The shelves of Gay’s The Word, the venerable LGBTQ+ bookshop in London’s Bloomsbury, are full of promising avenues: from The Queer Arab Glossary, “the first published collection of Arabic LGBTQ+ 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 best title, though? Manager Uli Lenart fetches a paperback by Thom James Carter, which offers an analysis of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons: They Came to Slay: The Queer Culture of DnD.
Fiction and DVDs on display at Gay’s the Word
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 1979 by a man called Ernest Hole and 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 bookshop, you can have a better name than Ernest Hole,” Lenart says.) They saw a gap in the market for “a bookshop that catered to a queer person from a 360-degree perspective”, says Lenart, “not simply on the basis of their desire”. Started a decade after homosexuality was legalised in England – making it the oldest bookshop of its kind in Britain – it aimed to present an unashamed front; no discreet signage or blacked-out windows here. The name was cheerily taken from Ivor Novello’s last musical. “It was very much a declaration of the fact that we’re here, we’re present and we’re not obfuscating who we are,” says Lenart, a wiry, zealous advocate who has worked in the store for 20 years.
