Queer Books Tell Our Stories

by Sigrid Nielsen and Bob Orr

Yay! You’re Gay! Now what?

That’s the title of a book by Riyadh Khalaf, published a few years ago. The cover is bright pink, with clouds and rainbows, and the letters can be read right across the floor of an average bookshop.

Riyadh offers advice about coming out for gays, bi men and those who feel they are ‘just different’. It’s a book about dealing with relationships, sexual feelings, families, homophobia.

Times have changed. For many who came out in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, there was little advice around, and you wouldn’t find it in ordinary bookshops.

What does all this tell us? Though coming out is easier now, it still has its problems. And, then and now, queer people have found support in books.

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Books have always meant a lot to LGBT people. Many have changed our lives. This is what Kim Halliday, a customer of Lavender Menace Bookshop as a teenager, said about finding a lesbian novel, Patience and Sarah: ‘I was 14 years old and there were a lot of things I didn’t understand about my life and feelings. And there they were in this book about two women who were crazy about each other and went off to live their lives together. I’d never   pictured it before – it really could happen like that.’

Bob Orr and I had had this same experience when we were teenagers in the 1960s. Browsing a station bookstall, he found a novel, No End to the Way, by an Australian writer, Gerald Glaskin. Glaskin had to use a pseudonym, Neville Jackson, because his career would have been threatened by publishing a novel about a serious gay relationship, which the characters treated as marriage.
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Lesbian novels were harder to find when I was growing up. There were a few about gay men, like Mary Renault’s The Charioteer. When I found Ursula LeGuin’s sci-fi novel about a world of androgynes, The Left Hand of Darkness, I had the feeling Kim describes – it COULD happen like that. Even though the story took place on another planet.

A few years earlier, we wouldn’t have found these books. Censorship laws would have stopped most of them being published. In the 1950s and early 1960s, court cases brought by the book industry – City Lights Bookshop in the US, Penguin Books in the UK – finally opened the way for positive, truthful queer books. And by the late 1970s, LGBT and feminist presses were turning out dozens of titles – and there were magazines, newspapers, cartoons, badges and t-shirts. A new era for LGBT readers had begun.

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Queer bookshops opened from San Francisco to Sydney. Bob’s bookstall at Edinburgh’s Gay Centre, later known as Open Gaze, was Scotland’s first. In 1982 we opened as a basement bookshop in Edinburgh’s Forth Street, Lavender Menace.

The shop, and its successor, West & Wilde in Dundas Street (run by Bob and his now husband, Raymond Rose) lasted for fifteen years. People flooded in, bought piles of books, and came to our events. West & Wilde finally closed due to the pressures of the internet and the coming of huge bookshop chains. Most of the other shops and small queer publishers around the world closed for the same reason.

But recently independent bookshops have started opening up again, and Scotland now has two queer-focussed shops, Lighthouse in Edinburgh and Category IS in Glasgow. In 2016 James Ley wrote a play, Love Song to Lavender Menace, which was staged at the Royal Lyceum, in Belfast and in New York.

We’re now going back and asking our customers from those days, which queer books meant the most to you? We want to start an archive of the books we sold, many of which broke new ground but are now forgotten. We want to apply what we learned as booksellers to show how books changed LGBT people’s lives for the better – so that the stories told then, and the new stories coming now from such publishers as Knight Errant Press and Monstrous Regiment, can be seen as one story.

We’ve formed a company, Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive CIC, and will apply for funding to establish our archive and book database.

Our website, lavendermenace.org.uk, has a blog about some of the books, and we post about them often on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We’ve been donated books by LGBT Health and Wellbeing and many individuals. If you have queer books you no longer need, we’d like to hear from you – we’ll give them a home, write about them, and make them as famous as possible.

Take care, stay safe, and we hope to see you at our events for LGBT History Month Scotland, Pride and during the Book Festival season – online or in person – with clouds and rainbows and very visible book covers.

Facebook: Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive and Blog
Twitter: @menacesof2019
Instagram: lavender_menace_returns