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He filled a bowl on the counter with free condoms as part of the community's fight against HIV. Schlegel kept over 200 gay titles in stock and particularly tried to carry a wide selection of lesbian literature. Schlegel came up with the name Bright Pink Literature and its pink triangle logo as an homage to the book, The Men With the Pink Triangle, about Nazi persecution of gay men. It could - on DecemSchlegel opened Bright Pink in a small office space connected to the Body Shop bar at 4310 South Paradise Road. Schlegel's interest in opening such a store was born when he visited A Different Light in Los Angeles, and wondered why Las Vegas couldn’t have something just as wonderful. Dalton, Waldenbooks, and, later, Barnes & Noble and Borders, began stocking gay sections.īut in 1987 Rob Schlegel, publisher of the Bohemian Bugle and one of the community’s greatest activists, opened Bright Pink Literature, the city's first specifically commercial LGBT bookstore. It would be several years before the chain bookstores in town such as B. Opening at the outset of the AIDS epidemic in Nevada didn’t help.
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R&R was ahead of its time, was more gift shop than book store, and was not much patronized by the Las Vegas gay community. R&R opened Februat 4637 Paradise Road next door to Gelo’s nightclub, then closed in November 1985. The first establishment in Las Vegas to offer LGBT merchandise and to advertise openly as a gay shop, was R&R Assordid Sundries. In the years before Stonewall, gay literature was unavailable in Nevada outside porn shops, and there were few commercial bookstores willing to stock such material. Part of that reason is that, as gay author Michael Thomas Ford has pointed out, “There’s more to be found in a gay bookstore than just something nice to read.” Just walking into a gay bookstore can be an act of liberation, and such shops often serve as welcoming space for the queer community in otherwise hostile environments. While more famous bookstores across the country, such as A Different Light and the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, have closed as LGBT literature has gone “mainstream,” Get Booked has survived for more than 20 years. The longest-lived LGBT bookstore in Nevada is Get Booked, located in the Paradise Plaza shopping center in Las Vegas on the corner of Paradise Road and East Naples Drive, an area known as the Fruit Loop for its cluster of gay businesses. (c) Dennis McBride, 2010 LGBT Literature in Las Vegas