The homophobic and censorship bookselling struggles of the 1980s.
It is not difficult to find the site of Edinburgh's Lavender Menace.
Find the corner of Broughton Street and York Place, a busy intersection between the central city and the northern neighbourhood of Leith. You will be a stone's throw from the tourists and trams of Princes Street. Walk down Broughton Street, a historic by-way that predates the neo-classical architecture of the city's New Town. Walk past the churches and late-night takeaways. In the distance you may spot the Mansfield Traquair, 'Edinburgh's Sistine Chapel'. Take the first right on Forth Street and pass the chic bistros and yoga studio. Continue until you find the stairwell leading to the building below flat 11a. Take a moment. You are standing at the entrance of what used to be the Lavender Menace bookshop.
Lavender Menace (1982-1986) was the first bookshop in Scotland that specifically catered to a gay and lesbian audience. It was the first free-to-access public gay and lesbian space in Scotland. It was one of two such stores in the United Kingdom, predated only by the Gay's The Word bookshop in London. The history of gay bookselling in the 1980s is full of victories and defeats, police raids and celebrity readings, transatlantic scandal and German sex dolls. Of the published histories that detail gay bookselling in the UK, few mention the Lavender Menace. Its history is found in newspaper clippings and the personal archive of Bob Orr, one of the bookshops founding members.
The decriminalisation of homosexuality occurred in England and Wales in 1967. It would take 14 years before homosexuality was, begrudgingly, decriminalised in Scotland. This legal victory was tempered by the realities of systemic resistance, as the 1980 edition for the official guidelines of police duties and procedures in Scotland still identified homosexuality with moral 'degeneration', social pollution, and paedophilia (as described in 'Scottish Criminal Law: Police Duties and Procedure', 1980).
Despite this, a lively gay and lesbian subculture began to emerge in Edinburgh. Gay Scotland 'Pub & Club' guide detailed a range of venues throughout the central city, including Key West Bar on Jamaica Street ('intimate & cruisy, mainly leather/denim'), Banana's Disco ('chic, busy, stifling'), and of course 'Edinburgh's Top Gay Disco' — Fire Island, found on Princes Street. Scottish Homosexual Rights Group (SHRG) and the publishing offices of Gay Scotland were found on Broughton Street, alongside cafés and the Lesbian and Gay Community Centre.
Lavender Menace was born out of a collective of SHRG members. This collective had established the 'Open Gaze' bookstall in the Gay Information Centre on Broughton Street in 1978. However, after some ideological differences with the SHRG, the collective resigned from 'Open Gaze' and established 'Lavender Menace.' The name 'Lavender Menace' took inspiration from the lesbian protest of the Second Congress to Unite Women (New York, 1970). The collective sold books at radical events across the UK between 1980-1981, as well as a temporary bookstall in the cloakroom of Edinburgh's Fire Island gay disco.
In late 1981 the group decided to open a full-time bookstore in Edinburgh. The owners of the bookstore would be Bob Orr, one of the original members of the Open Gaze collective, and Sigrid Nielsen, a community activist and operator for the Gay Scotland switchboard.
Both Bob and Sigrid had some hesitancy about running a private business, with notes on a projected budget explaining that 'all of the above … has been put together by a couple of amateurs. As soon as possible we should get advice from someone with experience of retail bookselling and/or accountancy expertise.' Despite this, posters soon emerged in Edinburgh gay venues, with a single screen-printed eye looking directly at the viewer, and bold font declaring 'LAVENDER MENACE — IS COMING'.
On 21 August 1982 Lavender Menace opened in the basement of 11a Forth Street. The store took in nearly £1,300 in 10 days. Sales during the Christmas period exceeded expectations. Within six months the store had achieved its expected annual profitability. Lavender Menace was a force of nature, supported through community donations and a small team of volunteers that helped behind the counter and dispatched mail order books. By August 1983 the store was holding festival book readings that became so popular that attendees had to sit underneath display tables.
