During the annual coming-out festival next weekend, community and city leaders will come together to pay a lasting tribute to a local LGBT icon.
A historic marker honoring LGBT bookstore Giovanni’s Room will be erected at the store, 345 S. 12th St., during next Sunday’s OutFest celebration.
The marker will read: “Founded in 1973, the bookstore served as a refuge and cultural center at the onset of the modern lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil-rights movement. The store provided resources to those working to gain legal rights for LGBT people.”
The dedication and unveiling will take place at 2 p.m. at the store, where Mayor Nutter will join a host of community leaders.
“I’m really excited, it should be a great day,” said Gloria Casarez, the city’s director of LGBT affairs who helped spearhead the marker application earlier this year.
The marker will be the second LGBT-specific one in the state; the first was erected in 2006 in front of Independence Hall to commemorate the LGBT-rights protests of the 1960s.
This year the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission approved 13 sites for markers throughout the state out of a pool of more than 50 applications.
Tony Brooks, executive director of the Luzerne County Historical Society, sat on the commission’s Historic Marker Review Board.
Brooks, a native of Wilkes Barre who moved to Philadelphia in the 1980s to attend the University of Pennsylvania and lived in the city for 11 years, said board members were initially hesitant to approve the Giovanni’s Room application.
“The first comments were that this is a commercial establishment, and historic markers aren’t given for commercial enterprises but I said, ‘No, no, this is much more than just a bookstore — in the gay community, a bookstore is really like a community center,’” Brooks said.
Brooks was the only openly gay member on the board and said he detailed his own experience with the store to demonstrate to his colleagues Giovanni’s Room’s import.
“This is really an example of how important it is to have someone at the table,” he said. “No one was familiar with the store besides me so I talked to them about what this bookstore can mean to someone who’s young, struggling with their sexual identity and coming from a small town to the big city, and how much it helped me to establish connections within the community in my own life.”
While he says he doesn’t know how much sway his story had on the board, the body subsequently voted unanimously to approve the application.
Casarez said the marker has been ordered and the city’s Streets Department has been briefed on its installation.
“Everything’s going ahead as planned and all we’re waiting on is for it to arrive,” she said.
Financing for the approximately $1,500 marker was largely covered through community donations, organized by the Philadelphia Gay Tourism Caucus, at Pride, and a contribution from PGTC events chair Bruce Yelk’s Triumphant Pride party.
Casarez said she expects several-hundred festivalgoers to head to the store for the dedication, which she noted was made possible because of vast community support.
“The dollars that were raised at Pride to manufacture the marker came from the community at large. So many people offered to give a dollar, and each one of those people helped to make this happen. People have an investment in the meaning behind this, in Giovanni’s Room, so I think of it as a real community effort.”
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].
