The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

In case you haven't heard, The Rake recently published a Guide Book to the Twin Cities. So far, we've sold a couple thousand copies, including a few to some of the Republican Convention delegates. Actually, we don't have any way of knowing that for sure, but we surmise that at least a couple of them might have seen it in the book stores and were getting tired of hotel food.

Although we didn't solicit any direct sales from the Republican folks, we received a call from the political office of Bill Bolling, the Republican Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. They ordered 150 copies of the book as gifts for their delegation and we made arrangements to deliver the copies to their hotel so we wouldn't have to ship them to Virginia, only to have them carry them here to the Twin Cities.

The Political Director, a very pleasant woman named Melissa Busse, also asked me to send her a copy so she could see it and prepare the appropriate presentation to their delegates. I sent one, but when she received it, she emailed cancelling the order because the book contains a six-page section on the Twin Cities GLBT scene. The email said the book would be a "BIG" problem to distribute to the delegates because of the section. She was very apologetic.

I also had subsequent pleasant communication with Bolling's Chief of Staff, who was apologetic for the flap and offered to reimburse us for any expenses. We ended up charging for the book I'd sent to Busse ($12.95 plus shipping and handling). Since we hadn't shipped the 150 books, I told him we were even.

But, as we are a news organization of sorts, we were in a little bit of a quandry as to how to treat this incident. I mentioned it, in confidence, to a friend of mine who happens to be a reporter at a daily newspaper. He said, "Hell, yes," when I asked him if he thought is was a story. So I passed along Busse's email and the rest is history, or at least one more reason for the Republicans to hate the media.

Anyway, the story was in the Strib and a couple of local TV stations, ended up getting picked up by the Associated Press and ABC News, and about 1,000 blogs. So far, I think we've sold one book as a result of the coverage. So much for the power of the press.

I did meet last Saturday with a couple of members of the Log Cabin Republicans, the GOP's gay caucus, and gave them enough books for their caucus. Strangely, they didn't see anything wrong with the 214 pages of content that wasn't specifically "gay."

If you want to see the offending pages, we've linked to them in pdf form below. If you want to buy the book, gay pages and all, click here.

(You'll have to click on the attached file link to see the pdf files. If you don't have Adobe Reader, download it here.)