Shelf love - How LGBTQ+ bookshops are changing the UK's literary scene

This World Book Day (March 6th), Alim Kieran explores how LGBTQ+ bookshops are reshaping the UK’s literary scene - amplifying voices, preserving history, and building community.

On a hot day during the summer of 2020, friends Rosie and Sarah from Sheffield were drinking wine together when they had the idea to open a queer feminist bookshop. Restrictions put in place for the first lockdown had eased, and the pair, who had met at a baby group years earlier, were sitting in Sarah’s garden, their feet cooling in her daughter’s paddling pool. “We'd been talking about how we didn't want to go back to normal life after the pandemic,” says Rosie. “We were discussing what we wanted to do instead and were both like, 'All I want to do is have a bookshop.'”

It's the kind of tipsy conversation that many booklovers will be familiar with. After all, who doesn’t want to spend their days surrounded by books, helping people find their next favourite read? And like many of those dreamers, neither Rosie or Sarah had experience selling books or running their own business: Sarah was a stay-at-home mum, while Rosie worked in equalities for heritage organisations at the council. Still, the following morning, they couldn’t shake the idea. “And so over the next two years, really, we met every Friday and started planning,” says Rosie.

Creating a business was a steep learning curve, and while at times Rosie and Sarah had their doubts, they nevertheless persisted. They joined the Booksellers Association, a trade organisation that provides support and advice for booksellers, and bought a copy of their book How to Start and Run a Bookshop. They also enrolled in a feminist business course run by an organisation called Sister in the US. “It wasn't necessarily focused on bookselling, but it was all about how you visualise your ethical business into being,” recalls Rosie. “It was a bit bonkers at times but also quite helpful in working out how we wanted our business to run and look like.”

Their vision was to create a bookshop that could act as a vehicle for other things. “We wanted it to be a community space,” Rosie adds. “We wanted people to be able to use the space to meet people and have groups. We wanted to programme and curate events. We wanted to give back to the community and do outreach-y stuff.”

With that decided, the foundations for Sarah and Rosie’s bookshop were solidified. In April 2022, they launched their business, Juno Books, online, stocking a specially selected collection of intersectional feminist and LGBTQ+ books. Six months later, they opened a physical shop, in the heart of the city centre.

Sheffield now officially had a queer bookshop.

Juno Books, Sheffield

The story of Juno Books is not a singular success story. Over the last six years, the UK has seen a tidal wave of new LGBTQ+ bookshops opening their doors across the country. It began in 2018 with Category Is Books in Glasgow – the first LGBTQ+ bookshop to open in Scotland since the closure of West & Wilde (previously known as the Lavender Menace Bookshop) in 1997 – and in the subsequent years, new queer bookshops have opened in London, Manchester, York, Leeds, Cardiff, Brighton, Durham, Darlington, Hay-On-Wye and Belfast. In fact, the UK now has more LGBTQ+ bookshops than any other country, and the second-highest number in the world behind the US.

All this is backdropped by the steady comeback of independent bookshops more broadly. According to a 2022 blog published by Companies House, between 1995 and 2016 the number of independent bookshops in the UK dropped significantly from 1,894 to a low of 867. The dominance of online platforms such as Amazon and high street chains like Waterstones, both of whom were able to offer heavy discounts, along with raising business rates and rents meant that smaller, independently run businesses weren’t able to keep up.

In 2023, however, the Booksellers Association shared promising data signalling six consecutive years of growth: by the end of 2022, the number of independent bookstores in the UK and Ireland stood at 1,072, the highest in 10 years. “During the pandemic we saw a frankly astonishing number of new entrants to bookselling,” Meryl Halls, Managing Director at the Booksellers Association, said in a statement at the time.“Drawn by the cultural relevance of books, reading and bookshops, inspired by the activism on display amongst current booksellers, seeing bookselling as a valid and rewarding career choice – these are all reasons why people open bookshops, and we want each and every one of the shops to succeed.”

LGBTQ+ bookshops are, of course, a part of that boom. However, while there are now nearly a dozen specialist destinations for LGBTQ+ books across the country, for nearly two decades there was only one: the iconic Gay’s the Word in London.

Gay’s the Word, London

Founded in 1979 by three members of the group Gay Icebreakers, an offshoot of the Gay Liberation Front, Gay’s the Word was the UK’s first LGBTQ+ bookshop. Tucked away on Marchmont Street, it quickly became a hub for community organising, with various political and activist groups utilising the space for meetings, including Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, the fabled socialist fundraising and activist group who worked to support those taking part in the miners’ strike.

