Lavender Menace: Keeping alive the spirit of Edinburgh’s pioneering queer bookshop
Literary stars Val McDermid and Jackie Kay backing fight to keep unique archive open
There are some 3,500 books, all catalogued, mainly rare titles now out of print. Alongside them in St Margaret’s House, the towering 1970s former NHS offices at Meadowbank, are nearly 200 magazines, ten folders of badges, four films, one board game, and eight boxes containing “various ephemera”. And the collection continues to grow, writes Emma Newlands.
It has the feeling of being a lifetime’s work, and has been accumulated over the course of half a century. The founders of the Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive are Sigrid Nielsen and Bob Orr, who founded the original bookshop of the same name. Opening in 1982, in Forth Street, on the edge of the New Town close to the city’s so-called Pink Triangle of pubs and clubs, it aimed to be not just a resource of lesbian and gay literature, but also a safe space for anyone who wanted to use it.
One supporter wondered if there were enough books to stock Scotland’s first lesbian and gay bookshop. They needn’t have worried. Sigrid and Bob managed to fill the shelves and Lavender Menace would go on to flourish.
“There was a time when being any sort of queer in Edinburgh was an existence where you could not be out and proud, but Lavender Menace bookshop was part of changing that,” Edinburgh tour guide Fraser Horn, who runs Street Historians, told The Inquirer.
“It let people share themselves and their stories, and feel less alone. The archive has then become a place which helps the community stay connected, while furthering original research into what it means to be on the fringes of society. Basically it’s of incalculable value.”
Keeping the doors open
Scotland’s only queer book archive now faces an uncertain future.
Its home, a brightly coloured space in creative hub Scot ART in the labyrinthine structure that is St Margaret’s House, not only preserves the past, it also provides a present-day backdrop for events and meet-ups.
With £150,000 in National Lottery funding set to run out within weeks, Lavender Menace is looking to safeguard its future. It has launched a crowdfunder to raise the thousands of pounds required to pursue its “vital work preserving LGBTQ+ literary history”, and continue to keep its doors open as long as possible.
The crowdfunder states: “We’re now facing closure due to the funding landscape. We’ve been applying for money to keep going and have had no successful bids - it is now harder than ever to request funding from large-scale donors.”
Among those to support the fundraiser so far are Scottish writing stars poet Jackie Kay and crime author Val McDermid, as well as fellow Auld Reekie booksellers The Portobello Bookshop and The Cookbook Shop Edinburgh, and hundreds of individual donors. Fraser has vowed to donate some of the proceeds of his tours.
From a cloakroom in a nightclub
The pioneering bookshop originally grew out of years of LGBT+ bookselling in the Scottish capital ignited in 1976 by Open Gaze bookstall founded by Orr as part of the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group’s Gay Information Centre on Broughton Street.
Lavender Menace was bankrolled by a bookstall Nielsen and Orr ran in the cloakroom of Fire Island, which was claimed to be “Edinburgh’s first fully-fledged gay disco”, located on Princes Street and now a branch of Waterstone’s.
Later, Lavender Menace became West & Wilde Bookshop on Dundas Street, which welcomed key writers from the community across the globe, including Armistead Maupin, David Leavitt and Edmund White. Among their notable guests was Karla Jay, one of the original New York Lavender Menaces, a group of radical lesbians who reclaimed what was originally a derogatory term used against homosexual women in the feminist movement. West & Wilde closed in 1997.
Lavender Menace returned about two decades later, inspired by the play Love Song to Lavender Menace by James Ley about the early days of the bookshop. It was initially a project created by Nielsen and Orr to celebrate the 50th anniversary in 2019 of the Stonewall Riots.
‘You opened up my world’
The total has already more than tripled its initial £5,000 target to keep the lights on for three months while it works on securing longer-term funding.
The hope is to raise the £22,500 required to stay operational with staff for six more months, which “crucially, would show funders that the community is engaged with our work and willing to support us”. The ideal scenario is to ultimately bring in double this amount to run the archive for a year.
Some donors to the crowdfunder have shared their own stories of support from the bookshops.
One, known as Ann, said: “Thank you for being my safe space over 40 years ago. You opened up my world.” Another, called Andrew, credited the original bookshop with being “a place of safety and wonder when I was a teenager”.
The current funding appeal was launched in a joint event with Edinburgh Art Festival, which welcomed “queer literary icon” Sarah Schulman - who was among the authors and activists to visit West & Wilde back in the day - to promote her new book The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity.
She said: “All over the world queer people are losing ground… Lavender Menace Queer Book Archive is one of many grassroots knowledge bases that are threatened, and now is the time to support them with gratitude.”
Mairi Oliver, owner of Lighthouse Bookshop, which bills itself as Edinburgh’s radical bookshop and originally stored the archive, said: “Lavender Menace is such a vital, living piece of Scotland’s queer and literary heritage. We know the archive is beloved and valued and relevant but those things don’t guarantee its survival, so we’ll always be ready to support and champion its future.”
Archive co-founder Nielsen said: “We are facing major challenges as a community… meanwhile, funding is becoming scarcer for all queer or progressive groups. We want to survive and preserve the resources and the knowledge we’ve collected over 40 years, and so we are calling on the community for your support.”
The archive has been in its current premises since 2022, and says those donating to the crowdfunder are supporting the only regularly accessible public space in Scotland dedicated to LGBTQI+ cultural heritage. It has also seen the number of visitors (who “come to research LGBTQI+ history, develop creative work, and build connections across generations ) jump by 56 per cent year on year in 2024-25.
Both Nielsen and Orr now welcome the progress to date of the crowdfunder, with the latter telling the Edinburgh Inquirer that it “gives us the space to achieve further funding towards a more sustainable future”.
Neilsen added: “Our books, queer ephemera, oral history interviews and meeting space are there to say ‘you belong’ - and with the public’s help, we’ll keep broadcasting that message.”