Another Loss for the Shrinking LGBT Book Store Genre

From the DC Agenda (formerly the Washington Blade):

Lambda Rising, a bookstore serving the LGBT community in the nation’s capital for 35 years, is closing its D.C. store in Dupont Circle and its remaining out-of-town store in Rehoboth Beach, Del., in January.

The closings, announced Friday, mark the end of the city’s only exclusively LGBT bookstore and becomes another in a series of gay bookstores that have closed in recent years in other cities, including New York and Baltimore.

Deacon Mccubbin, 66, the store’s founder and co-owner, told D.C. Agenda in an exclusive interview that he plans to retire soon and that he and co-owner Jim Bennett, his domestic partner of 32 years, decided they would rather close the stores than sell them to a new owner who might change their focus and mission.

“The phrase ‘mission accomplished’ has gotten a bad rap in recent years but in this case, it certainly applies,” Mccubbin said.

“When we set out to establish Lambda Rising in 1974, it was intended as a demonstration of the demand for gay and lesbian literature,” he said, noting that few if any mainstream bookstores and newsstands carried gay related books and periodicals at the time.

“Today, 35 years later, nearly every general bookstore carries GLBT books, often featuring them in special sections,” he said.

Mccubbin said the Internet also enables people today to access LGBT related information from almost any location in the country, accomplishing yet another part of Lambda Rising’s mission: to provide up-to-date information to a community that could not obtain it elsewhere.

Click here to read more about Lambda Rising and it's history and impact on the DC community in The Agenda's story.

The DC LGBT Center also has a retrospective of Lambda Rising at it's website.