I’m in Manchester, visiting my mom, for a few days, and on Friday I popped into the city center to meet a friend and take a look around. As anyone who has watched the original British Queer as Folk (or any of Russell T. Davies’ many Manchester-set dramas) knows, it’s now a very queer-friendly place. The Gay Village is one of the city’s main nightlife centers, and it’s marked on neighborhood maps for all the world to see. (I admit, though, that part of me loves this cheeky, very Mancunian, map calling the Village “3 gay people and 500 straights,” though I have no idea if that’s true.)
I was checking out queer bookstores, and it felt relevant that one of them is in Afflecks—”an emporium of eclecticism, a totem of indie commerce in Manchester's Northern Quarter”—in other words, one of those buildings that houses a warren of stalls, mostly selling things like anime, fetish clothing, and items that appear to be pre-seeded with the aroma of pachouli. It’s a magnet for outsiders, and the building is packed with signs reminding visitors that it is “no place for hate.” I don’t know the background there—if there have been incidents in the past, or if it’s part of a general campaign of positivity—but it feels like a nice encapsulation of the difference between Old Manchester, which is to say when I grew up there, and the city as it is today.
Back in the 1980s, I mostly went into the city to catch the train to Nottingham, where I went to university, or to go shopping at Grass Roots, a classic “radical bookshop” down near Piccadilly station. (There was also an amazing place called Paramount Books near the Arndale Center that sold American magazines. I assumed it was long gone, but a search suggests it’s still there, which is mind-blowing.)
Like most of Britain’s radical bookstores, Grass Roots had a great feminist section, more gay and lesbian books than I’d seen anywhere else, and lots of other sections like ecology, race, anarchism, and left politics. (I don’t know if this is true, but I have long assumed that just as porn was the big seller for U.S. gay bookstores—along with lots of fine literature—and recovery and spirituality titles kept U.S. women's bookstores in business, the U.K.’s radical bookstores paid their bills by selling books about drugs.)
Grass Roots was a safe space, but the hate speech was flying just about everywhere else. The idea that there might be two dedicated, specialist LGBTQ bookstores in central Manchester was unthinkable in the 1980s, but it’s almost banal today. (Needless to say, it’s not the only place that has changed this way. When I’m at home having to watch the kind of TV shows my mom tunes into—which is to say Britain’s most popular shows, most of which are British-coded as working-class—I’m shocked at how many gay men and lesbians are front and center. There were always queers on posh shows—showing off their Oxbridge smarts and Oscar Wilde wit—but now there are tons of basic homos all over the TV lineup.)
Anyway, I’ll spare you more of my Life on Mars thoughts about Manchester and just say that the two stores were fascinating. The Gay Pride Shop in Afflecks had more queer tchotchkes than I have ever seen in one place. We are talking DOZENS of different flags and bandanas and cocktail sticks and buttons and whatevsies celebrating different sections of the community. (Some examples: Abrosexual Pride, Agender Pride, Aromantic Pride, Asexual Pride, Bear Pride, Demiboy Pride, Demigirl Pride, etc.) I’ve seen queer merch before, but this was on a whole new scale.
On the other side of the space was a really well-stocked bookshop. I took this slightly weird photo so I could show my pal Hugh Ryan that they had lots of copies of his book, but you can see that they not only stock the paperback but also keep the hardback after the paperback comes out. (The same was true of other books—Tom Crewe’s The New Life, the big gay novel of the moment, but also Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show, and others.) They had clearly imported a bunch of books directly from the U.S.A., and it was just great to see so many different kinds of titles—light fare, serious stuff, the whole gamut. The books were also beautifully shelved, so you always knew what section you were in—perhaps a holdover from all that careful labeling of 50+ community Pride flags!
Unfortunately, though, chatting to the guy who was working in the bookshop, I learned that it’s closing in March or thereabouts. The merch stall will still be in Afflecks, but the books are going online-only. He told me that about 80 percent of book sales currently come from the Internet, so they’re bowing to reality. He didn’t know the reasoning, but as I mention in the feminist bookstore chapter of A PLACE OF OUR OWN, sidelines were always popular—not least because there’s a much higher markup on those items than on prices-printed-on-the-cover, heavy to ship, and space-consuming books.
A few blocks away, in Ancoats—which my Manchester-based friend Colm assures me is the up-and-coming part of town—is Queer Lit, part of Social Refuge, an unimaginably comfortable space that offers a really cozy-looking bar and coffee shop as well as the bookstore. Oh, and there’s a co-working space downstairs if you prefer typing in queer company.
The space is absolutely gorgeous. Comfy chairs, room to breathe (and not overhear your neighbor’s conversation), just really NICE. Unfortunately, though, I wasn’t that impressed with the bookshop. It’s possible that the guy I spoke with was on his first day there or something, because he didn’t seem to know the stock or even how the books were shelved. It turned out to be in a truly hard-to-fathom way, which was alphabetical by title, divided into sections for gay men, lesbians, and trans people.
This makes for a most peculiar browsing experience. I understand why stores separate out titles for gay men and lesbians, but if there are NO other distinctions, not even fiction and nonfiction, it can be really hard to find a book. For example, where would Hugh Ryan’s The Women’s House of Detention go? It’s written by a gay man, but it’s about lesbian and trans history. (They didn’t seem to have a copy in stock—at least that I could find!—so I can’t tell you.)
A sign outside claims that Queer Lit is “Europe’s Largest LGBTQ+ Bookshop,” but I’m not convinced. The biggest space, maybe. And the most beautiful space, almost certainly. But unless something odd was going on with the books the day I was there—a big re-shelving project, perhaps!—I’ve seen several U.K. stores with more square footage devoted to queer books.
EVENTS: I’m glad to say that I have some events on the calendar (with a couple more in progress, including a New York City event). I’ll make a page soon to keep track of them, but for the moment, here are the dates and places:
Friday, April 12: Andrea Carson Coley Lecture in LGBTQ+ Studies, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia. Noon.
Monday, June 3: Washington, DC. Politics and Prose, Connecticut Avenue, 7 p.m., in conversation with Christina Cauterucci.
Friday, June 14: Edinburgh, Topping & Company, 7 p.m., with Alison Bechdel.
Monday, Aug. 19: Minneapolis, Magers & Quinn, 7 p.m.
Wednesday, Aug. 21: Chicago, Women & Children First, 7 p.m.
RECOMMENDATIONS: I loved Rachel Shteir’s biography, Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter. A really rich and nuanced picture of a complicated, flawed woman. (As are we all!)
LISTEN TO ME: On Working, I had a fantastic conversation with the great biographer Adam Sisman, including about how he came to write not just one but two biographies of John le Carré. On Working Overtime, Isaac Butler and I helped a listener figure out how to hire and manage people to help them get their creative (and other) work done.
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