RE the matrimonial dogs - to each other or to you? Cause you’re no doggie preacher dropzone, you’re just a man.
Couldn’t she just subscribe?
I wouldn’t ascribe any deep political motives to BaM.
Could it be possible that the magazine was already sold out, and the clerk just didn’t know what he was talking about and made some shit up on the spot?
Just askin’, is all.
Robin
Barrytown , your mom totally rocks. Its too bad that everyone’s parents can’t be that cool.
Road Rash , if you’re feeling daring enough to venture out to Katy Mills Mall, they have a Books-a-Million there. If you haven’t been there before, the mall’s pretty scary.
As for the Houston location, I honestly can’t say what they do and do not have, since I rarely go to the scary mall. The Longview, TX location, was very liberal, especially for such a conservative town and had a wide section of books, ect on gay/lesbian topics. (This was a year or two ago so things might have changed). I have a friend who works in Sugarland, I may have to see if there’s a BaM there and send him on a mission to see what they have. Project!
I’m guessing along with most people that it was just a doofus employee, especially based on how he said it. Although it could have been a weenie manager. (I used to manage a used/rare book store, so I can still call other book store employees doofuss, doofi, whatever if I want to. 
)
I always get those confused over there :smack:
Great cite, astro. And to add another data point, the BAM in Texarkana, Texas - as conservative a place as you’ll find - carries The Advocate, as well as several other gay publications and even has a “Lifestyles” section. Okay, it’s only about 2 or 3 shelves; but at least it’s something.
Barrytown, at this point I have to ask, what are you asking us for? Maybe your mom should just call the store and ask if they have the rag. If the manager says it’s against company policy, then she can call him on his lie. If he says of course they have it, then she can get the clueless employee fired. Win/win.
It used to be easier: if it looked like somebody besides a resident was paying taxes on the property it wasn’t in Lombard. But now that they bulldozed the seminary and the cemetary to put in real, live businesses (and homes–didn’t they see Poltergeist? my sense of reality is distorted.
tdn, I asked because up until that point, I hadn’t found any information that either confirmed or contradicted what the guy at the bookstore had said. I hadn’t actually thought to check their website in the way that astro did (thank you very much astro, by the way) and was trying to find out if anybody else had had that kind of experience with BaM. This way, I had hoped to nip any ignorance in the bud before it occurred - that is, before my mom got a whole bunch of people together with a letter addressed to the company about their “company policy”.
Thanks to everybody for their cites, opinions and speculations. 
Oh yeah, I got that. I’m just saying that now that you are armed with this new found information, it’s time to go on to step two – call the book store and catch them in a nice juicy lie.
Rule #1 is a good point. I don’t think she should chill on this though. I think she should go to the manager and complain that she was given misleading information by a clerk. She should make a fuss.
I was going to ask if you’re being serious but I just noticed that Guin already posted a reply.
The employee was very probably talking out his ass. I do that sometimes at work: people ask me about a company policy, and I make an educated guess based on what I hear at meetings and have read in the handbook. That said, I’d never claim that my employer has an unethical policy.
What might be happening is, the store manager just didn’t think that there’d be enough of a market for The Advocate. As anyone must know, if they read The Advocate, there are a lot of people who don’t want to admit how many gay people there are in the world, let alone in their community. “Should we stock that gay magazine?..Well, how many gays do you think there are around here—two? We’d sell more copies of Underwater Basket Weaving Digest!” If, however, enough people requested a magazine to indicate that it would be worth stocking, the store probably would.
You may be right, Rilchiam, about the employee talking out of his ass thing; but if the magazine Barrytown’s mom had asked for had been Underwater Basket Weaving Digest, would the clerk have made a crack about the company’s “Southern values” by way of explaining why they didn’t carry it? It’s a lot less inflammatory to say “there’s not enough of a market for this publication here” than “the company does not cater to this particular market for moral reasons.” Barrytown’s mom was ready to organize a written protest over the difference. She ought to relate the exchange to the store’s manager, so that at least s/he’s aware that there’s an employee with oral diarrhea on the payroll.
Of course, it easily could be that it’s the store manager who misinformed the clerk about the policy. If it turns out that this particular store is making up its own rules about what magazines they won’t carry and why not, I’m sure Books-a-Million would then like to know about it.
I worked at a Books-a-Million for a while after college. It truly is the Wal-Mart of large bookstore chains, and mostly operates in the south.
We had the Advocate and a few other gay-interest magazines.
I recall that much of the ordering was done by one of our managers, because she refused to carry Anne Rice’s “Sleeping Beauty” books because of their sexual content. So this could be a case of the bias of a single manager at that store.
The owner of the chain was rumored to ‘drop in’ unexpectedly at branches, and to fire people on the spot if he didn’t like what he saw. We were encouraged to live in terror of him.
When we put magazines behind the counter, it wasn’t usually censorship per se. It was more that certain magazines tended to get stolen, damaged, have pages torn out, or get taken into the men’s room and masturbated over, to the point where they were unsellable. We’d put them behind the counter so that we’d actually have some to sell.