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The shelves of Gay’s The Word, the venerable LGBTQ+ bookshop in London’s Bloomsbury, are full of promising avenues: from The Queer Arab Glossary, “the first published collection of Arabic LGBTQ+ slang”, to Queen James, an alternative biography of King James I, to a trek across the lesbian bars of America called Moby Dyke. The book with the best title, though? Manager Uli Lenart fetches a paperback by Thom James Carter, which offers an analysis of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons: They Came to Slay: The Queer Culture of DnD.
The dazzling variety in Gay’s The Word – it stocks not just “classic” fiction and non-fiction by Alan Hollinghurst or Audre Lorde but also fantasy, spirituality, self-help and sex, comics, magazines and poems – has been its ethos for 46 years. It was opened in 1979 by a man called Ernest Hole and his colleagues from a gay socialist group called Icebreakers. (“I don’t think, if you are going to be the founder of a very serious gay bookshop, you can have a better name than Ernest Hole,” Lenart says.) They saw a gap in the market for “a bookshop that catered to a queer person from a 360-degree perspective”, says Lenart, “not simply on the basis of their desire”. Started a decade after homosexuality was legalised in England – making it the oldest bookshop of its kind in Britain – it aimed to present an unashamed front; no discreet signage or blacked-out windows here. The name was cheerily taken from Ivor Novello’s last musical. “It was very much a declaration of the fact that we’re here, we’re present and we’re not obfuscating who we are,” says Lenart, a wiry, zealous advocate who has worked in the store for 20 years.
The path wasn’t easy. There was a Customs and Excise raid in 1984, based on the accusation that it was selling “indecent” material, several smashed windows and fluctuating levels of business. But it has survived, in part due to its cult status among readers and authors. Once, when the office printer broke down, there wasn’t enough money to replace it, but when novelist Sarah Waters heard about it she sent a new one. “It’s a bricks and mortar bookshop that has a very tender place in a lot of people’s hearts,” says Lenart. As well as selling books, it has long been a meeting place for communities and discussion groups, not least the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners group, as immortalised in the hit 2014 film Pride. “There’s a lot of affection and care.”
The criterion for inclusion is that the book is good, and “centres” a queer experience; the remit now goes beyond “gay” or “lesbian”, with trans, nonbinary or bisexual stories coming to the fore. Whereas at the height of the Aids crisis there was a proliferation of literature for those desperate to find out more, recently there has been an “absolute mushroom cloud explosion” in young adult literature, says Lenart, who names Here to Slay by Radhika Sanghani as a notable new addition. Other top sellers are Sunburn, a coming-of-age story set in 1990s rural Ireland by Chloe Michelle Howarth; Evenings and Weekends, by Oisín McKenna; and A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley. The store also sells badges, and “the tote bags are massively popular”.
If it was once an outlier, there are now many other queer bookshops opening across the country. “It’s beautiful to see,” says Lenart. Does that make Gay’s The Word the hot, wise aunt to the younger generation, then? He laughs. “We can run with that. I’d be the dowager any day.”
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