I've felt like going to Chicago. To walk the streets where the protagonists of Els grans optimistes (Periscopi, 2021 translated into Catalan by Marc Rubió) strolled. I'd like to go into the bars that Yale Tishman and company frequented. It always happens to me when I read a book that moves me. I feel the need to make the settings where the plot unfolds my own, as if, by doing so, I myself would become part of it. The author, Rebecca Makkai (Illinois, 1978), has created characters that are impossible to forget for a long time. Els grans optimistes tells us a story set in the 80s, when Chicago was a city devastated by the AIDS epidemic. It is the story of a group of gay friends who begin to get sick and die at a young age when they should only have been concerned with living. It speaks to us of loss, of love, of friendship, and also of betrayal.
I had heard about this novel months ago. Readers I trust had recommended it to me insistently, but, for whatever reason, I hadn't decided to buy Els grans optimistes until, one late summer afternoon, I saw it displayed in the window of Antinous, my LGBT bookstore. So I went in, the bookseller, Josep Vitas, confirmed that it was excellent, and I took this novel home.
In 1997, Antinous opened its doors at Josep Anselm Clavé 6, in the heart of the Gothic Quarter. Six years ago, the growing tourist pressure in Ciutat Vella and the consolidation of the Gaixample as a pole of attraction for the LGBT community led its promoters, the bookseller-siblings Josep Vitas and Maria Vitas, to move the business to a new location in the Eixample Esquerra: Casanova, 72.
Antinous, as I have said, is an LGBT bookstore. This means that books written by or starring gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals occupy a prominent place. Of course, to enter, no one asks for your queer card and, in fact, neither all the clientele of this bookstore belongs to the collective nor all the books sold in it are of LGBT theme, but it is evident that it is a bookstore specialized in the collective. Starting with the display window, where the latest novelties and best-sellers are exhibited. Also on the interior tables, full of novels, essays, and children's and young adult books on this theme. The real mine of Antinous, however, are its crowded shelves, full of LGBT backlist books that you will hardly find in any other bookstore.
Antinous, along with Cómplices (Cervantes, 4) ---the first LGBT bookstore in Barcelona---, have done and still do a very important job of driving and promoting LGBT culture. A few years ago, they were surely the only place where many readers dared to buy LGBT-themed books without feeling judged or despised. Fortunately, homophobia is being overcome and it is no longer scary or shameful to ask for certain books in certain bookstores, which does not mean that bookstores specialized in this theme have lost their reason for being. Far from it. A display window overflowing with LGBT books contributes to giving visibility and, therefore, to promoting authors, themes, and publishers that, with few exceptions, do not usually top the best-seller lists or appear in mainstream media. It is also particularly valuable to be able to receive advice from a bookseller-activist specialized in this theme like Josep, capable of creating a community of client-friends who not only buy books, but also attend the presentations held at Antinous, as well as its busy reading club.
Since we're at it, it would be equally urgent for some brave publisher to dare to edit or re-edit in Catalan the great classics of LGBT literature. In recent months I have noticed how some essential works have never been translated into Catalan and the Spanish edition has been out of print for years. I have bought some in second-hand bookstores and it has struck me that the Catalan translations from more than thirty years ago have generally aged poorly. What rigid and crude Catalan! Luckily, there are exceptions to celebrate, such as the recent and wonderful translation into Catalan by Albert Nolla of Confessions d'una màscara, Yukio Mishima's great classic (Adesiara Editorial, 2021). So, Catalan publishers: who's in?