The Shortest Ramp Is a Longer Road

To get into the shop, you have to travel up the world’s shortest ramp. At the summit is a single rectangular room (longer than it is wide), with a cozy corner recess stocked with yarn in a wicker basket, and a graffitied, single occupancy bathroom. The two longer walls are covered in books, zines, and other ephemera, and the floor is covered in confetti. While the proprietors of other stores at this intersection have mostly papered over their windows, and opted to light their spaces with slightly oppressive fluorescent bulbs, this establishment feels as though it’s lit solely by the sun. And it teeters on overstimulating. Inside, I saw nearly every color I can name, both “red” and “green,” and also “chartreuse.” There’s also a community bulletin board that is impressively kept up to date; every posted event is yet-to-happen.

This is the Nonbinarian, which describes itself online as a “trans+ led volunteer-powered exclusively-queer bookstore & mobile mutual aid initiative in BK.” The Nonbinarian’s founder, K. Kerimian, began riding around Brooklyn on a pink custom cargo bike back in 2022. At that time, they were just giving books away. When I spoke with them, each of us sitting in one of the store’s plush armchairs, they noted that their focus was on the borough’s “book deserts,” a term they used to describe places where access to books is limited. The store settled in its current location on the southeast corner of President Street and Rogers Avenue in November 2024.

Back in November, before the bookstore had even opened, someone smeared dog feces on Kerimian’s pink cargo bike. And then in April, that very same bike disappeared in the dead of night. The Nonbinarian organized a GoFundMe page to raise funds to replace the bike, where they described the theft as an “act against our symbol of pride and community solidarity.” The store’s take is that the incident was definitely queerphobic in impact, plausibly in intent.

The Nonbinarian takes up a lot of space in my mind, because it takes up a lot of visual space in my commute. I used to walk past that bike almost every day.  We also both showed up around the same time. Around when the book bike began operations, I moved to Brooklyn from Harlem, and from Texas before that. I bopped around the borough; mostly cycling through sublets in various corners of Crown Heights, and occasionally venturing further: Kensington, Boerum Hill, and what an oldhead might call Flatbush, but which is now known as Prospect Lefferts Gardens. I finally landed in my current corner of Crown Heights only a few months before the Nonbinarian bookstore opened its doors. I feel like my fate and that of the store are somehow tied up together. For that reason, I want to believe that the dog feces and the bike theft were pure flukes and not related to any larger ideological conflicts.

There’s another, equally self-involved reason why I hope these incidents were acts of necessity or even convenience, rather than of hatred. Sometimes, I do a double-take because I see a face that looks too similar to that of an aunt or an uncle or a cousin. If I’m out in the late afternoon, I dodge clumps of students and wonder how come my braids didn’t look that cool when I was a teen. I’m always searching for the dopamine hit of hearing an African grandma speak, and I’m still living off the high of that time a Black man in his 60s, adorned with a baseball cap, sang about how my friend and I were fly girls (the only lyrics in his song were “fly girls”). I’m happy to be a droplet in the sea of brown faces that populate this Black neighborhood.

Because I feel like a part of this particular whole, I experience others’ worser impulses as my own. I’ve witnessed how racism is the only thing keeping a lot of Black people from professing a full-throated conservatism, complete with misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic views. While I know that Black folks are not a monolith — the Afro-Caribbean owner of my laundromat has a pride sticker above her own bulletin board — I dread the possibility that the person who stole the book bike was a Black person expressing their homophobia.

But if this hypothetical thief’s experience is anything like mine, then they’ve found the store’s whiteness as conspicuous as its queerness. The representation among the customers pales in comparison to that on the shelves. Almost every time I step into the store, or just peer through its expansive windows, I find a collection of people who could pass a paper bag test with flying colors. There’s a world in which the thief views themselves as a freedom fighter, doing their part in a war against white encroachment.

In my quest to figure out whether my ambivalence towards the Nonbinarian is shared, or if I’m just making things way deeper than they have to be, I chatted with some folks, including front desk ladies at the nearby Brooklyn Community Pride Center, the cashier at a local bodega, somebody just minding their business at a coffee shop, artists, and community organizers. A volunteer at the Nonbinarian mentioned being an alum of Bluestockings, a queer, trans, and sex worker run bookstore on the Lower East Side. They were drawn to the Nonbinarian due to what they articulated as common values: a concern with accessibility, the distribution of free resources, and, of course, queer literature. Kerimian describes the store as a site for “queer joy,” having elicited a response that is reportedly “overwhelmingly positive.”

I chatted with a Black zine-seller who is currently organizing an abolitionist third space on the northern side of Eastern Parkway; they were cautiously optimistic about the Nonbinarian. For another organizer, focused primarily on the intersection of race and disability, it’s big beef with the bookshop. They especially disliked how the aftermath of the bike theft played out. They felt that asking the community to fundraise for a stolen bike after leaving the bike outside in the first place is some “white shit.” At the end of the day, they view the store as trespassers (“Do we really need another bookstore?”)

