DC’s lgbt community is pretty much dead

photo by allaboutgeorge
licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

Well, it’s official: DC’s lgbt community is pretty much dead. Only a day behind The Citypaper, The Washington Post reported this morning that Lambda Rising will close its doors before the end of December 2009.

The Post article writes:

Deacon Maccubbin, Lambda Rising’s founder, said that he has accomplished all he had intended when he opened the gay-oriented bookstore in 1974 and that “it’s time to move on.”

And while it feels like a strawman argument to say this it, I can’t help but feel it: Are you happy now HRC? We’ve finally been assimilated.

I know, I know. More openness, being able to find a gay or lesbian section at Books-A-Million is a good thing so why do I say the lgbt community is pretty much dead?

Simple: there is no real community focus any more. Yes, we have an “official” community center but their outreach is so poor, and so overshadowed by other organizations that have dominated the community for decades that even though I’ve been looking I had to find out about them by reading an article about another community institution closing.

I will miss Lambda Rising. Just walking into the place all those years ago was a personal triumph and a key part of my history. And maybe I’m just whining but it’s hard to see yet another independent bookstore shut down, and doubly hard to see this one, so long a bright, safe place, go.