A collection of mismatched chairs and benches are set up in rows on Commercial Street in Provincetown. They face the small front porch of feminist and lesbian-centered bookstore Womencrafts, waiting to be used. Soon, dozens of people gather in front of the store and sit down. They quiet as local artist Suede takes to the makeshift stage and starts reading.
“We have come in peace and with courage to say, ‘America, this day marks the return from exile of the gay and lesbian people,’” Suede read from a speech delivered by late local lawyer and activist Urvashi Vaid at the landmark March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in 1993. “ We are banished no more. We wander the wilderness of despair no more. We are afraid no more.”
This was the first stoop reading of the season for the shop, as it celebrates its 50th year in business. The tradition is just one way Womencrafts uplifts the community that has sustained it for decades.
“I don’t think of myself as a business person. I don’t think of myself as a retail person. I think of myself as a community organizer. And this is a community center,” owner Michelle Axelson said.
A place for community
Womencrafts started at a tumultuous time. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, a group of feminists saw lesbians as a threat because some worried their push for their own equality could distract from the mainstream women’s liberation movement. That worry would inspire a surge of new feminist bookstores that centered the female and lesbian experience. This includes Womencrafts.
“People from all over the country knew it was a place that they could come, where they could be seen,” Axelson said.
At the peak, there were over 100 such stores nationwide. Today, it’s estimated that only a couple dozen remain.
A factor in this is that ownership can be tough. Axelson says Provincetown is becoming more and more expensive and exclusive. Luckily, Axelson — with help from the community — was able to buy the building that houses Womencrafts. She rents the bottom floor and lives on the top floor. Still, smaller brick-and-mortar bookstores have often struggled with competition from larger book sellers, like Amazon.
Axelson says the biggest obstacle right now to Womencrafts is President Trump. She says the store is inherently political and therefore policies that impact LGBTQ+ communities, women and those living with HIV are challenges to running a vibrant bookstore.
“He poses a threat to every single person I love,” she said.
A room that hugs you
When you walk into Womencrafts, you’re met with shelves filled with colorful books, cards and crafts. Art covers the walls, including portraits of women who have resisted over the years.
This jubilant atmosphere welcomed Victoria T. Barstow for the first time in the 1990s. Barstow was an elementary school teacher at the time. She visited Womencrafts yearly during April vacations to buy books for her students with LGBTQ characters and story lines. She said it was one of her safe spaces.
“ I had this amazing, wonderful activist life, and then I got hired by Framingham Public Schools, and all of a sudden, it was like I’m in the back of a big walk-in closet,” Barstow said.
She eventually decided it was time for a change. With support from the school’s administration, she came out to her students. She said the community was supportive. And she thinks Womencrafts played a big role in allowing her to be completely herself at work. So much so that Barstow moved to Provincetown when she retired and started working at the shop part-time.
“The room just hugs you and says, ‘It’s okay to be who you are. As a matter of fact, it’s pretty damn glorious to be who you are, and we celebrate your existence here,’” she said.
One way the store does this is by offering a discount to every woman. So that women feel they can come out in a safe space, they call it the “dyke discount” or queer discount. Carol Bergen remembers when she was offered it for the first time.
“I felt like the whole room stopped, and you were on, like, one of those game shows where [everyone was] looking at you,” she said.
This was in the late ‘70s, during one of her first visits to the shop. When she said yes and claimed what she had always known about herself, she said her heart opened up.
“The world stopped for the minute when I thought about it, but the world didn’t end after that,” Bergen said. “And, you know, just build your life on that.”
Today, some people, including Axelson, call it the queer discount. She says even though the shop started as a lesbian-centered space, she wants it to be a comfortable and inviting space for all people, including transgender and nonbinary customers.
A center for activism
Over the years, the bookshop by the sea has become a center of activism, especially today.
“When there’s a crisis, when there’s a celebration, when there’s something that needs to happen, we meet here,” Tracy Kachtick-Anders said. “We write postcards, we start marching, or we start celebrating, or we light candles. It’s a little bit more than just a store.”
An example of this for Axelson happened in 2018, during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination hearings.
“ I was a kid for Anita Hill, but Christine Blasey Ford is my age,” she said. “Her story is my story. Not all the details are the same, but the experience of being a woman in this country, not being able to be heard and believed, is certainly my experience and that of so many of the customers.”
Axelson watched the hearings with others at the shop. Months after Kavanaugh was confirmed, a makeshift memorial was created underneath a portrait of Ford. In a guest book, people wrote messages to Ford and shared their own stories of assault and survival. This includes Axelson.
“It’s my responsibility and my great privilege to be able to use my voice for myself and for other people as often as I can,” she said.
While the shop is a hub for protest and activism, it’s also a place for hope. Axelson remembers hearing from the mother of a young person who lived in the Midwest and had just come out.
“She was really scared for her daughter because her daughter didn’t know any lesbian adults, which made her think that we didn’t live, so that there must be something really wrong with her,” Axelson said.
So she and others wrote the girl letters about their lives. Years later, she heard from the family that the girl is now happily married to a woman. Womencrafts wants to collect stories like this for a time capsule they plan to bury on their property this fall, to open up 50 years from now.
Axelson isn’t sure what she’ll put in it, but she’s thinking maybe something she sent to that family.
“It’s important to me that we remember our struggle, but it’s also important to me to tell our joys,” she said.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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