I was doing some research on the concept of LGBT bookstores, and I started thinking about how LGBT bookstores provided information which was not otherwise available. Nowadays it is harder to identify examples of physical locations which share information of a sort which absolutely cannot be found outside of those locations. I feel like there ought to be a word for the concept. It is sort of like an information silo, except in the case of a silo, the silo is imagined to restrict access to the information. LGBT bookstores in their time wanted to share information and could within their walls, but otherwise, external pressure disallowed the information to circulate.
The advent of Internet was the beginning of a fundamental change in human sexuality. Prior to the mid 1990s, basic concepts in sexuality were widely unknown and hardly in print to be learned. There was a history of LGBT bookstores from the 1970s at earliest to the advent of Internet. The importance of bookstores with an LGBT focus was that in their era they were the only place in which many people could access LGBT publications. The window between the start of confrontational advocacy for gay rights and common public access to Internet was only about 25 years, so there was hardly time for the concept of LGBT bookstores to develop as a stable cultural institution. They had significance for a generation in the urban centers which could sustain them. Of course the advent of the Internet killed bookstores, but too often only the commercial aspect of that appears in print because for example Amazon.com became a commercial superpower along with the story of it obsoleting brick and mortar bookstores. The less told story is how the advent of the Internet made practically all nonfiction books before the Internet become obsolete in comparison to the kinds of works that could be produced after the Internet. The fact checking process which could be done in 2005 included web search, but before 1995, fact checking research relied on print without computer support. Perhaps in the future people might look back and imagine that if computers were not available, then surely there was some primitive non-digital replacement, but actually there was not. It used to be the case that if reputable authorities made mistakes then it was not possible to detect them or discuss the problem, just because books and paper articles have no search function, and there are no discussion forums to get community suggestions, and in general the quality of nonfiction works relied on what a single human could compile from analog notes and sorting through paper at a local library.
Consider basic human sexuality for an example of an odd misunderstanding which used to happen before Internet but does not happen now. There was advocacy for LGBT rights before the advent of the Internet, but the LGBT community was unable to publish or share concepts in sexuality even among itself, and many people still learned basics of sexuality by experience rather than discussing, hearing, or reading how things worked in advance. To give an example of the implications of this, consider that the leading and most respected religious anti-gay activists of the era could, for example, publish anti-gay propaganda which stated that gay sex between males was not possible. The premise was that anal sex usually caused bodily injury. Nowadays, such an idea is bizarre, because practically all communities can do things like ask a gay person or view a gay pornographic movie which establishes the existence of anal sex. There might not have been any anti-gay propaganda published in the era which addressed anal sex as something that could happen, and if anything, all literature described anal sex as one person’s physically damaging assault on another with no pleasure possible for the receptive participant. A range of polished and seemingly researched anti-gay odd claims about homosexuality circulated in books in the period between from maybe 1980-2000, which is the time after the establishment of the gay rights movement as a cultural institution to the establishment of the Internet as a community forum. These books were pulp, but they come from established Christian ministries. There used to be more persons employed with academic background in divinity studies, and such people were just recently employed in all sorts of fields including academia. I am not sure about the extent to which the genre of English language Christian anti-gay pulp pseudo scientific theory has been subjected to literary critique, but I think evaluating mainstream religious publications on homosexuality would be a good place to start if anyone wanted to understand the culture and perception shift in sexuality that followed the advent of Internet. If I were to explain the culture shift to acceptance of LGBT people, I would say that it happened because information about basic sexuality circulated quickly through the Internet. The activism that came before was useful but small scale, and had less impact toward achieving acceptance than mass media through the Internet. I am raising the issue of bizarre ignorance of sexuality as a way of demonstrating the level of ignorance that was possible even among those interested in LGBT topics.
When I was younger and had questions about my sexuality, I came from a cultural background which included religious pulp literature. As I think back, it seems so shocking to me at how such poorly researched works could be so well funded and distributed with so much cultural support and yet be so far outside the mainstream. Nowadays, if someone wants to say crazy things, they cannot do it so easily in books because they are checked by a more competitive marketplace. Previously, books went into circulation and were purchased without consumers being organized to give feedback. There was no place to read consumer reviews in advance of purchasing a book, and no way for people who liked or disliked a book to be able to promote it to other readers. Marketplace demand was much more controlled by marketplace supply, and all kinds of odd decision makers came to gain the power to create supply for any number of reasons unrelated to being able to anticipate what readers would want.
The significance of absurd misconceptions in anti-gay bigot literature is that anti-gay books from this era capture the unspeakable fears of the era among the reading and researching class. Even though I think Christian mainstream media of the time was immature in its academic standing, it was the culmination of what Christian culture could produce given generations of support to that time. Televangelism was a powerful cultural institution and the money it collected was invested in the production of propaganda on all kinds of topics. The Christian ministries of the era hardly sought to produce white papers, so far as I know, but I think their pulp paperbacks were the investment that the culture made to be position statements. A further significance is that Christian paperback propaganda of the era was not general interest; these were the culture’s equivalent of research products for researching members in the community. I raise the issue of weird Christian anti-gay propaganda to demonstrate what it was possible for reasonable, educated people to believe before the year 2000 if they researched the best available published information from the most respected authorities. It was possible for people to have very strange ideas in that time. More strange long-held but incorrect misconceptions are still being identified today as communication becomes more easy.
The impossibility of anal sex was a contributing factor to the popular thought of the pre-Internet era that gay relationships were unnatural or a crime against nature. A gay guy might understand the process of gay sex more completely than an straight person, but still, with ignorance as the norm all sorts of anti-LGBT rhetoric was free to circulate and even tolerance of LGBT culture was a taboo.