Letters and Feedback

    Independent bookstores bring brick and mortar insight, expertise

    The article [“LGBT publishing companies try to expand their audience,” Dec. 23-29, 2011] implies that bricks-and-mortar stores don’t exist on the Internet as a source of books or ebooks. Of course that is not true.

    Giovanni’s Room, like hundreds of other independent booksellers, offers more than 4 million books and more than 2 million ebooks online, made possible by our joining together in the American Booksellers Association. You can get virtually any book in print and ebook through Giovanni’s Room.

    Further, Giovanni’s Room has been classifying LGBT books online for years. Real people actually look at the books the store gets and categorize them with an insider’s perspective.

    Compare what you get at Giovanni’s Room when you look up “2011 lesbian fiction” in the categories under Women’s Literature (http://queerbooks.com/2011-lesbian-fiction) with the junk pile you get at Amazon when you look up “lesbian fiction 2011” (http://goo.gl/Ucgar).

    For at least three years, any person looking up “homosexuality” on Amazon will find the first book listed has always been “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality” by Joseph Nicolosi and Linda Ames Nicolosi (Sept. 30, 2002).

    Giovanni’s Room offers regular emailed announcements of books and movies in different subjects: men’s, women’s, bi and trans. You can also get monthly lists of best-sellers (check out the horror that is Amazon’s listing of, say, lesbian best-sellers) and announcements of store events.

    We independent booksellers have invested great resources to make us competitive in the world of the Internet. Give us a try. Nobody on the Internet does LGBT literature better.

    — Ed Hermance
    Owner, Giovanni’s Room

    Burns’ passion, smile will be missed

    Robert Burns was an exceptional community leader, who blended his skills as a legendary DJ in the ballroom scene up and down the East Coast, while connecting youth involved in the ballroom community and the house he was head of, House of Blahnik, with culturally relevant HIV-prevention and education messages. He creatively and effectively tailored interventions to the communities, the youth and the individuals he worked with for the most effective means of successfully reaching his audience.

    He was a tireless, fierce advocate who you could often find well after 2 a.m. years ago when The Collective was part of Mazzoni, counseling, testing or just reassuring and doing some one-on-one education in his RV in that alley smack in the middle of the Gayborhood. Most recently, decked out in a suit and tie working long hours at Colours, going above and beyond to ensure that the public-health measures and the needs of Philadelphia’s HIV/AIDS community were being heard and moving forward, he would still, regardless of how tired he was, give you that bright smile that lit his whole face, his whole being, and wrap you into the biggest bear hug. He never lost his sense of humor, and he never allowed the occasional setback to stop his work, his mission from moving forward.

    Rob and I worked together to bring Wolfgang Busch to Philadelphia in 2004 to screen a preview of his then-in-production “How Do I Look,” as well as Jennie Livingston’s “Paris is Burning,” when I was working at the William Way Community Center and that was when our friendship, our at-times subversive partnership all in the name of social justice and advocacy, began. Whatever you take away from Robert Burns, his life and his achievements, know that he was all heart, all passion, never held back and always spoke his mind, regardless of who was in the room, and he is a shining example of one of Philadelphia’s relentless forces in the field of HIV/AIDS who will be dearly missed.

    — Christina M. Molieri, MSS, MLSP
    Public health consultant, Philadelphia

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