Growing a queer LGBT+ Books Archive
Lavender Menace queer LGBT+ books archive aims to give space to hard-to-find and out-of-print queer LGBT+ books and make them accessible to the community by establishing a ground-breaking digital and physical archive, supported by an interactive blog and our social media.
We grew out of Lavender Menace which first opened as a lesbian and gay bookshop in Edinburgh in 1982. Founded by Sigrid Nielsen and Bob Orr, the name was revived in 2019, as part of the Stonewall 50 celebrations. You can find more about us here.
Queer LGBT+ books archive blog
We have been blogging about the books in our growing archive since May 2020. And we invite you to comment. Tell us about your part of the queer library. And take part in readers’ conversations. None of this would have been possible when we opened the shop in the 1980s. We also post regularly on our social media.
How to get involved
As restrictions continue, we are encouraging you to record your own collection of your own queer LGBT+ books and share it with us.
What we’ve been up to recently
We took part in an online event with LGBT Health and Wellbeing live streamed on Tuesday 29 June. with Meet the Authors with Elix Hwang and Ellen Galford in conversation with Sigrid Nielsen. Here’s the full recording of the event. With many thanks to Jules Stapleton Barnes.
We’re collaboratedwith the LGBTQ+ network on Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) with a live streamed event on Tuesday 15 June at 6pm as part of their Festival of Pride and Knowledge 2021. Keep an eye out on our social media.
LGBT History Month 2021, saw us collaborating with Edinburgh City Libraries and Pretty Bright producing a video call Unsung: How queer books tell our story. The first streaming of the video was followed up by a live Question and Answer session. Here’s the complete production.
Unsung: The queer books that tell our story from Howard Elwyn-Jones on Vimeo.
We have been contributing to our own pages in the amazing Somewhere: For Us magazine now well on to being a queer LGBT+ sensation. The articles we write reflect what it was like to run Lavender Menace and West & Wilde Bookshops in the 1980s and 1990s. We also feature reviews of books from our collection by guest reviewers.
The future beyond the pandemic
We continue to work with our main LGBT+ partner Lighthouse Bookshop who are housing the main part of the archive. And with their co-operation we are planning a community meeting when the time is right, to publicise the archive locally and to gauge support for its long-term development.
We will also be launching a fund-raising effort and a range of merchandise designed by Kate Charlesworth to promote our services.