Gays the word photos
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 collective. The bookshop was set up in January by a group of male lover socialists as a community space where all profits were funnelled back into the business. This ethos continues today with shelves bursting with books and the space used for book and community events, all stewarded by four members of staff: Uli, Jim, Erica, and Pao. Across the website, you'll locate details about our history; features in reproduce , 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 publication reviewer, event coordinator, author interviewer and is a member of
The Book Society.
Jim is a bookseller and the accounts manager, working here since
He has been a voracious reader since he was a child, and now
Gay’s The Word: the proudest bookseller in Britain
The shelves of Gay’s The Pos, the venerable LGBTQ+ bookshop in London’s Bloomsbury, are full of promising avenues: from The Queer Arab Glossary, “the first published collection of Arabic Gay 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 finest title, though? Manager Uli Lenart fetches a paperback by Thom James Carter, which offers an examination 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 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's The Word
Books
New & Prize-winning
Fiction, Nonfiction, Young Adult Fiction, Classics, Poetry, Plays, Infrequent Books, Coming Out,
plus Gay's The Word and
LGSM merchandise
in our online shop!
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Pre-Orders
Want to pre-order
a hotly anticipated title?
Check out our Pre-Orders page for a selection of upcoming books with both
UK and European shipping available online.
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OUR EVENTS
Online and in shop, we host book launches, author signings, readings, and panel discussions.
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OUR HISTORY
We are the UK's oldest LGBT+ bookshop, opening in January at 66 Marchmont Street.
About Us
OUR COMMUNITY
Online and in shop, we provide meeting space for society groups and resources.
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UK
Another way to support
Gay's The Word
Want an alternative to Amazon?
Or to bargain a non-LGBTQ book?
We've got our own shop front on UK.
All purchases through our link mean we get 30% of the sale.
Plus,
Bishopsgate Institute
About this Archive
Administrative Biographical History
Gay's the Word is the UK's oldest LGBT bookshop, established in January by a small organization of people from Gay Icebreakers, a gay socialist group, as a community space where all profits were funnelled back into the business. For a period of time it was the only LGBTQ+ bookshop in England.
In , 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 adv as the Joy of Male lover Sex and Joy of Womxn loving womxn Sex were among the books seized. Directors were eventually charged with conspiracy to import indecent books under the Customs Consolidation Act
A campaign was place in motion and the charges were vigorously defended. A defence fund was set up and raised over £55, from the public. Many well-known writers also gave their support. Newspaper articles appeared, various MPs visited the shop and questions were asked in the House of Commons. The charges were eventually dropped in