How Queer Bookshops Changed the World: An Evening with AJ West and June Thomas

On the eve of indie bookshop week we're celebrating Queer bookshops in particular with an Edinburgh launch of AJ West's How Queer Bookshops Changed The World, hosted by to wondrous June Thomas, and followed by a Q&A bringing in Lavender Menace's iconic founders, Bob & Sigrid!

Travelling from Shakespeare and Company in Paris to Gay’s the Word in London to the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York, A.J. West has written the first history of these remarkable spaces. Tracing their evolution from under-the-counter operations to beloved out-and-proud institutions, West reveals how they stood at the vanguard of LGBTQ+ rights, offering support through the AIDS crisis and bringing the fight to Section 28.

How Queer Bookshops Changed the World celebrates cherished shops past and present, the ground-breaking books they championed when others wouldn’t, and the booksellers who demonstrated courage and community through it all.

Our Speakers:

A. J. West is an award-winning journalist and was the first openly gay BBC television newsreader in Northern Ireland. He is a former director of a national UK queer charity. His last novel The Betrayal of Thomas True was a No.2 Sunday Times bestseller. He has written extensively about queer issues for Gay Times, Attitude, the Independent, Daily Mail, Sun, Telegraph. He regularly appears on network television and radio as a panellist on current affairs programmes, often discussing queer topics.

June Thomas is a writer and podcaster, especially interested in lesbian history. Her first book, A Place of Our Own: Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women’s Culture, was published in 2024. She is now writing a biography of author and activist Rita Mae Brown, scheduled for publication in 2028.

Bob made his home in Edinburgh when he moved to study there from Glasgow in 1973. He set up SMG Bookstall in 1976 to raise funds to support the nascent Gay Centre in Broughton Street. In 1978 he expanded the stock and changed the name to Open Gaze. He worked with Sigrid Nielsen from 1979 and opened Lavender Menace Bookshop with her as a partner in August 1982. With his now husband, Raymond Rose he opened West & Wilde Bookshop five years later which traded until 1997. He was instrumental along with Sigrid Nielsen in establishing Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive in 2019.

Sigrid 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 left as a partner in 1987 and later 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.