PROFILE PGN
Family Portrait
Philadelphia Gay News www.epgn.com March 7-13, 2014
41
Suzi Nash
Dan Sherbo: Turning the pages of Giovanni’s Room history “Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.” — Barbara Tuchman For a lot of people in the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection, Giovanni’s Room was a place that was instrumental in their coming-out process. It was a place where you could find people who were like you, when you might not have known a single gay person in the world. But when you walked in that door, unlike anywhere else, you knew that the person behind the counter would be sympathetic It was a place to get information on myriad topics or to find novels to help you get away from it all. Before the Internet, Giovanni’s Room was my personal “Philly Gay Calendar.” I’d call up and ask whoever was at the desk to read the fliers on the bulletin board and tell me what was happening that weekend. I could call trying to find out how to get in contact with a particular organization and the person at the desk would usually be able to supply me with a name and phone number. It was a meeting place and a space where you could meet all sorts of authors and poets and people making change in the community. And happily, as it gears up to celebrate its 40th anniversary, Giovanni’s Room is still all those things. Founded in 1973, Giovanni’s Room Bookstore is named after James Baldwin’s novel of the same name. This week, we took a moment to speak to Dan Sherbo, one of the three original owners. An accomplished illustrator, Sherbo now resides in Maryland with his husband and two cats. PGN: How long did you live in Philadelphia? DS: I lived in Philadelphia for 11 years. PGN: Where are you originally from? DS: From a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania, Athens. It’s up at the New York state border. There’s a lot of fracking going on up there now, which has changed the whole nature of the place. It was just a small town in a valley between the mountain ridges on the Susquehanna River when I was growing up. It was a farming community mostly, population 2,000. I think there were about 120 in my graduating class. Everybody knew each other. PGN: What were you voted most likely to do? DS: I was expected to go into theater. I actually went to Temple University intending to go into theater but my life skewed off in a different direction. PGN: What prompted the transition? DS: It was 1969 and I joined the cultural revolution. What can I say, drugs had a big
effect, and I dropped out of school. From that point on, I was living life and coming out and I got involved in the nascent gayliberation movement. Eventually I did go back to school and got a degree at Tyler School of Fine Arts and became legitimate. PGN: How long was the gap? DS: I was out of school for six years. During a large part of that time was when I was acting as coordinator for the Gay Alternative Magazine, which is how I got involved with the Gay Activist Alliance, which incidentally is where I met Mark Segal. He must’ve been about 19 or 20 at the time. At the time, the Gay Alternative Magazine was a celebrated literary magazine of which there were only a few at the time. The magazine was a very modest scale but attracted a lot of top-notch contributors such as Martin Duberman and others who have gone on to make names for themselves as historians or writers. That’s when one of the staff members, Bernie Boyle, and I got the idea that Philadelphia needed a gay bookstore. We got Tom Wilson Weinberg involved and the three of us opened Giovanni’s Room. The bookstore became the headquarters for the magazine and a place for meetings; pretty much anything that needed to happen for the community happened there. PGN: You were on South Street back then, correct? DS: Yes, I think it was 232 South, right next to Knave of Hearts. PGN: What were some of the early fears? I remember reading stories about bookstores having trouble getting books through customs back in the day. DS: You know, we were fearless back then. But we weren’t even at that level of sophistication to worry about international customs. We were just flying by the seat of our pants. As far as I can remember, we acquired all our books from a warehouse in the village in New York. We would just go in and pull books from the shelves as if we were shopping for cereal and put them in a big cart. Craig Rodwell from Oscar Wilde bookstore told us about it. He helped us a lot and gave us advice about what kind of books to get, what kind of publications, etc. PGN: Since we’re on the topic of books, tell me about your work as an illustrator. DS: That was a result of the six years I took to work as an activist. It was great but left me really, really poor! I never had any money at all and as I looked around, a lot of my friends had careers and cars and nice apartments and were thinking about making a future for themselves. I decided I needed to get something of my own. I wanted to find a job that would be lucrative but that I would also have a passion for. I
got an opportunity to go back to school so I jumped at it and spent four years at Tyler School of Art. PGN: What was your first paying job? DS: I did a weekly illustration for the now-defunct Washington Star newspaper. I moved to Washington the day of my last class. There was a guy who worked in Congress I had met while visiting D.C., so I moved down there for love. I got a regular gig doing a column in the Sunday magazine of the Washington Star, which was the rival to the Washington Post. That paper folded within a couple of years but by that time I was working for the Washington Post as an illustrator. [Laughs.] When I first began, they tried to get me to do things like weather maps. In those days they would actually cut out little pieces of paper and paste them on with wax to make a weather map and I was terrible at it! I was trained at Tyler to do intricate illustrations and come up with ideas and concepts but when it came to doing that technical stuff, I was just
DS: I designed doormats. I still have a couple of them! [Laughs.] A guy that I met at a party owned a rug company. He asked me if I would be interested in designing rugs and doormats for him. He said it could be very lucrative if I took a percentage. I never made any money off of it but I got a few good doormats. When you’re an illustrator, unless and until you start getting really big clients who will pay you a ton of money, you take all sorts of jobs, anything that comes along, and you can get some funny work along the way. The mattress thing was for the National Bedding Institute. When you’re an illustrator, in Washington particularly, you get calls from all these crazy groups; every profession you can imagine has a lobbying group representing them in Washington and they all have publications. I will say there are a couple I flat-out refused to do: rightwing organizations like the Heritage Foundation who wanted to hire me to do illustrations for their magazine. I told them absolutely not. PGN: That’s crazy. But did I read you designed a headstone? DS: Yes, a friend’s brother died of AIDS and she asked me to design a graphic for his headstone. PGN: Interesting. And what would you like on your headstone? DS: Oh, I wouldn’t want a gravestone. I would want to be cremated and cast to the winds or something like that.
PGN: OK. As a tea lover, I have to ask which tea company you designed for. DS: How do you know all this? It was Tatra Tea Company. They were located right outside of Philadelphia. I was still in art school and I designed Photo: Suzi Nash a basket case. They learned that pretty a box for them that they quickly and began giving me the job of were going to use for their laying out pages and doing the majority of line of teas. I don’t know that I got paid illustrations. This was during the hey days anything for it, but it was a pretty prestiat the Washington Post, after the Woodward gious thing to have in my portfolio right and Bernstein Watergate exposé, and it was out of school. a very exciting place to be. PGN: Who was your favorite illustrator PGN: Since that time, you’ve worked as an and book as a kid? illustrator and designed for everyone from DS: Favorite illustrator was probably watch companies to mattress companies. Norman Rockwell and my favorite book What’s the oddest job you’ve had? was “Alice in Wonderland.” PAGE 46