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Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive
- Membership number 7494
Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive was started in 2019. Its founders, Bob Orr and Sigrid Nielsen, have drawn on their experience opening Scotland’s first lesbian and gay bookshop, Lavender Menace, in 1982. This era has been called ‘the golden age of LGBT+ publishing’. It was a remarkable time not just for the sudden emergence of writers who brought a marginalised community into the light, but because it led to a book culture which offered safe spaces and support to LGBT+ people. Lavender Menace and its successor shop West & Wilde were among many independent bookshops which fostered LGBT+ creativity, visibility, and involvement.This vibrant time came to an end around 2000, due to changing economics in publishing, higher rents, and the growth of the internet. West & Wilde closed in 1997, as did all but one of the early LGBT+ and women’s publishers in the UK. Many of even the most popular and life-changing books have fallen out of print. And the social spaces the books generated, as well as LGBT+ pubs and discos, largely disappeared.Today a new generation knows little about these books, or the inspiration and increase in wellbeing they brought to people’s lives. This kind of history is not taught by the education system, or passed on within families. The Archive was founded to preserve the heritage of the liberation movement of the 70s, 80s and 90s – the books themselves, which trace a minority group’s empowering success story, and the LGBT+ gathering spaces bookshops offered. Realising the books they had sold were in danger of disappearing, Bob and Sigrid began to hold LGBT+ bookstalls and call for book donations, and now have around 1,000 volumes. The Archive has rented a studio at St Margaret’s House, and the space opened for events and visitors in June 2022. Here, working with the National Library of Scotland and others, this collection is being curated along professional lines, and provides a unique overview of queer writers of the period – both literary and amateur. The Archive collection continues to grow, and its Directors and team of volunteers are creating a digital classification system for the books, which will become a digital and interactive web-based database. The Archive regularly holds online and in-person events linked to the collection, featuring LGBT+ writers, just as Lavender Menace and West & Wilde did. Today the emphasis is on dialogue between writers of the older generation in conversation with younger writers. A recent event celebrated the opening of the bookshop 40 years ago.As part of its mission, the has promoted Scottish LGBT+ writers of the past, such as lesbian novelist and activist Iona McGregor and gay oral historian Bob Cant, in order to illuminate the personalities of an earlier era for LGBT+ people today. The Archive is a Community Interest Company, to date generating its income through giving talks, running a bookstall, selling Queer Writers heritage cards and bookmarks and community fundraising.
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