The success of Lavender Menace was echoed by Gay's The Word in London. In 1983 The Bookseller predicted that the 1980s 'would be the decade of the gay novel' (quoted from 'Gay in the 80s'). One year later both bookshops would have their stock confiscated, their premises raided, and would eventually take HM Customs & Excise to court in the most high profile obscenity case since 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'.
At 9:20am on 10 April 1984 Glen McKee opened his front door to find two officers from HM Customs & Excise. McKee, one of the directors of the Gay's The Word bookshop, had experience dealing with police, and requested to see any legal right for the officers to search his property. The officers provided a Writ of Assistance, and proceeded to enter McKee's property. The officers interrogated McKee over the conduct of Gay's The Word bookshop, citing its sale of 'indecent' materials. They seized all of the bookshop's records and papers, including a subscription list for the shop newsletter, and a number of McKee's personal possessions, papers, and books (according to a report in 'The Bookseller' from 22 September 1984). McKee was detained for six hours, during which he was denied access to a solicitor or any other outside assistance.
At 1pm that same day additional officers from HM Customs & Excise entered the Gay's The Word bookshop. Customers were told to leave, and the officers told assistant manager Paul Hegarty to close the shop. The officers proceeded to spend five hours sorting imported titles — mostly from the USA — from UK books. Hegarty was cautioned and prevented from getting in contact with a solicitor. The officers finally left at 6pm with 800 volumes, as well as the shop's invoices, accounting records, address lists, and correspondence.
Officers proceeded to raid the homes of shop directors Amanda Russell and Jonathan Cutbill. Two months later, Customs issued a formal notice of 'seized' against 22 of the titles removed from the shop, citing that these works contravened the Customs Consolidation Act (1876). Furthermore, continued importation of certain American titles would be blocked, amounting to £11,000 worth of seized books, of which Gay's The World was still required to pay American publishers.
The Customs Consolidation Act (1876) gave HM Customs & Excise rights to seize 'indecent or obscene … books', with no specified time limit on how long materials could be detained. Importantly, the term 'indecent', as used in the Act, had neither elaboration nor statutory definition in UK law. While domestic titles could only be seized by the Obscene Publications Act (1959), the Customs Consolidation Act only applied to imported titles.
The Obscene Publications Act (1959) defined obscene works as 'tending to deprave and corrupt.' There was no such statutory definition for 'indecent' works used by the Customs Consolidation Act. Works classified as 'obscene' could claim defence of 'the public good,' as in the case of D H Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', but this was not a legitimate defence against the Customs Consolidation Act. This meant that in order to prove the literature seized by HM Customs & Excise was not indecent, the defence could not call evidence citing the work's literary or artistic merits. The sole test that may be applied was whether 'the ordinary man in the street' would consider the book to be indecent. As noted by 'The Bookseller' in 1984;
'The importer of a title has no way of knowing how the terms will be interpreted by Customs officers, magistrates or judges. A book can be prohibited import under [the Customs Consolidation Act], but lawfully on sale as a UK publication, to which the different test of the Obscene Publications Act applies.'
Some of the titles seized by HM Customs & Excise included works by Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood, and Jean Genet. A number of these works were core texts on university syllabi. Any UK republication of the exact same text was not seized.
The seizure of literature from Gay's The Word was part of HM Customs & Excise's 'Operation Tiger.' This was not the first instance of law enforcement's fractious relationship with gay literature. Earlier in 1984 officers seized 26 books from Lavender Menace in Edinburgh, and in an interview with 'Capital Gay' Bob Orr explained that this had happened at least four times previously. 'We are booksellers, not pornographers,' explained Glen McKee, 'as Customs officers would have discovered if they had paid us the courtesy of rational discussion' (as reported in 'The Scotsman' on 21 August 1985).
