Chapter 13: Bookstores are the bomb
...on threats and safety
As many of you know, this month on a sunny Sunday, Buffalo Street Books received a homophobic bomb threat. The building was evacuated and searched, just after a Drag Story Hour had concluded. I’m taking this opportunity to discuss threats to bookselling in a hyper-local and then a wider perspective.
But first a quick word to subscribers: last month was the one-year anniversary for Open Book, which means you might be prompted to renew. This summer I will be rotating off the executive board of BSB after six years and two terms, and this fall I will be publishing my second book. That means I will bring this newsletter to a close in the summer. Please consider renewing with a monthly subscription so that you are only paying for the posts that I will write, though I heartily thank anyone who renews as a higher level. As always, every cent goes directly to Buffalo Street Books. This newsletter has raised close to $3000, and I am so grateful to everyone who is reading this. Onward!
The threat to BSB came via email to a news station in Buffalo (which is about three hours west from Ithaca). Using standard alt-right hate speech (“pedophiles,” “groomers,” etc), the email attacked “you” (the bookstore was not named) and threatened to blow up the entire building which houses the bookstore at a specific time that day, smack dab in the middle of Drag Story Hour (the event was not named). The threat did not reach Ithaca authorities and they did not reach the building until more than an hour after the named time.
The email named five individuals on a “hit list” and said that they had already been killed; it gave all five of their home addresses. In the protected space of this newsletter, I don’t mind saying that I was one of the individuals. That day, totally unaware of what was transpiring down at the bookstore, I came home from a hike to find two sheriffs’ cars and a bomb-sniffing dog in my driveway. What followed after they departed was a confusing round of phone calls, texts, and emails, first ascertaining that everyone was safe and then attempting to pool information.
Here’s what reassured me in the moment: the email seemed generic and didn’t show much familiarity with the bookstore, even appearing to assume that because of the word “Buffalo” in its name, we are located in Buffalo. The specificity of the names and addresses were, obviously, anxiety-producing, but let me say this: I would have been much more afraid if the drag queens had been named. They were not.
Here’s what concerns me: the authorities (the Tompkins County Sheriff’s Office, Ithaca Police Department, New York State Police and Cornell University Police Department all arrived downtown) treated this at the highest threat level, according to the scale given by the federal government’s Cypersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. It is not clear to me why. Also, the authorities had no idea that the bookstore was the target. They only realized this when they showed up at my house (I happened to be the first individual they visited) and I told them what connected the five names on the list. Do they not have Google? The sheriffs in my driveway did not appear to have heard of the bookstore and asked me to repeat the name several times. No one appeared to realize that bookstores are far more likely to be the target of such threats than, say, the restaurants which also occupy our building. The investigation is ongoing but we haven’t hear anything for a few weeks, despite our requests.
Now that the event has had some time to fade into the past, now that the bookstore had affirmed its joyous support and celebration of LGBTQIA+ people and books and events, now that our wider community has been informed and has offered their support to the bookstore’s staff, here’s how I’m thinking about it all. Buffalo Street Books has survived hazing and been inducted into a growing club we never wanted to join. We are just one of many bookstores who have been threatened, and there are more than we even know about. Here’s a few from the month of April.
Mosaics, a queer bookstore in Provo, Utah owned by drag queen Tara Lipsyncki and her husband which opened just last October, was the target of a bomb threat last weekend. The threat was emailed to news organizations before a scheduled drag story hour. You can support them by purchasing books at their Bookshop storefront. This threat repeats from last September against another Utah bookstore, the King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, which cancelled its drag story hour after a pair of bomb threats, the first in its 46-year history. That event would have starred Lipsyncki.
As one of our board members, Natalie, pointed out, a Black-owned bookstore in Raleigh, North Carolina, was forced to close its doors this month because the threats it received were so relentless and so credible. Liberation Station Bookstore, the state’s first Black-owned children’s bookstore and a store in which every book is written by a Black author, opened last summer on Juneteenth and was an immediate success. But as soon as they opened they were met with death threats and hate speech. The owner, Victoria Scott-Miller, said that one caller described the clothes her 13-year-old son was wearing as he worked in the store. She chose not to report the threats to the police for three reasons: because it’s exhausting for Black people to make their lack of safety heard, because she wanted the bookstore to be a refuge from the violent world and not a place where Black customers would encounter police, and because other people had mentioned some of the social media posts so patrols had already increased and she thought that would be enough. Now, she is planning to reopen the store elsewhere but has not yet announced the new location. Liberation Station also has a storefront on Bookshop so you can support them by buying books.
The American Booksellers Association has published guidelines for holding a safe drag story hour, but has not published statistics that I could find about the number of bookstores receiving homophobic or racist threats (correct me if I’ve missed them!). And of course the problem is hardly confined to bookstores. Libraries have had to cancel story hours and close for hours or days at a time to respond to threats, as GLAAD has begun to note alongside its coverage of book bans.
As Scott-Miller’s reaction suggests, the right response to a violent threat is not particularly obvious. A bookstore must first consider how to keep its staff safe, including authors and performers, and next consider how to keep its space safe and open for its entire community. But what does “safe” mean? As I’ve implied, I’m not bowled over by the uninformed local response to BSB’s bomb threat. An informed response would have zeroed in on the bookstore and would continue to work with the general manager and staff to identify and meet their needs over time. In the absence of such support, some bookstore owners choose not to contact authorities or make public the threats against them (meaning the number of threats, whatever it is, is slightly to vastly under-reported). For them, “safe” means dealing with the threat quietly and privately.
Buffalo Street Books chose transparency and the public affirmation of our values. I love how General Manager Lisa Swayze phrased it:
If anything, the threat only increases our resolve to continue to do the things that we believe improve lives and spread love through books in our community, including Drag Story Hour. We are grateful to our Drag Queens who volunteer their time to spread literacy and joy so kids can be confident in themselves and become changemakers in their communities. We remain committed to inclusion and equity and to the bookstore being a safe community space for all.
Strangely, I think that response means we felt safe enough to reveal danger. I’m tempted to say we are undaunted, but I don’t want to speak on behalf of anyone else at the store who was affected by this event, so let me just say: if you are looking for me, I’ll be enjoying the bookstore’s events at Dewitt Park during Pride Week in June.
Book recommendation
Speaking of joy (but switching topics entirely): is All Fours by Miranda July the best Bisexual Coming-of-Perimenopausal-Age novel of all time? Yes, even if the pool is not large! I was absolutely captivated by this book—its voice and its trajectory. The narrator is a married middle-aged artist with a kid who sets out on a solo road trip from LA to NY, a two-week break from her routine, but she gets about twenty minutes down the road before she checks into a motel and hides there for the duration of her trip, calling home and pretending to her family that she is seeing the sights. Why she stays, what she does with her weird break from time, where her desires take her—riveting and entirely unpredictable. Imagine Tom McCarthy’s Remainder combined with a very sexy version of Catherine Newman’s Crone Sandwich, if you will. July’s work has previously been treated as slight, but I will be in suspense to see what reviewers do with All Fours (forthcoming on May 14th). I found it dense and memorable.