to either find a substantial amount of

~ money to upgrade the print shop or '

close it. New Victoria Publishers paid
off the print shop’s debts, the print
shop closed, and in 1985, New
Victoria — by then with three mem-
bers (Beth, Claudia, and Rebecca

. Beguin; Claudia and Rebecca are

both editors and authors in their own
right. and Claudia designed many of
the covers) — moved across the bor-
der to Norwich.

That was the year Sara
Dreher sent New Victoria her first
Stoner McTavish mystery.

In New Victoria’s best year,
said Beth. “we grossed a couple hun-
dred thousand dollars.” The four
women who worked there actually
got paid. But by 1998, sales had
started to dip. In 1998 New Victoria
published eight books. In I999, six
books came off the presses. They had
four books planned for 2000, but
there was no income because their
distributor — a specialist in alternative
presses — went out of business. They
now have a new distributor — not the
same principals under a new name —
and plan to publish two books this
fall.

“No one’s been paid,”
declares Claudia. She has been talk-
ing about retiring, being less
involved. She’s relieved in a way that
there were so few books in the
pipeline when their distributor dis-
solved. Rebecca Beguin has gone to
work for the Vermont Book’
Professionals Association. The new
distribution deal doesn’t “official1y"
take effect until January.

“Part of me, I would like to
just shut the doors and move on,”
Beth admits. But the lifestyle is still
attractive: “I could be my own boss
and do the things I wanted to. Except
for the pay, it’s been great! This was ,
a mobile proposition, we could go
anywhere and still do this. Finding a
regular job would mean our not being
together as much, not being able to

' travel. We travel well together. There

are places that we would not go sepa-
rately, but together we would.”

Beth adds that she has
reservations about the deal with the
new distributor: “It means making a
commitment to keep publishing.
Maybe if someone came along who
was interested and savvy about pub-
lishing  but it’s not happening.
Besides,” she muses, “inertia is my
middle name ——I’m not very into
making changes.”

Claudia comes back into
the room and the conversation
returns to cultural change. “The thing
is that we’re very wary of getting
subsumed by gay male culture. We
come out of the feminist movement.
But now, ‘feminist’ is not used and
‘lesbian’ has been subsumed in the
gay cultural scene. And the term
‘queer’ ~ I disagree with that, not
because of its pejorative history, but
because it loses women.”

The phone rings, and Beth
answers. “No, look,” she explains,
‘we’re not a retail store. We have a
catalog. and we do everything by
mail. If you give me your address,
I’ll send you out a catalog.” It’s a
guy from New Jersey looking for
explicit ‘lesbian’ pornography among
the video offerings. “You can usually
tell,“ she says. “We do have one or
two guys who order the more quality
videos. but mostly, when it’s men,
they’re looking for porn. None of our
titles is porn, though a few might be
bad erotica. It’s always a question,
whether we should be sending that
stuff out to men or not.” .

The video collection was
acquired when another woman decid-
ed to close her business and sold it to
New Victoria. It is, the two women
say, an effort to both keep lesbian
culture alive by appealing to women
who are more video-oriented than
print-oriented, and a hoped-for
source of income from rentals.
Among the titles there are Aimee and
Jaguar. Before Stonewall, “Chutney
Popcorn, November Moon, and Boys
Don I Cry. _

Some of the funds are gen-
erated by the $25 membership fee —
which also helps screen out guys
calling on a whim, looking for
pornography. But response (even to a
flier in this very newspaper) has been
low and slow.

Claudia notes the upsurge
in glossy magazines: “They’re fine,
but the feminism has gone out of it.
Now it’s all about fashion, lifestyle,
celebrities, parenting. Maybe,” she
muses, “it’s because we won, but I
doubt it. It’s true that half the people
in law schools now are women, and
half the people in med school are
women,” but it feels more like being
co-opted than like winning, she con-
eludes.

“We’re not willing to work
on books that are only for entertain-
ment. [The book] needs to be worth"
the time and have a political point of

view or a spunky character,” Claudia
explains. I quote a mutual colleague
who says she works only on books
that “are worth the tree.” “I-Immm,
‘worth the tree,’” says Beth. “Yeah, I
like that.” Claudia adds, “_Our kind of
books are a refuge — especially for
isolated lesbians. We want to keep
them going.”