Geoffrey Robertson first defended the UK gay community in court in 1977. In the case of Mary Whitehouse v Denis Lemon and 'Gay News', social conservative and activist Mary Whitehouse CBE sued 'Gay News' for publishing 'The Love That Dares to Speak its Name' by James Kirkup. The poem, written from the viewpoint of a Roman centurion, portrays Jesus as gay, and intimates that he had sex with notable biblical figures. Whitehouse accused the newspaper and its publisher, Denis Lemon, of blasphemous libel. This was the first time in 56 years that UK blasphemy law had been trialled in court, and 28 years after Lord Denning had described blasphemy as 'a dead letter' (in 'Freedom Under the Law', 1949).
Geoffrey Robertson, an Australian-born barrister, took on the case. However, the defence was marred with difficulties. The presiding judge Alan King-Hamilton ruled that no literary or theological witnesses would be called to the stand, neither the poet, editor, nor publisher could be called as witness. Rather, King-Hamilton argued, the jury would already be able to interpret the poem for themselves. The test for blasphemy, the judge argued, was whether one could read a poem out loud without blushing.
The prosecution of 'Gay News' was successful, and the paper was fined £1,000. Denis Lemon was fined £500 and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment suspended. Both 'Gay News' and Lemon were ordered to pay the prosecution fees incurred by Whitehouse, totalling £7,763. An appeal for this case reached the House of Lords, but was lost when the House ruled that blasphemous libel did not require the specific intent of blasphemy.
Nine years later Robertson would use the lessons learned during the Whitehouse v Lemon and 'Gay News' trial to argue on behalf of Gay's The Word.
The community outcry over Operation Tiger's seizure of materials from Gay's The Word was loud and clear. Throughout the summer of 1984 newspapers such as 'Gay News' and 'Gay Scotland' ran features encouraging their readers to hold fundraisers and write to their respective MPs. 'If we are to give Customs the huge raspberry they so richly deserve' wrote a newspaper advertisement, 'we need to keep up the pressure … Here are some suggestions as to how you can help …' The legal fund raised by the community totalled £50,000.
Both bookshops continued on, despite their depleted stocks. Lavender Menace hosted several events during the 1985 Edinburgh Festival, including the 'sparkling, extroverted Lancashire personality' Jeanette Winterson reading from her debut novel 'Oranges are not the only fruit'. 'Oranges' would later go on to win the 'Whitbread Award for a First Novel' and would be featured on innumerable English and Queer literature reading lists. The after-party was described in 'Contact' magazine as being a drunken affair, with several women 'stumbling around the shop, merrily putting greasy paws all over the nice books, and in some cases, even buying them!'
Gay publishing continued to thrive internationally. In 1982 Australia's radical press 'Gay Community News' was restructured into the 'Gay Publications Co-Operative', releasing the first issue of 'OutRage' later that year. 'OutRage' would increase in circulation to around 11,000 in 1995. U S publishing houses were exporting a great deal of gay literature to international markets. Even in Edinburgh the lesbian interest magazine 'Contact' began circulation in 1985, although a reader letter in Issue 3 complained that the £1.00 price was 'a lot dearer than other publications of the kind.'
Lavender Menace doubled during the evenings as a meeting place for gay and lesbian youth movements. In a 1983 documentary on gay life in Edinburgh, social worker John Hughes explains that 'this bookshop, 20 or 30 years ago, wouldn't have been allowed, and secondly would have been seen as a seedy and dirty kind of place. It's marvellous to have this bookshop now.'
The trial of Gay's the Word v HM Customs & Excise was scheduled for June 1985. In opting for a public trial, Robertson and the Gay's The Word team managed to secure the date for the hearing during the exact same week as London LGBT Pride demonstration. In 1985 this was the only LGBT Pride event in the UK, but it still attracted close to 10,000 community members and supporters. Notable support included the 'Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners' group, whose actions were recently celebrated in the Golden Globe nominated feature film 'Pride' (2014).
