Lambda Rising Bookstore (site)

For 35 years, Lambda Rising was more than a bookstore — it was the institution that proved gay culture had a commercial and civic center. Deacon Maccubbin opened the first 300-square-foot shop in 1974, one year after the APA stopped calling homosexuality an illness, with a defiantly simple stock policy: anything by, for, or about gays and lesbians. In 1984 the store moved to this Connecticut Avenue flagship in Dupont Circle and grew into the largest LGBT bookstore in the country. Its footprint on the culture is hard to overstate. In February 1975 it aired the world's first gay-themed television commercial. That same year it organized Washington's first Gay Pride Day block party — the seed of today's Capital Pride. In 1987 it launched the Lambda Book Report, and in 1989 the Lambda Literary Awards, still the most important prizes in queer publishing, later handed to the Lambda Literary Foundation. When Maccubbin retired, he chose to close rather than sell; the flagship shut in January 2010, part of the wave that took most of America's LGBT bookstores. The Dupont Circle storefront has since housed ordinary retail — currently a cosmetics shop — and carries no plaque. What you see today: an unmarked storefront on Dupont Circle's main commercial strip. The visit is for those who want to stand where queer literature got its national prize and Washington got its Pride — and Dupont Circle itself, the historic heart of gay DC, still rewards the walk.