Gays the word photos
Gay’s The Word: inside England’s only LGBTQ bookshop
Unassumingly sandwiched between a phone restore shop and a café, Gay’s The Word has stood steadfastly on Bloomsbury’s Marchmont Street for 40 years.
The UK’s first LGBTQ bookshop has managed to outlive all its fellows – including Edinburgh’s West and Wilde, Brighton’s Out, and Charing Cross Road’s Silver Moon – which have all fallen victim to the economic pressures independent businesses so often face. As a outcome, Gay’s The Word is one of only two extant queer bookshops in the country. (The other is Glasgow’s Category Is Books, a newcomer which opened in September last year.)
The shop, which was willed into life by founder Ernest Hole, first opened its doors on 17 January 1979. With squatters in its basement, the rent was affordable; but securing the lease nevertheless proved a difficult task. The council were reluctant to allow the space to a gay establishment – in part due to an assumption it was a prank, given Ernest’s surname.
“They said it would be a porn bookshop because that’s what gay bookshops were in those days,” says manager Jim MacSweeney, who has worked there since 1989. “Our very first ads said: ‘London’
About Us
More than a just bookshop...
Gay's The Word is the UK's oldest LGBT bookshop and a touchstone for the broader LGBT people. The bookshop was set up in January 1979 by a group of gay socialists as a community room where all profits were funnelled support into the business. This ethos continues today with shelves bursting with books and the room used for publication and community events, all stewarded by four members of staff: Uli, Jim, Erica, and Pao. Across the website, you'll find details about our history; features in print, radio, and film; photographs and recordings from past events; and a curated selection of books in our online shop.
Our Booksellers
Uli is the bookshop manager. He loves literary fiction, literary non-fiction, and vintage homosexual ephemera. He is a book reviewer, event coordinator, author interviewer and is a member of
The Publication Society.
Jim is a bookseller and the accounts manager, functional here since 1989.
He has been a voracious reader since he was a youngster, and now enjoys reading history, fiction, memoir, and biography.
Pao is a bookse
Gay’s The Word: the proudest bookseller in Britain
The shelves of Gay’s The Word, the venerable Homosexual 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 investigation of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons: They Came to Slay: The Queer Culture of DnD.
It has a very tender place in a lot of people’s hearts
Uli Lenart
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 male 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 finer name than Ernest Hole,” Lenart says.) They saw a gap in th
Bishopsgate Institute
About this Archive
Administrative Biographical History
Gay's the Word is the UK's oldest LGBT bookshop, established in January 1979 by a small community of people from Gay Icebreakers, a gay socialist community, as a people space where all profits were funnelled back into the business. For a period of period it was the only LGBTQ+ bookshop in England.
In 1984, Customs and Excise mounted a large-scale raid and seized thousands of pounds' worth of stock. Works by Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood, and Jean Genet as well as the Joy of Gay Sex and Joy of Female homosexual Sex were among the books seized. Directors were eventually charged with conspiracy to import indecent books under the Customs Consolidation Proceed 1876.
A campaign was set in motion and the charges were vigorously defended. A defence fund was fix up and raised over £55,000 from the public. Many well-known writers also gave their back. Newspaper articles appeared, various MPs visited the shop and questions were asked in the Home of Commons. The charges were eventually dropped in 1986.
Scope and Content
Legal documents, press and publicity material, leaflets, facts pac