Tender Age in Bloom

There was only one bookstore in my town growing up, and it was located in the mall next to a leather goods shop. I'm fairly certain that most of its profits came from the sale of Danielle Steel novels and coffee table books featuring the unrelenting cuteness of kittens. Not by any stretch of the imagination did it usually feature quality literature. In fact, any novels that didn't fall neatly into the romance, sci-fi, thriller, and detective genres were housed on three shelves at the back of the store and labeled "General Fiction."

During those tender tween and early teen years, I somehow managed to skip over the requisite "Young Adult" reading. I never got into Gary Paulsen or Judy Blume. I shuddered at the thought of reading anything published by Sweet Dreams...girls who are dying of cancer and have one last wish to dance with the most popular boy in school at prom just weren't my thing. This lack of acceptable options paved the way to an early introduction to adult fiction, and the genre of "general fiction," as I thought of it, in particular.

I had the novels of the "General Fiction" shelves at the local bookstore memorized. I knew when new books came in and when old ones, whose potential popularity had passed, cycled out. When Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina made its appearance, I snatched it up immediately. The praise heaped on this novel had even trickled down to me in my isolated, literary backwater of a hometown. After hearing Tabitha Soren, the little redheaded MTV news reporter, mention it as one of her favorite books of the year, it had long been on my "to-be-read" list. (Why I trusted Tabitha Soren's judgment on literature is a mystery to me today.) Given the buzz generated by the novel's many critical accolades, I felt that reading Bastard out of Carolina would somehow connect me to a segment of the population that was well read and culturally aware - basically a nonentity in my town.

Now, in case you haven't read this book, there are some things I should mention. It's not necessarily recommended reading for kids in their early teens. It deals explicitly with issues of sexual abuse and incest. It's a raw, heartbreaking tale of a girl in South Carolina, Bone, whose adoptive father molests her under the nose of her mother and extended cadre of relatives.

Issues of age-appropriateness aside, Bone's story is one of resilience and determination. She's a well-drawn character who, apart from her formative history of sexual abuse, I felt some kinship, too. She stands apart from the other girls in that she isn't all sugar and spice and everything nice. She has a decisive hardness to her that isn't very feminine. And I shared her sentiment that "Love, at least love for a man not already part of the family, was something I was a little unsure about." Bone's feelings made sense to me.

After devouring Bastard out of Carolina, I went to our local public library to see if Dorothy Allison had written any other books. To my delight, I discovered that she had published, several years earlier, a series of short stories called Trash, which was available by interlibrary loan. I put in a request and waited, looking forward to its arrival.

When I got the call that the book had been delivered, I applied pressure to my mother to make an unscheduled trip to the library. We stopped by after she returned from work one evening and I approached the front desk with my library card. The librarian knew me by name and laughed off the card that I pushed across the countertop toward her. I told her that I had requested a book, and she replied with an instant, "Oh, yes!" and turned away from me to pull it off the hold shelf.

"Here you go!" she said, plopping it in front of me. As she called up my account, I flipped to the back cover to read the book's description. As if the letters were somehow flashing, raised, and neon, the genre label, "lesbian/fiction" jumped right out at me. My heart skipped a beat and my face flushed. "Oh," I said aloud, not quite meaning to, which drew the librarian's attention.

"What's that, honey?" she replied intently, as if I had made some articulate comment.

"Umm...this isn't quite what I thought I had ordered," I stammered, trying to think on my toes, "I think I wanted something by a different author. I don't need to check this out." She took the book from me, and flipped the cover from back to front and back again. I said a silent prayer that the word "lesbian" didn't light up for her like it had me.

"Are you sure you don't want to take it? It looks like a good read to me," she said, trying to be helpful. I attempted to will down the redness from my cheeks, but I still felt my ears burning when I replied that no, it was really okay. I could find something else to read.

I turned around and fled to the stacks of fiction in a separate room. Pretending to peruse the titles, connections that I didn't necessarily want to make started to whiz through my head. From the back cover of Trash, I had gleaned that Dorothy Allison identified as a lesbian. I knew that Bastard out of Carolina was at least semi-autobiographical. Did this mean that Bone was a lesbian, or was going to grow up to be one? I culled through my memories of the story for evidence of any proto-lesbianism, and, once I started to think about it, her leanings became easily apparent.

“But how could this be?” I thought. Bone and I didn’t think or carry ourselves any differently, and I certainly wasn’t a lesbian. I wasn’t sure what all this meant, and tried to push it out of my mind. I convinced myself that Allison left it all open to interpretation. And even if my thoughts and way of being did bear some similarity to a lesbian character in a book; it didn’t mean that I was gay. Nope…not at all. Not willing to face the librarian again, I said a silent prayer that my mother wouldn’t ask for an explanation for my lack of books, and I fled outside to wait for her by the car.

I had forgotten entirely about this incident until last year when a friend and I were visiting New York. She’s in the publishing industry and loves books. Before we arrived in the city, she did comprehensive research on all of New York’s best bookstores. I was only too happy to oblige her on her quest to visit as many of them as possible.

One of the first stores we visited was in Greenwich Village. It was one of those places that is quickly becoming an anomaly these days – a neighborhood book shop in cramped quarters that would otherwise be prime real estate for a cell phone store. It occupied less space than the bookstore in the mall I frequented while growing up, yet was stuffed to the gills with ten times as many volumes, not one of them a retrospective on the popularity of troll dolls. And never in a million years would there have been a section devoted entirely to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender authors and subject matter at the book shop in my hometown's mall.

As I made my rounds, I stopped in front of the queer lit section to see if bookstore owners in New York were miraculously aware of some kind of decent lesbian fiction of which word hadn’t yet traveled to Boston – wishful thinking on my part. But of course most of the titles were geared toward gay men - we were in Greenwich Village, after all. However, the requisite Dorothy Allison novels were on display, and next to copies of Bastard out of Carolina and Cavedweller was a reissued edition of Trash.

Looking at the paperback, I got the same kind of embarrassed rush I get when I reread my old journals from high school. The cover had been updated, and when I flipped it over, there was no genre label, warning that the contents inside were decidedly lesbian.

I have to say I felt a tinge of disappointment at the label's absence. Although it wasn’t quite a daring act of courage to buy a gay book in Greenwich Village in 2005, I couldn’t help but feel, at least for thirteen year-old me, a little bit proud when I brought Trash up to the check out counter.