A. J. West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World is a history of independent LGBT bookshops, from the under-the-counter days to open, out-and-proud institutions. It follows the shops and booksellers who got banned books onto shelves and supported their communities through the AIDS crisis, Section 28 and book bans. The list of shops is long and international: The Highlander & Dove, Librairie Parisienne, Shakespeare and Company, City Lights, The London Underground, Adonis Bookstore, the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, Glad Day, Lambda Rising, Giovanni’s Room, A Different Light, Modern Books, Housmans, Prinz Eisenherz, Gay’s The Word, Lavender Menace, West and Wilde, Vrolijk, The Bookshop Darlinghurst, Paperxclips, Gay-on-Wye and Gayberystwyth Books. The argument is that these places were never only retail. They were where people found information, found each other, and kept the history of resistance alive.
Several of the shops are women-oriented, and that was what I watched for as a lesbian reader. The Amazon Bookstore Cooperative, A Woman’s Place, Womanbooks, Sisterwrite and Silver Moon are all in there. There are fewer of them than gay or general LGBTQ+ shops, which fits the history, since there were simply fewer lesbian and feminist bookstores to write about, but they are part of the story and not an afterthought.
I picked it up because it came up in my library’s Available Now audiobooks, and I stayed with it because I have lived the other end of this story. The shops it celebrates are disappearing. COVID did damage, and so did the simple fact that queer and feminist books are now easy to find online and in ordinary bookstores. Even Glad Day had to move out of the Gay Village because of rent. My own preference has always been for used bookstores, for the price and for the chance of finding something unusual, and most of those are gone too, or so commercial that the used books are lost among the remainders.
What stayed with me is how the book’s history sits next to the present. After listening, I went to the websites of some of the shops it features. Shakespeare and Company has some appealing options, like a yearly book subscription, but no dedicated queer or lesbian section, and a catalogue of more than 70,000 literature listings does not feel like a queer bookshop. City Lights’ own About page does not seem to use any of the words gay, LGBTQ or queer. Gay’s The Word is still there and still unmistakably queer, which was good to see. The book celebrates what these shops did, and the shops’ own current pages show how much that identity has faded.
This is for anyone who wants to understand that queer bookstores were always more than books.