Unlike the Whitehouse v Lemon trial eight years earlier, the defence exhibited greater confidence during the trial. Evidence obtained from HM Customs & Excise revealed top-secret 'black-list' of homosexual publishers who were to be subject to scrutiny by the department, dispelling any notion that the raid on Gay's the Word was simply the result of bad practice.
The deciding blow came from a rather unusual source. During proceedings it became clear that the use of the Customs Consolidation Act by HM Customs & Excise had extended far beyond the confiscation of gay literature. Customs officers had, it was revealed, confiscated inflatable rubber women produced by German manufacturing company Conegate. This confiscation was in direct opposition to the European Union's Treaty of Rome, in which there could be no 'quantitative restriction' on imports between member states, and no arbitrary discrimination on trade.
The effect of this ruling was that Customs officers could no longer confiscate materials labelled as 'indecent', only those that would qualify as 'obscene'. The legal definition of 'obscenity' is materials with likelihood 'to deprave and corrupt', and had prior statutory definition under the Obscene Publications Act. None of the literature seized from Gay's The Word could be defined as obscene, and so HM Customs & Excise settled the case.
Shortly after the victory against HM Customs & Excise, Lavender Menace transitioned into the West and Wilde bookshop on Dundas Street. Opening on 1 August 1985, West and Wilde offered three times as much space as Lavender Menace, as well as a more accessible entrance and street-facing display window. 'To attract a wider section of the lesbian and gay community we badly needed more space' explained Bob Orr to 'Gay Scotland', 'when we were offered the new premises we jumped at the chance.' The new bookshop's name was taken from Oscar Wilde and Vita Sackville-West, two giants of gay literary history.
West and Wilde continued the commitment of Lavender Menace to be a community centre as well as a bookseller. It held evening events, distributed a reading list, and a hairdresser was briefly employed in the basement. Despite the AIDS crisis, Section 28, and a global recession, West and Wilde continued to open its doors into the late 1990s. In 1994 the shop launched a £10,000 development fund campaign, while current owners Raymond Rose and Bob Orr took on additional part-time work. The shop suffered two arson attacks in 1995, the first resulting in £15,000 worth of damages. West and Wilde finally closed its doors in late 1997 due to dwindling finances.
Gay's The Word continued to trade through the difficult 1990s, as well as the rise of online bookselling in the 21st century. In 2019 it celebrated its 40th anniversary with a special event at the British Library. Jim McSweeney, the manager of Gay's The Word for over 30 years, explained that 'more than anything working in this space reaffirms my faith in humanity. The customers, laughing with them and talking about books is a real pleasure and a privilege. It feels like coming home', (quoted in an article from 'Dazed' magazine, 27 February 2019).
More than 20 years after the closure of West and Wilde, a new queer bookshop opened in the southside of Glasgow. Category Is Books run by wife and wife duo Charlotte and Fionn Duffy Scott, opened its doors on Allison Street in September 2018. Since then it has been a community hub, offering a Trans-friendly pop-up barber shop and other events, on top of selling books.
In 2019 the Twitter handle '@menacesof2019' was launched by Sigrid Nielsen. Boasting a iconic purple eye, the handle announced 'Scotland's first LGBT bookshop returns for events, readings, and entertainment and bookselling in Edinburgh.' A partnership with Edinburgh's Lighthouse Bookshop allowed Lavender Menace to establish a temporary 'takeover' during Edinburgh's 2019 Pride weekend.
In the 1982 issue of 'The Radical Bookseller', Bob Orr wrote:
'Gay bookshops, perhaps even more than other radical bookshops, don't exist simply to sell books. They are a space for lesbians and gay men to meet, leave messages — and feel central, not marginal. Even the most well-stocked radical bookshop sells gay books largely as a sideline, because of the sheer numbers of non-gay titles. In a society where we ourselves are a sideline, a space of our own where we can find a literature of our own is a good point for moving into wider activities.'
