Quimby’s Queer Store is no ordinary bookstore. Browsing in it can make you dizzy. “My goal is eventually that when people walk in they’re just overwhelmed: like, ‘Oh my god what is this.’ I want them to be stunned,” says proprietor Steven Svymbersky. You might have been more than just overwhelmed had you walked in off the street on a certain Friday night last September. You would have been witness to the sight of Svymbersky stripped to the waist, strapped to a bookshelf, getting 33 birthday lashes from dyke dominatrix Bliss, who was wielding a leather cat-o’-nine-tails–while Wiseacre riffed away on music from Jesus Christ Superstar.
Svymbersky himself can’t understand why some people don’t take him and his business seriously. “It makes me mad when I hear these people say ‘Oh, you’ll grow out of it…’ This guy wants to see my tattoos….He says, ‘You’re gonna be so sorry, you’ll end up getting a real job.’” Svymbersky rolls his eyes and flexes his “fuck you” finger. (The one next to it has a brand-new gothic Q tattoo.) “I was like, you don’t know that, how can you possibly make that judgment….Just because you gave in, just because you bit it, doesn’t mean I’m going to. That’s so pathetic.”
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But sales aren’t exactly Svymbersky’s primary preoccupation. “I hope people are inspired to do their own zines, to put out their own books because that’s where it’s at. That’s one of the reasons I do it,” Svymbersky says. “I know how hard it is to get them in stores; I know how hard it is to get an audience.” His own ventures in self-publishing have included a long-running series of comics anthologies: Quimby Comix, Quimby Magazine, and Quimby Extra. Svymbersky admits that he’s been publishing “since they would let me,” having passed the de rigueur journalistic high school trial by fire when he was suspended and almost got the faculty adviser fired for publishing “bad things” in the school paper. At that time he wrote occasionally under the pseudonym Burf Quimby, a name that’s “always been with me.”
In the meantime, extra space is filled up with ephemera and miscellanea like little skull beads from India for a quarter apiece, bleeding-performance-artist videos by Ron Athey, piercing jewelry by Body Circle, colorfully painted Polish religious icons, Mexican lotteria games, awesome fully-assembled Big Daddy Roth models, Speed Racer and H.R. Giger calendars, Freaks and Pocket Pin-Ups trading cards. . . Whew!
