Oscar Wilde Bookshop

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This venue is closed.

Thanks in part to its prominent location on Christopher near Gay Street, this store now enjoys global notoriety, catering primarily to visiting Europeans, Aussies, and curious Red Staters on pilgrimages for gay lit. Opened by a single activist in 1967, the small, efficiently organized shop is divided into genres you didn’t even know existed: lesbian mystery paperbacks and nontraditional-family children’s books, such as the splendidly innocent Daddy’s Roommate. Fiction authors arc from the Über-literate Whitman and Baldwin to popular personalities such as David Sedaris and Michael Musto to a brigade of small-time authors unfettered by mainstream success. Rather than serving as a de facto Gay Hall of Fame, the biography section explores high-profile people of dubious sexuality, such as Marlon Brando, Katherine Hepburn, and that mystifying Anderson Cooper. The back room, meanwhile, holds photography books, including plenty by Bruce Weber, some signed first editions, and cute tote bags for the long journey back to the hinterland. — Ben Perkins