I witnessed the same phenomenon of LGBT-themed books disappearing from mainstream book stores after something of a hay day in the 80s and 90s. I only found out later that it was because most of the major publishing houses had discontinued their LGBT imprints in favor of including LGBTQ-themed books in more general collections.

I see both pluses and minuses.

There’s a wealth of lesbian and gay themed self-published books available, so many you could not read them all if you tried. Obviously, this is wonderful and great for young people who are looking for information and literary role models.

On the other hand, sifting through them for quality is … discouraging sometimes?

Lesbian and gay genre novels are pretty much gone from mainstream publishing. Major publishing houses used to have small divisions that nurtured LGBTQ authors and published their work specifically for that reason, resulting in a high quality curated collection of outstanding novels coming out every year.

Many well known authors owe their success to those LGBT imprints. Tons of lesbian and gay themed novels that are considered classic today would never have been printed otherwise.

I’m not exactly sure why that stopped, but the death of physical bookstores and the disappearance of gay bookstores probably has a lot to do with it. And while we now have a wealth of self-published books, I do bemoan the loss of the traditionally published ones.