But, counters Beth, “The
truth is that there’s less demand for
the books we publish.” She says she
would not have minded publishing a
few more books that might not have
met their political standards as long
as they generated some cash flow.
“There was Naiad, publishing 24
books a year, and maybe 22 weren’t
worth reading. But at the end, they
had more cash flow, more assets.”

I New Victoria’s best selling
book so far is Barbie Unbound, by
Sara Strohmeyer, which sold over,
20,000 copies in four months. It was
a quirky choice for New Victoria, a
photographic compilation of the
iconic anti-feminist doll’s adventures
in the “real world,” as imagined by
Strohmeyer: PMS Barbie; Barbie
d’Arc; Overweight Adolescent
Outcast Barbie; Tailhook Barbie;
Barbie Plath; Virginia Slims Barbie
Dates Tobacco Lawyer Ken; Barbie
Antoinette; Co-Op Barbie, complete
with brown hair on legs and armpits.
Sometimes satire is the best revenge.
Certainly Strohmeyer seems to have
thought so.

Claudia refuses to name a
favorite book, saying that since she
edited them all, she has no perspec-
tive. Beth’s favorite book is one of
the Stoner McTavish mysteries:
Something Shady, by Sarah Dreher,
“because it pokes serious fun at psy-
chiatry and talks about the definition
of crazy — sort of like the movie King
of Hearts.”

Both Beth Dingman and
Claudia McKay seem to be “in
process” with New Victoria. At age
68, Claudia hopes to travel more and
edit less. Beth would feel more com-
mitted to continue if there were hope
for the future of feminist lesbian fic-
tion or an influx of cash or energy.
Whatever happens with New
Victoria, it has played a role for
many feminists and lesbians: teach-
ing, entertaining, supporting, con-
necting, affinning. V

Check out New Victoria 19 website at
www.newvictoria.com.

Landmark Gay and Lesbian-Bookstore Closes in Montreal

 

BY PAUL OLSEN

citing increased com-
petition and poor

' sales, the owner of

Montreal’s landmark gay
and lesbian bookstore,
L_’Androgyne, announced
that the store would close
by the end of August.
Billed as the

“Gay and Lesbian
Bookstore" of Montreal
since 1973,” L’Androgyne
was located on St. Laurent
Boulevard for most of its
30-year history. Less than
two years ago the store

' Was purchased by Bernard

Rousseau and moved to
Amherst Street, closer to
the city’s Gay Village.
Uhfonunately, the move
didn’t help boost sales.

In an interview,
Rousseau said the decision

to close L’Androgyne was
a difficult one. “I think the
need is just not there any-
more for that kind of
store.”

Rousseau noti-
fied customers.of the clos-
ing in a message posted on
the store’s web site. “The
main reason we arrived at
this decision is cut-throat
competition from the major
bookstore chains which all
now carry a selection of
gay and lesbian titles, from
some discounters selling
some of our titles almost at
our cost and from all the
Web sites and especially
Amazon.cajust now start-
ing to sell into Canada,” he
wrote. “We think the busi-
ness model of specialized
little bookstores is broken
and non-sustainable. Gays
and lesbians can now find
books and videos from the
regular mainstream mer-

chants.”

“I’ve come here
many times so it represents
a loss,” said customer
Bradford Brown of
Montreal. “When I travel I
usually go to the [gay]
bookstore, someplace that I
know is not just a place to
buy books. It is a place to
find identity and learn
what a community really is
about.”

According to
Todd Anderson, President
of the Toronto-based
Canadian Booksellers
Association (CBA), many
independent bookstores are
losing the battle against
large chain stores. “We
have lost some excellent
stores over the past eight
years, we have faced coer-
cive behavior and we have
been challenged with
intense competition.”

According to

Michael Hoynes, Chief
Marketing Officer for the
American Booksellers
Association in Tarrytown,
New York, “Most of the
greatest loss of [U.S] inde-
pendent bookstores took
place in the early 90’s.

Approximately 40 percent "

of independent bookstores
in the country went out of
business. A lot of it had to
do with the super chain
stores and the Internet.”
Likewise, in a
recent story,
PlanetOut.com reported
that Different Drummer

Books, a gay bookstore in _

Laguna Beach, California,
was closing after fifteen
years. V

_ Opposite: clnudln McKay and Beth Dlngman.
This page: vlows from New Vlctol-_Io's Norwlch offices.

“The agenda
has changed.
Lesbianism
is now about
assimilation.”
Beth
Dingman