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An hour later, I was faced with a box of lesbian and feminist novels published by Daughters, Inc., one of the first women-owned and -run presses in the country, probably the world. It published Rita Mae Brown’s now-classic Rubyfruit Jungle and Blanche Boyd’s Nerves, as well as another dozen groundbreaking novels. I would never look at these books again, not really. But I hesitated to let them go. (Almost all my feminist literature was going to the women’s-studies library at Dartmouth.) I remembered how vital we all thought it was to control the production of our own newspapers, magazines, and books. The women who ran Daughters, Inc. knew they couldn’t depend on mainstream publishing companies to publish what they wanted to read — so they did it themselves. It is what the Gay Men’s Press collective did in London in the 1970s when it produced volume after volume of new writing about gay politics. Its titles included Guy Hocquenghem’s groundbreaking 1972 Homosexual Desire (with its famous beginning, "The problem is not so much homosexual desire as the fear of homosexuality"), and Alan Bray’s masterful 1982 Homosexuality in Renaissance England, a work of original and amazing scholarship that came out of the movement, not the academy.

DIY community self-determination is what Boston’s Gay Men’s Liberation was after when we began to publish Fag Rag, the first gay-male-liberation newspaper in the country. I knew this work firsthand. I helped lay out the early editions — proofing the typeset copy and laying it on sheets of cardboard, fixing it with wax, and rolling it flat with a hand-roller before we drove it to the printers to be published. And then we delivered it to community centers and bookstores ourselves. In the late 1970s, Charley Shively and I edited, proofed, and laid out Arthur Evans’s Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (the first of a series of "Fag Rag Books") on my kitchen table as Walta made us tea and supplied us with music by Laura Nyro and Nina Simone. Knowing all this, it seemed almost insulting to the women of Daughters, Inc. and the Gay Men’s Press not to keep their books.

I CERTAINLY DON’T want to sentimentalize the past, holding it fast for any unexamined comfort it might provide. Nor do I want to succumb to grumpy-old-man syndrome: "In my day we had to actually lay out our movement newspapers and magazines — none of this Quark and PageMaker stuff. And when we finished working until late into the night, we had to walk miles to the nearest sex club to fuck around — none of this meet-tricks-on-the-Internet business. You young people have it pretty easy these days." But unpacking and jettisoning so many of the books I have lived with over the past three-plus decades made me think hard about today’s queer movement and how it works, who is in it, and whom it reaches.

Sometimes I bemoan the fact that the queer movement doesn’t seem as straightforwardly progressive as it was in the late 1960s and the 1970s. (Although, to be fair, when ACT UP members infiltrated the 2004 Republican National Convention and caused a major ruckus on the convention floor it was pretty radical.) But I also have to admit that new technology has made it easier to expand the sheer scale of the movement. In the 1970s, we were lucky if we could reach a thousand people for, say, a last-minute, hastily planned demonstration. It took major phone networking and, if you had enough time, leafleting bars and clubs (if they let you hand out political leaflets). Now, with e-mail, you can reach thousands and thousands of people — in any city across the country — within minutes. While we were dependent on the 20 people who might show up at a Gay Men’s Liberation meeting to discuss Dennis Altman’s Homosexual Oppression and Liberation, the comparable contemporary discussion can involve hundreds simultaneously in an online chat room.

Still, all this new technology also seems to have a downside. Sure, the movement has grown larger and far more visible than we could ever have imagined. But as more and more people joined, the less cutting-edge and the more moderate (and even conservative) it has become. This is unsurprising: as your base grows, so does the variety and scope of the political positions the movement must contain, usually finding a divine average somewhere in the middle. It’s true that the moderation of the movement is a product of many things. It is now easier to come out than it was 35 years ago, while the tone and tenor of national politics have become far more conservative than in the 1960s. It’s also true that the movement’s radicalism is a victim of its own success, ascribable in part, again, to the enormous changes in technology and information dissemination. In the 1960s, young women and men often had to go to the public library to find out anything about "homosexuality"; now, it’s on every television network and cable channel. Information about the Stonewall Riots or Gertrude Stein is a click away on Google, and if you need to find out about the work of queer late-19th-century German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, several electronic books available at university libraries will give you the text in both German and English. In a very real way — especially for gay kids — the Internet has brought queerness into the average American home.

WHEN I BEGAN teaching gender studies four years ago, I was surprised by how few gay and lesbian books my students had read, or had even heard of. As someone whose home was overcrowded with queer books, I simply couldn’t understand it. And while they are perfectly happy to go to the library and find and read and use books, it is not really their instinct to do so. Books — as books — are simply not as important to them as they were to me. One of the reasons I let my book collection grow was that I saw it as an archive. Actually, it does contain some rare books and pamphlets — I have an original S.C.U.M. Manifesto that I bought directly from Valerie Solanas on a Greenwich Village street in 1969, and some early gay-liberation publications that are difficult to find. But much of what I have is available, just not easily so. The point is, in queer liberation’s early years, you never tossed out a gay book because there were so few. Now, easy access to so much information — both accurate and inaccurate — has changed all that, remaking the movement in all kinds of ways.

Obviously, one of the reasons I was haunted — like that woman in the Gothic novel — was that my books represented a vital time in my life that I had moved beyond, along with the world and the queer movement that had been so instrumental to its change. It’s idiotic to sit around and complain about how bad the present is, how shallow the movement has become, and how much more radical everything was in the past. I am going to keep, and cherish, the books I decided to stow away in my new library. But let’s face it — doing research on LexisNexis is a lot easier than looking through newspaper archives in a dirty library basement. I’d be insane not to use PageMaker to publish a newspaper or a book. And as an organizing tool, e-mail is obviously far more efficient than phone-trees. My students write amazing papers, in part because they have access to a wider, more-comprehensive range of queer materials than I ever did. I’m not resistant to technology or even, in theory, professionalization, despite my qualms about their effects on how we engage in politics and what types of politics we do. I made my peace with my books by accepting that they were vital to my past — and thus extraordinarily instrumental to who I am now. That may be, at bottom, a sentimental attachment, but sentiment does not have to stand in the way of progress.

Michael Bronski’s newest book, Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press, 2003), recently received a Lammy Award for Best Anthology of 2003. He can be reached at mabronski@aol.com