You can now watch the recording of this event online
In 1984, UK Customs and Excise officers raided Gay’s The Word bookshop in London and seized over 140 titles on the grounds they were “indecent or obscene”. Dubbed “Operation Tiger”, this was the start of a series of raids and confiscations up and down the country targeting queer booksellers, mail-order services, and book shops, including the original Lavender Menace book shop.
To mark the 40th anniversary of Operation Tiger, we invited Graham McKerrow, Sarah Pyke, and Sigrid Nielsen to discuss obscenity, queer bookselling in the 1980s, and the campaign to save these books from censorship.
Graham McKerrow is a journalist and political activist who edited leading gay and HIV/AIDS publications. He trained as a journalist on local newspapers and in 1980 he joined Gay News as a reporter and investigated police harassment and failings. The following year he co-founded and then co-edited Capital Gay. In response to Operation Tiger, he coordinated the Defend Gay’s the Word Campaign. In the 1990s, he edited the magazine Positive Nation for people with HIV/AIDS. He then spent 15 years at the Guardian, ultimately as editor of the Guardian and Observer Syndication Service.
Sigrid Nielsen is a graduate of St John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In Edinburgh in 1979 she joined Bob Orr in Open Gaze, the bookstall he ran at Edinburgh Gay Centre, and worked in other bookselling and publishing groups. She and Bob opened Lavender Menace, Scotland’s first Lesbian and Gay Community Bookshop, as a partnership in 1982. Sigrid managed author readings, mail order lists, and bookshop events. She co-edited In Other Words: Writing as a Feminist (Hutchinson Education, 1987) and published articles and short stories. In 2019, she and Bob revived Lavender Menace as an LGBT+ books archive and heritage organisation.
Dr Sarah Pyke is Munby Fellow in Bibliography 2023–2024 at Cambridge University Library and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. She has taught at London Rare Books School, Anglia Ruskin University, and the University of Roehampton and has held fellowships at the School of Advanced Study’s Institute of English Studies and Freie Universität Berlin. With Malcolm Noble, she has recently written on queer bibliography, and a co-edited special issue of The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America on this emerging sub-discipline was published in June 2024. With Leila Kassir, Sarah co-curated the online exhibition Seized Books! LGBTQ+ books and censorship in 1980s Britain for Senate House Library, University of London.
The recording of this event is now available to watch here and on our YouTube channel.
