What we’re losing when we lose Giovanni’s Room

READING RAINBOW: Ed Hermance’s little LGBTQ book shop was a cultural hotspot and safe haven in a pre-Gay­borhood Philadelphia.
Neal Santos

Sitting at his battered desk, Ed Hermance looks surprisingly peppy for a man whose business is about to close. As the owner of the LGBTQ bookstore Giovanni’s Room since 1976, he’s presided over its slow, steady decline for the past two decades. Having failed to reach an acceptable deal on selling the business, the 73-year-old Texas native is ready to sell the converted house on the corner of 12th and Pine streets that’s home to this Philadelphia institution. There’s only so much economic whipping you can take from Amazon. Barring a miracle — at press time there were rumblings about a last-minute sale, but nothing definite — he’s closing up shop for good on Saturday.

In every interview and casual conversation, Hermance trains his fire on the online retail giant, echoing a common complaint that its “destroy the competition now, turn a profit later” business model is taking down everyone in its path: booksellers big and small; retail music outlets, and even publishers. It’s hard to argue with that. The demise of Hermance’s store is of a piece with this dismal trend.

Still, even if Amazon didn’t exist, Giovanni’s Room might have been near the end of its natural life anyway. 

One way of thinking about what’s happened to Hermance’s business is to ask: “What the hell is Giovanni’s Room, anyway?” It’s an old book. Written in 1956 by James Baldwin about an American expatriate’s geographic and personal odyssey, Giovanni’s Room is a chronicle of confused sexual identity that ends, predictably for the time, in guilt and death. It’s also one of the most highly regarded LGBTQ-themed novels ever. It speaks to gay and bisexual men who came of age just before and during the time when gay men and lesbians were beginning to make noise as a coherent political movement. 

Hermance is proudly of that vintage. He recounts the origin and growth of Giovanni’s Room, the book shop, with both detail and rhapsody. He and then-partner Arleen Olshan bought the three-year-old business in 1976 and moved it from South Street to Spruce Street. But when a homophobic family from the suburbs bought the building shortly thereafter, Hermance and Olshan scrambled to find a place to rent. They had no luck. “No one would rent to us on the major streets.” The 1970s were still a time when the gay bars “had black windows, so no one could see in. But we were trying to be out.” 

What happened next showcases the communitarian ethos that welded the LGBTQ community together in those early years. Hermance realized that the only way to be secure and visible was to buy a place. So when the Pine Street location came up for sale, he says they “borrowed money for the down payment from the gay community, from our customers. And then something over 100 volunteers renovated this place.” 

Giovanni’s Room, like the other now-defunct LGBTQ bookstores in major cities like New York, San Francisco and Atlanta, enjoyed a good run in line with the strengthening gay rights movement. As the closet disgorged its queer contents at an accelerating pace, Hermance and his peers fed what he calls “that desperate hunger for books that had something to do with being gay.” 

But not just books. In the 1980s, as gay men were diagnosed with HIV, Giovanni’s Room became “a safe space”; an island to crawl onto after being slammed with the bad news. As Hermance recalls, “sometimes they were looking for a book, but mostly they were looking for emotional support. ‘Let me just catch my breath for a minute, here.’” 

If the place doesn’t sound like it was especially welcoming to the straights, that’s probably because it wasn’t. This isn’t Barnes and Noble, with a teeny “Gay and Lesbian” section. Everything in Giovanni’s Room curated by Hermance for the community — including a hefty section of porn. The collection, though downsized radically over the past decade, reflected until the end the will and knowledge of its owner and his bibliophilic staff. It’s stuff that you won’t find in any mainstream bookstore. 

The store’s layout, too, testifies to the owner’s strong, idiosyncratic judgments about what an LGBTQ bookstore should carry, and how to arrange the contents. The prospective customer doesn’t get past the entrance before staring at a huge rack of LGBTQ periodicals — a quick signal that the place carries lots of current material, and that it is unabashedly LGBTQ. Walk up two steps, and you find yourself in a long room that begins with gay men’s fiction and ends with a wall of porn. The upstairs contains a mid-sized room that houses the nonfiction, and is where authors have long read their books to sympathetic, homey audiences. 

You can find most of these things online, of course, but not organized like this. “It’s the difference between a brain and an algorithm,” he says, aphoristically. Then he beckons me closer to his computer screen, and punches in “homosexuality” under Amazon books. The second hit is A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. He needn’t mention that one would not find such a title in Giovanni’s Room. 

How many will miss the place? Author and Slate columnist Victoria Brownworth wrote movingly of her sense of loss, but her elegiac piece noted that she visited the store back in the 1970s. Will this absence be felt as deeply, or at all, by those under 40? Unless they’ve taken an LGBTQ studies course, they likely haven’t even heard of Baldwin’s book. 

Hermance knows what’s going on here. “It was the gay authors who imagined for us what being gay was like. Everyone knows what it’s like to be straight,” he says. “But people don’t need it like they used to.” 

That’s probably true for many members of the community, who have been absorbed into the mainstream. And there aren’t enough radically queer, unassimilated folks to sustain the place. But for some, at least, Giovanni’s Room has served until its end as Philly’s island of normalized otherness in a “Gayborhood” now populated by artisanal gelato vendors and trend-chasing wine bars. 

“I’m sorry I’m not passing this on as a living organism,” Hermance says in a rare moment of wistfulness. 

But maybe a Phoenix will emerge from these ashes. Queer Books LLC is a startup that wants to carry something of Giovanni’s Room forward; more than 50 people attended a community meeting last week, brainstorming about that goal. While the market for dead trees won’t sustain a business alone, information and development manager Kelly Burkhardt and the company’s other principals are working on creating a more multipurpose successor. Stay tuned. 

Perhaps this new effort will bear the vital essence of what Hermance created. But Giovanni’s Room, as we’ve known it, is done. Buoyed by the restless energy of the movement in which he came of age, Hermance has, at long last, been dragged down by changes in the community of which he’s been a proud and visible leader.