfied and having a good time, coming together.


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LGBT HISTORY PROJECT: Exploring 70 years of lesbian publications, from 1940s zines to modern glossy magazines 2023-11-02
- Since the '40s, lesbians have created a vibrant history of publications. From the exploration of daily lesbian life to literary and feminist pursuits, to the modern age of glossy magazines, for over 70 years, lesbians have ...


 


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