Like the queer bookshops of today, Gay’s the Word soon became part of a network of LGBTQ+, feminist and radical bookshops across the country, including institutions such as Housmans Bookshop in King’s Cross (which is still there today and was the birthplace of LGBTQ+ charity Switchboard), Sisterwrite on Upper Street in Islington, News From Nowhere in Liverpool, the Lavender Menace in Edinburgh, and even bookshops overseas like Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia.

In fact, Gay’s the Word relied on their American counterparts for much of their stock, as few LGBTQ+ books were published in the UK. In 1984, HM Customs and Excise raided the shop under the assumption that it was importing and selling pornographic material. They seized thousands of pounds’ worth of stock, including titles by writers such as Jean Genet, Christopher Isherwood and Gore Vidal, and the directors of the shop were charged with conspiracy to import indecent books. After two years, the charges were dropped and the case against Gay’s the Word was dismissed.

For the next twenty years, Gay’s the Word continued to operate. By the early 2000s, however, the business was in trouble. It was during this time that Uli Lenart, who is now Gay’s the Word’s deputy manager, began working at the shop. “I was given the job and instantaneously sat down and told that the bookshop had months to stay open,” he recalls. “It was running on financial fumes. Essentially, it was looking like game over. There was uncertainty about what to do and, indeed, whether anything could be done.”

By that point, Gay’s the Word was the sole torchbearer for the UK’s queer bookshop scene. “One-by-one, not just domestically but internationally in places like America, independent queer bookshops began to close,” Uli says. “It was a common story as to why: gentrification, rising rents, digitisation, the loss of the net book agreement, price fixing, cheaper shopping online, plus mainstream bookshops like Barnes and Noble and Waterstones coming in. There was lots of competition. It felt like death by a thousand paper cuts. There were all these very challenging obstacles.”

The network that Gay’s the Word existed in had crumbled, and those working in the shop began to feel like the sole survivors. “It was a lonely time,” Uli says. “It was also challenging because there were fewer people coming through the door. It was difficult to keep the faith. Questions were asked about whether our time had come, whether our mission had been fulfilled.”

Still, with what Uli describes as “youthful naivety”, he believed that something could be done to save Gay’s the Word. While not “fully cognisant of the numerous challenges and difficulties” he might encounter, he met with Tim Teeman, a journalist and Gay’s the Word regular, and together they devised a plan.

“A big issue at the time was visibility,” says Uli. “It was before the big kick-off of social media, which has really democratised representation and the ability for spaces like independent bookshops to communicate and interact with their demographic. At that point in time, really any information or news stories about the shop were really constrained to our ability to get coverage in the queer press. That proved a challenge.”

Uli was adamant that any campaign they launched remained constructive. “I didn't want a narrative that was too worthy or pleading,” he adds. “I wanted people to feel good and positive about their interaction with the shop, even with it in a state of precarity.”

At the time, the Cash-for-Honours scandal, which saw political parties accused of giving away life peerages in return for donations and loans, was ripping through Parliament. Inspired by groups like Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners – who utilised a headline from The Sun for their now-famous charity fundraiser, “Pits and Perverts”, in 1984 – those working to support Gay’s the Word called their campaign “Cash for Honours”. “It was a shelf-sponsorship campaign,” Uli explains. “It was affordable: you could donate £100 and you'd have a shelf sponsored in your name. It had great traction with authors such as Sarah Waters and Ali Smith, right down to regular customers. We have [the names of those who donated] up in the bookshop still to this day.”

The campaign picked up traction in the mainstream press, including The Guardian and The Times, where Tim Teeman called it “one of the most enduring symbols of gay life in London”. Sponsorship money poured in and “we got our ballast back,” says Uli. “The bookshop has been independently self-sustaining and profitable year-on-year ever since.”

Of course, the “Cash for Honours” campaign wasn’t the only boon for Gay’s the Word. In 2014, the film Pride, was released. Telling a fictionalised account of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and their efforts to support striking miners in Wales and featuring scenes set in the shop, it introduced a whole new generation to Gay’s the Word.

“The way I see it is that in the 1980s, a kindness went out into the world,” says Uli. “There was solidarity with a community who were commonly under persecution by the powers that be. When the film was made, it felt that kindness reverberated back to the shop. That was an incredible uplift for us. People, especially the young generations, were able to understand a little bit of what this space is about.

“It was always designed to more than just a bookshop, but a community resource and a space for a connection.”

When Fern and their partner Ren opened their queer bookshop, Paperxclips, in Belfast in 2022, they, too, wanted their business to be more than just a place to find your next LGBTQ+ read. Housed in a unit in an old linen mill, the shop sells books, but is also home to a café, a barber, a trans lending library and an archive of rare and erotic LGBTQ+ literature.

