By Karli Korszeniewski
Queer bookstores are much more than businesses where books are bought and sold— they serve as community spaces for Queer representation and visibility, and have played a key role in gay liberation, says Sarah Dunne, a doctoral candidate in the History department at UC Santa Barbara.
“My research has uncovered the existence of a network of international booksellers who founded Queer bookstores across the world, in doing so, creating vital community spaces for their customers,” Dunne said.
These bookstores provided access to Queer reading material through in-person and mail-order shopping and also held author events for Queer writers. They organized early pride marches and fought the impounding of Queer publications by custom officials. Vitally important was that they shared information and undertook fundraising during the AIDS crisis, she said.
Sarah Dunne, a doctoral candidate in the History Department at UCSB gave a lecture at the Santa Barbara Library earlier this month on the role of bookstores in Queer culture.
Dunne’s talk Beyond Bookselling: How Queer Bookstores Shaped the Gay Liberation Movement was held at the Santa Barbara Public Library by the History department, co-sponsored by UCSB’s Sexuality & Gender resource center, and the Walter H. Capps Center.
Dunne graduated with honors from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland for her bachelor’s degree and received her master’s from Nottingham University in England. This year she was awarded a UCSB Graduate Humanities Research Fellowship and is serving as the 2023-2024 Mendell Graduate Fellow at UCSB’s Walter H. Capps Center for the study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life.
Dunne didn’t initially know any Queer bookstores and hadn’t thought about their history. She then felt inspired after watching the 2014 film “Pride,” that depicted a 1984 miners strike in Wales, UK. In it, the activist alliance Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, or LGSM, would use the bookstore Gay is the Word as its headquarters.
Before Queer bookstores, there had been little positive representation in publications regarding the LGBTQ community. But in the 1950s, there was a rise of pulp fiction lesbian novels, she said. These books were quite popular, with over 1.5 million copies sold, but could only be sold because they contained endings that punished them or condemned their sexuality, such as the main characters dying or turning straight.
Everything changed with the 1967 opening of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York City’s Greenwich Village, which focused on LGBTQ publications and was founded by Craig Rodwell. Dunne said Rodwell intended to open a place that not only sold LGBTQ work, but also provided a community space beyond the bar scene, and could be used for political organizing.
Dunne said the Oscar Wilde Bookshop was deeply connected with the 1969 Stonewall riots, serving as one of the locations for activist conversations. Rodwell contacted multiple newspaper outlets to get coverage on the first night of the uprising.
Rodwell organized New York City’s first Pride March in honor of the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall riots in 1970, originally called Christopher Street Liberation Day. Dunne said that half the money raised for the event was donated by Oscar Wilde Bookshop customers. “The hard-earned dollars of gay bookstore customers laid the groundwork for over 50 years of pride marches and festivals that we still enjoy today,” she said.
Sarah Dunne, UCSB history doctoral candidate, talks about the first Queer bookstore, the Oscar Wilde Bookstore, and its community support during and after the Stonewall riots of 1969.
Queer bookstores expanded in the 70s, which was possible because owners respected and helped each other’s businesses, instead of acting as competitors, Dunne said.
“I have discovered through my research the existence of a network of booksellers focused on helping one another in business and announcing the cause of gay liberation,” Dunne said. “Queer booksellers often encouraged prospective bookstore owners to set up shops in cities that did not have existing queer bookstores.”
Though these shops served as places for comfort, visibility, and community, Queer bookstores also faced challenges. “These haven stores were not safe from homophobia,” Dunne said. “Gay bookstores were susceptible to vandalism, robberies, threatening phone calls, and hate mail.” Queer bookstores across North America and the UK also routinely had their book shipments confiscated, after being classified as obscene.
Karli Korszeniewski is a second-year Film and Media Studies major at UC Santa Barbara. She is a Web and Social Media Intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.