I read them hastily in the stacks, a page at a time. I say “secret” relationship because I never took any of these books out. I also had an intense secret relationship with “Art History,” some few dozen dusty tomes that contained the only mentions of homosexuality anywhere to be found on our nonfiction shelves (as I knew, because I’d learned to use the card catalog specifically to look for gay things).
Ours was a small-town library by this point I’d read everything in “Fantasy & Sci-Fi” (my preferred mode of escapism), done a solid tour though “Mystery,” and devoured - with that particular brand of teen disdain that masks real interest - the entirety of the “School Reading” section. I don’t recall what made me pick up Rat Bohemia, the slender blue volume with electric yellow lettering, but I had been making a methodical survey of the library since approximately 1985, and so I suspect there were very few books that didn’t pass through my hands at least once during those years. I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Sarah Schulman by accident in 1995, on the “New Fiction” shelves of the public library in Irvington, New York.
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