If we take for granted that people’s online personas are some approximation of their real-life beliefs, then there’s actually plenty of people with questions about the store’s place in the community. When News 12 Brooklyn reported on the dog poop incident on Instagram, folks wrote some choice words in the comments, including: “They done put everything but what the neighborhood could possibly use on that corner,” “Let the chaos begin,” and “Guaranteed less than 5% of the community will even consider this as an essential for the community. Not much use to the locals who’ve been there for decades.”

(I’m purposefully obfuscating this commenter’s intent — they’re speaking to the Nonbinarian as a harbinger of demographic change — but I think it’s worth mentioning that no bookstore is essential if the only service it provides is in being a place to purchase books. And not to shill for Big Library, but you don’t even really have to spend money to have access to reading material, to the extent that you consider literature essential to a well-rounded life; I know of at least 50 places in Brooklyn alone where somebody can get a book for free. If being strictly essential was a good enough reason to axe the Nonbinarian, you may as well get rid of bookstores altogether.)

In any case, according to its district profile, the residents of Community District 9, composed of both the aforementioned “locals” and more recent arrivals, could use more affordable housing, more resilient infrastructure, and less trash on the streets. The community (the one that’s tapped in enough to be on the Community Board’s radar) has articulated its greatest desires and those desires aren’t about interpersonal relationships. The community is asking for more of its systems and institutions.

The Nonbinarian is not writing the housing policy that makes half the residents of Brooklyn Community District 9 “rent burdened.” But the store is actively inserting itself into system-level conversations. In addition to the shop’s raison d’etre: “Everyone deserves to see themselves on the shelf,” painted above the cozy corner, I could piece together a list of left-of-liberal political stances through the flags, flyers, and posters displayed around the store. Some takes were local — New York City needs to “FREEZE THE RENT” and elect Zohran Mamdani as its next mayor — others international in scope — Free Palestine.

It also turns out the world’s shortest ramp is actually wheelchair accessible. The bathroom and Wi-Fi are free for anyone to use. Also free: binders for trans masc individuals. Business cards informing people of their rights. COVID tests. Masks. The Nonbinarian also published a thoughtful and detailed statement (re-)committing to disability justice vis-a-vis ironclad COVID precautions in February 2025.

But even though I can find Black books and tarot cards on the shelves and a true but nonetheless trite Instagram caption reading “Just as there is no LGB without the T, there is no queer history without Black history,” what I’ve looked for and cannot find, is any engagement with its own status as a white-conceived, (partially) white-owned business in a neighborhood that’s hemorrhaging Black people. That conversation — one that would probably involve words like “displacement” and “pricing out” and “racism” — is a bigger ask than carrying Black on Both Sides by C. Riley Snorton. According to Kerimian, it is an ongoing conversation amongst the staff, one that has manifested in actions such as training volunteers as notaries and platforming events led by people of color. But it’s nonetheless unfolding in private, safe from scrutiny.

Before it became a largely benign, voweled alternative to an acronym with four consecutive consonants, and after the apex of its usage as an outright slur, the word “queer” implied a certain political orientation. Being gay was not enough to make you queer. To earn that title, you needed to reject assimilation and adopt a politics that challenges power in all forms. There are people whose response to the store is informed entirely by homophobic sentiment. But there are others who may be alienated by what they experience as a furthering of white gentrifier encroachment . . . which is another way of saying that they’re put off by a store that doesn’t feel queer in the late 20th century sense of the word — whether or not that’s the language they’d use.

It’s not the language I’d use, mostly because the language I’d use is “unsure.” My feelings for the Nonbinarian can best be described as a massive metaphorical question mark, hanging in the air above 1130 President Street and held aloft by mercurial sentiment and bald contradiction. The latter is why I can pine for the attention of my local bodega cat and still write something as dramatic as “perhaps the Horseman of Conquest (read: Gentrification) doesn’t ride atop a white horse; he rides a mini schnauzer rescue named c.k. dexter haven.” (I’m mostly joking, but to the extent I’m serious, it’s because the aforementioned c.k. dexter — the official shop dog of the Nonbinarian — followed me around the store during one of my visits.)

I can stare at a “Gay It Forward” pay-it-forward wall for folks who might be otherwise unable to purchase a book, see that it’s a good thing, and still speculate over whether this lefty oasis exists for the Crown Heights of right now, or for the Crown Heights of 2030, a neighborhood that could very well have lost another 19,000 Black residents. I’m not sure if I’ll be one of them.

The Nonbinarian is a capacious container for these emotions. They’re feelings about this particular store, sure, but they’re really about whether or not there’s any hope of building community in spite of circumstances, like racialized gentrification or latent queerphobia, that seek to undermine that effort. And even underneath that, they’re really really about my own desire to be a net good, and my fears of being seen as an outsider. If nothing else, I’m grateful that the Nonbinarian can hold all this alongside its many, many books.