Have you visited these LGBTQIA+ independent bookshops yet?
INTRO BY DIVA STAFF, HEADER IMAGE BY MURDO MACLEOD
Independent Bookshop Week (14–21 June) is a flagship campaign from the Booksellers Association – celebrating, supporting, and advocating for independent bookshops and the unique cultural, economic, and community value they bring to the retail sector and wider society. It’s also Pride month. To celebrate the annual observations, we are putting the spotlight on three queer booksellers to share their thoughts on why it’s important to have LGBTQIA+ independent bookshops today.
WORDS FROM EMILY (THE BOOKISH TYPE, LEEDS)
As a proud trans woman and owner of a queer bookshop, I like to think that I understand why spaces like ours at the Bookish Type in Leeds are so important. With queers of all flavours historically being pushed out of public third spaces, we’ve always had to make our own, and since Gay’s The Word opened in 1979 those safe havens have included bookshops.
Queer bookshops are so special because there is a curated selection of both fiction and non-fiction that reflect our lives, our loves, our heartbreaks and our struggles. They’re gathering spots for first dates with no judgement, places to uplift and support local queer authors and to spread information in zines.
In the current political climate, queer bookshops are more important than ever. When the Supreme Court ruled the definition of a woman in the Equality Act was to mean a “biological woman”. I cried for a week. This, for our community, especially for trans women like myself, was the culmination of over five years of calculated hatred from trans exclusionary people in high places to distract from real problems. The first step to stripping us of all our liberties, healthcare and access to society. The responsibility of queer bookshops is to be there for all our trans siblings: provide safe bathroom spaces, host fundraisers for trans people’s healthcare, use our large platforms to promote help for the community and the most influential thing we can do is hire trans women! Nobody else wants to hire us!
To my knowledge, The Bookish Type is the only trans woman-owned bookshop in the UK. Already I’ve had people harass me; I’ve been called slurs, called a groomer, and threatened with violence, but I’m lucky to have wonderful co-workers and volunteers. With their help, we have made sure The Bookish Type is a sanctuary, a place where trans people can have a break from keeping their guard up and just breathe.
WORDS FROM MAIRI OLIVER FROM (LIGHTHOUSE, EDINBURGH)
On Tuesday evening I lugged a suitcase of books across Edinburgh’s sunsoaked meadows, to the basement of a housing co-op, where Lighthouse was running a pop up bookshop to complement Queer Film Night’s screening of the documentary Before Stonewall.
Fifty odd folk straddling generations, genders and class, of varying ethnicities and regional accents watched a film together, and then stayed late to unpick what there was to learn about finding joy and resolve and inspiration from our forebears, from the queer folk who had lived and loved before Stonewall.
In discussions I drew on examples from June Thomas’ A Place of Our Own and Jane Cholmeley’s A Bookshop Of One’s Own to illustrate how LGBTQIA+ people have always built the spaces we needed, from holiday resorts to bookshops, and that the cliques, discourse and infighting that we bemoan about this moment we are in now, also existed in the seventies, eighties and nineties. To those with access to our history, today’s transphobic backlash has palpable echoes of the “gay panic” of the McCarthy era, the AIDS pandemic, Section 28. We’ve seen – and we have overcome – hate, misinformation and state sponsored persecution and medical neglect. But how? Again I reach for my table of books and find Jake Hall’s meticulously researched Shoulder to Shoulder: A Queer History Of Solidarity, Coalition And Chaos, which is packed with examples of movement building by disabled, queer, feminist and Black organisers, by sex workers, unions and collectives.
To me this is what queer bookselling is all about – it’s being of the community and in the community, bringing writers to those who need those voices most. It’s about access to our histories and the intersections of our experiences so that as a community we can dream bigger, organise better, and look after each other. We – at Lighthouse, Edinburgh’s Radical Bookshop – do that with books.
WORDS FROM MEERA (ROUND TABLE BOOKS, BRIXTON)
In 2015, the UK was a leader in LGBTQIA+ rights across Europe. Now, just 10 years later, it has fallen to 22nd place out of 49 countries. The necessity of our existence as a safe and intersectional queer space is unquestionable.
Round Table Books is a political space, and we do not have a choice about it being anything else. The intersection of our racial backgrounds and LGBTQIA+ experience makes it impossible to fit within present traditional conventions, and we cannot conform to the norms of society as they currently exist.
Intersectionality for us at the bookshop is where we evolve from. We fundamentally have always had it as part of our ethos that we are the whole Venn diagram. I have to navigate both my Asian and lesbian identity. And my colleagues have had equally complex experiences to traverse. We celebrate both the global majority and queer experience in our space, but if there is discrimination from one experience to the other, that is not welcome.
We have successfully nurtured that complexity of experiences for both our local community and visitors. Lambeth has both the largest LGBTQIA+ and Latinx populations in London, as well as one of the largest Afro-Caribbean communities. Sharing space is a fundamental aspect of our philosophy; we value partnership over allyship. As an LGBTQIA+ space, we exist because we and our community need space to meet, share experiences, talk, love, laugh, hold hands, kiss, and be safe to do so.
DIVA magazine celebrates 31 years in print in 2025. If you like what we do, then get behind LGBTQIA+ media and keep us going for another generation. Your support is invaluable.
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