More from the "Attack Queers" - Do I detect just a hint of schadenfreude in this op-ed by Bruce Bawyer about the closing of New York's Oscar Wilde bookstore? The point he makes is valid. It is not necessarily a bad thing that independent gay bookstores are struggling -- if it is because gay literature and reference is now widely available. Your local Barnes & Nobles stocks plenty of books of interest to gays, and "gay writers" are increasingly accepted in the category of mainstream lit. At the same time, this is the Village, in New York City. The Big Apple is supposed to be the kind of place where even the most arcane specialty shop can survive and thrive -- where entire stores are devoted to doorknobs. Something seems amiss if a world-renowned specialty bookseller can't make it there, especially now that it has little competition.

Bawyer's made a name for himself disclaiming gay community. He's a founding proponent of the utopian post-gay society, where being gay is about as important to you or anyone else as being left-handed. I won't suggest it's a bad thing that gay authors are accepted in traditional publishing or that gay characters have become common in everyday literature. But I believe it is still important to hear voices whose experiences you identify with. It's fair to say most of the reading I have done in my lifetime was before I came out in 1997. In that time, I barely read anything with characters whose experiences equated with mine. That's why Becoming a Man was such an important book to me. Since that time, I have really come to treasure the ability to see my own world through the eyes of the gay characters I discovered through literature.

Terry Gross interviewed Richard Price on Fresh Air the other day. The author of Clockers and other semi-autobiographical novels about the projects of New York, Price read for Gross a passage in his recent work Samaritan. In it, the main character goes back to the old neighborhood and volunteers to teaches creative writing at his old school. He brings books for the class to read, telling them:

Let me just say something about these particular books. They're mostly written about people who grew up without advantages. Some in cities, some in rural, hard lives all around. And the reason I chose them for you was because I feel we read to learn new things, sure, absolutely, but more often than not, what we really get out of the good books we read is self-recognition. We read and discover stuff about life that we already knew, except that we didn't know we knew it until we read it in a particular book. And, this self recognition, this discovering ourselves in the writings of others, can be very exciting, can make us feel a little less isolated inside our own thing, and a little more connected to the larger world.

I truly hope that the closing of gay bookstores, in New York and elsewhere, and the mainstreaming of gay authors, does nothing to rob gay people of this invaluable resource for self-understanding.