“What we’ve tried to do – and what a lot of other queer bookshops are trying to do – is create a more comfortable and ethical place to come and hang out,” explains Fern. “We are perfectly happy for someone to come to the shop and if they bring their own food and drink and charge their phone and read for a few hours, they don't have to buy anything in order to exist in that space.”

This attitude means that Paperxclips has become a place for people to gather. Along with regular events like a weekly writing group and craft sessions, they host a monthly community queer stand-up comedy night. They also facilitate community organising. “It feels really powerful to say yes if a group wants to have a meeting about, say, a Palestine solidarity march at the shop,” says Fern. “Or if people want to do a Trans Day of Remembrance event. The shop feels like a natural place to do that, surrounded by the comfort and safety of your community.”

Part of the desire for Paperxclips to become a community hub was, Fern admits, selfish. If they were going to spend all their time there, they wanted it to be a place where they could hang out with people too. “And the fact that there's a barber shop there is because I'm a barber and it's cheaper to run one business than two.”

The idea for the shop solidified during the pandemic, but was inspired by other LGBTQ+ bookshops, both in the UK and in Australia – as Fern says: “The shop is built on the shoulders of giants.” They had been to Gay’s the Word and Hares and Hyenas in Melbourne, but it wasn’t until they visited Category Is Books in Glasgow in 2018 that they felt like opening their own bookshop in Belfast might be possible. “Both Glasgow and Belfast are working class towns with growing queer scenes,” explains Fern. “We saw the community's reaction to how [Category Is Books] were doing things and that was very inspirational. The way they went about doing business was very similar to how we had pictured things if we were going to do it.”

Belfast, Fern says, felt ready for it. And indeed, since Paperxclips opened, they’ve received support from established LGBTQ+ organisations in the city, as well as from people coming in off the street. “You can go to Waterstones and while they might have queer books, they are the ones that they know are going to sell really well,” Fern says. “Whereas you can come to our shop, browse for an hour and find something that was first published in the '70s that you won't find elsewhere. People want that experience.”

Paperxclips logo

In 2022, the New York Times ran a story about how sales of queer romance novels have surged. Using insights from NPD BookScan, which provides data on book sales in the US, they reported that sales of queer romance had increased 740 per cent over a five-year period; around 850,000 LGBTQ+ romance books were sold in 2021 alone. Meanwhile, according to an article in the Advocate that cited a report by market research company Circana, between 2022 and 2023, 6.1. million LGBTQ+ fiction books were sold in the US, a 173 per cent increase from 2019.

It's a similar story in the UK. “Books with LGBTQ+ themes are, if anything, more prevalent on bestseller charts,” an article in The Bookseller noted, “boosted by readers in the great TikTok revolution of late.” Overall, they suggested, those in publishing are optimistic about the success of queer books.

Abi Fellows has worked in the book trade since she finished university in 2001, first as a bookseller and now as an agent at the DHH Literary Agency, where she represents authors such Jon Ransom, Juno Roche and Michael Handrick. She says it’s difficult to pinpoint a moment when things began to shift for queer publishing, although points to the success of Alice Oseman’s graphic novel series Heartstopper, which is also a hit TV show on Netflix, as a moment when publishers started wanting to acquire more queer books. “I feel like there was almost a bit of a feeding frenzy,” she says. “Publishers saw books working on their competitors' lists and wanted a piece of that.”

For a long time, Abi notes, queer books were “traditionally really literary”. However, as the sales figures reported by the New York Times prove, the landscape has shifted significantly in recent years. “There’s still a lot of work to be done on this, but I think those books are no longer siloed,” Abi adds. “They're not just for queer people. They are books that straight people want to read as well. A rom-com is a rom-com.”

Cal Kenny, a senior commissioning editor at Sphere fiction, an imprint of Little, Brown, agrees. “The thing that I have mainly seen is the demand for these books from readers, across all ages and demographics, has proven to publishers that there is a market for them,” they say. “So now we think about them in a much more ambitious way, especially with the popularity in recent years of queer romance and romantasy with queer themes. The rise of those genres has made everybody feel much more comfortable in the idea that queer books aren't just for queer readers. They're for everyone.”

Cal points to the success of Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue as a significant moment that shifted attitudes. It’s something they took with them when publishing the writer and actor Ryan O’Connell’s novel Just By Looking At Him. “One of the things that I thought was really exciting about it at the time was that it was very frank, and a little bit disgusting, on the specifics of queer sex,” they say. “I leant into that in a huge way with the positioning of it and with the marketing.”

When Cal posted on their own Twitter account about the book, they were taken aback by the response. “Loads of people were requesting copies. So I think on a personal level, that was the first time that I noticed that the demand was evident. People were very excited about things where sex wasn't just a metaphor. They wanted the sex. That was really exciting.”

Publishing, however, is an increasingly trends driven industry, something that Cal and Abi are cognisant of. “But queerness is not a trend,” Cal says. “It’s why [publishers need to] invest in queer writers who are writing in every genre, and not just writing about queer experiences. I think true representation and true equity comes when we have queer writers, trans writers, non-binary writers writing police procedurals, when we have them writing big non-fiction tomes about history that aren’t necessarily just queer history. That's how I think we safeguard these artists.”

“More range would be really nice,” echoes Abi. “For example, I still don't think we see enough queer publishing that centres older people. I just want to say to editors at publishing houses, ‘Queer people and queer books aren't a monolith. We've got so many different stories.'”

Both highlight how significant the rise of LGBTQ+ bookshops across the country are in proving to publishers that there’s a dedicated audience for queer literature. “It's brilliant, visible evidence of the appetite for these books,” says Abi. “It also speaks to how many people are LGBTQ+. It's not a niche group of people.”

“Keeping a bookshop open in this economy is not a given thing and the many ways in which they've diversified to make space for queer readers and queer authors is so significant and valuable,” adds Cal. “I know I have really deeply benefited from it, both on a personal and professional level.”

In 2024, the UK can feel like an increasingly hostile place for LGBTQ+ people. For two decades, the number of LGBTQ+ venues across the country has shrunk. Successive Tory governments have hacked away at the safety that many were beginning to feel with their divisive emphasis on “culture wars”. Transphobia is rife in all corners of society, particularly within the media and political classes. And figures released by the Office of National Statistics, reported here by Stonewall, show that anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime has increased dramatically over the last five years.

Taken together, it makes the success and proliferation of LGBTQ+ bookshops and queer literature all the more significant. Furthermore, these new businesses are recreating the solidarity shared by queer-specific bookshops across the country that Uli says Gay’s the Word once relished.

“We perceive this emergent and new generation of queer bookshops and bookshops that have great queer curation as having family back again,” he adds. “What we always felt instinctively from the very start was that for a young person, or any person, who lives closer to that bookshop in Glasgow, or that bookshop in Leeds, or that bookshop in Manchester, is that there's going to be increased visibility and accessibility for that person. So the idea of there being this resurgent ecosystem throughout the UK, and hopefully beyond it, of more queer bookshops and more queer spaces is a heartening thing. It’s the world we want to live in.”

Both Rosie and Fern have felt the significance of this. When starting Juno Books, Rosie says that staff from The Lighthouse Bookshop, a long-standing radical bookshop in Edinburgh, were “super helpful”. Fern, meanwhile, says that Bug and Finn, who run Category Is Books, were always on hand to answer questions they had when opening Paperxclips. “We wouldn't be able to exist without Gay's The Word and Category Is Books,” they add. “None of this would have happened without the backing of those people.”

This sense of community is woven into the very DNA of LGBTQ+ bookshops. It’s also a way of combating any rising anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric while providing a safe haven for queer people. “We get people who come to the shop because it's a place where they can feel respected,” says Fern. “They don't have to be constantly vigilant about what people are thinking about them. It feels very special to be able to provide that space. I feel very grateful, especially when it comes to younger queer people who haven't found a space where they belong yet, that they feel happy and comfortable in the shop and want to tell their friends about it.”

For Rosie, Juno Books is the kind of space she wished that she’d had as a queer person growing up. “It’s the best thing ever seeing young people get excited about seeing books that they’ve heard about on a shelf in a proper bookshop rather than something they have to furtively order online,” she says. “I had a grown man, not even that old, crying in the young adult section because of how much that would have meant to him growing up. It's just lovely.”

When asked about how he feels about the role Gay’s the Word has played in his life, Uli gets emotional. “I can't even begin to put into words what an incredible special space this is, and how many wonderful and nurturing interactions happen here on a daily basis, and have done for such a wonderful amount of time,” he says.

There’s power in recommending someone a book, especially for queer people. “You are suggesting something that someone is going to put into their mind and distil through their heart,” Uli says. “Being able to be a conduit to that experience of finding solace and sanctuary in words, and hopefully within themselves so they can go forth joyously, is such an incredibly, incalculably beautiful thing.”

He pauses. “I think that's probably why other bookshops have opened. It's because of the magic and wonder of doing what we do. It really is the greatest honour of my life.”