It was the early 80s, and on an autumn day in Edinburgh’s New Town, a young man appeared at the top of the steep stairs that led down to the city’s gay bookshop, Lavender Menace. He had just been made redundant and wanted to donate part of his severance pay to the shop. “He gave us £50,” remembers Sigrid Nielsen, who ran the bookshop with her business partner Bob Orr. “I still wonder who he was.”
Lavender Menace bookshop was founded in 1982, two years after homosexuality between men over the age of 21 was legalised in Scotland. Although its physical presence on Forth Street only lasted for five years, the bookshop made a lasting impact on Scotland’s LGBTQ+ population. During its operation in the 1980s, Lavender Menace was one of two gay bookshops in the UK; the other was London’s Gay’s the Word. Orr and Nielsen opened Lavender Menace after Orr found success selling literature from a bookstall in the cloakroom of the gay club Fire Island, and then later from a glass cabinet in Edinburgh’s Gay Centre. “We were scattered and underground,” says Orr about Edinburgh’s LGBTQ+ community in the 1970s and 80s. “None of us came out at work. We didn’t get on with our parents. By the time the bookshop opened in 82, we knew we were taking a risk, not just financially, but socially as well, whether the neighbourhood would put up with it or not.”
Lavender Menace operated as a bookshop and a mail order service that sold LGBTQ+ literature across Scotland. Orr and Nielsen took advantage of the flourishing gay and lesbian publishing industry in North America and imported new books for UK readers. But, like Gay’s the Word, they faced trouble from customs. “We lost several thousands of stock at Glasgow’s docks that we had to pay for,” says Orr. “We would hide our stock in the shop in case we were raided like Gay’s the Word.”
“Customs would read the books!” adds Nielsen with a laugh. “Sometimes a box would be returned to us and there would be coffee stains and cigarette ash inside.”
Lavender Menace closed its doors in 1987. Nielsen left bookselling to pursue freelance writing, while Orr opened a political bookshop with his partner called West & Wilde which operated until 1997. Nielsen and Orr lost touch, while many of the UK’s LGBTQ+ publishers and bookshops closed.
It was the Scottish playwright James Ley who brought the pair back together in the 2010s, when he interviewed Orr and Nielsen for his play Love Song to Lavender Menace about the origins of the bookshop. During the play’s run at the Lyceum theatre in 2017, Orr and Nielsen operated a bookstall in the theatre’s foyer.
“We thought we might keep doing bookstalls like in the old days,” says Nielsen. “But then we found out that books were literally disappearing and that young people had no idea of [LGBTQ+] history or who the writers were. We decided to think of a way to preserve the books. Nobody wanted them, so we wanted them.”
Four decades after the bookshop opened, Orr and Nielsen founded the Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive. LGBTQ+ organisations donated books and initially the archive was stored in the basement of the radical Edinburgh bookshop Lighthouse Books. In 2022, Orr and Nielsen moved the collection to a small, publicly accessible room in the arts community building St Margaret’s House. It is around a table in the centre of this room that Nielsen and Orr are telling Lavender Menace’s story. The archive is now shelved along white bookcases, sorted into genres such as Lesbian History and Gay Men’s Poetry, and during our interview Nielsen pulls books off the shelves to illustrate a point. A smaller bookcase holds new books for sale, while printed posters of book covers and pride and trans flags adorn the room’s green walls. Above the door hangs a replica of Lavender Menace’s original sign.
National Lottery Heritage funding has meant Orr and Nielsen can be ambitious with their plans. A digital catalogue will be launched by the end of the summer, while a living memory project will involve interviewing older people about what LGBTQ+ books mean to them for an exhibition. Events and bookgroups bring different generations of Edinburgh’s readers together, while the archive continues to expand. Orr and Nielsen hope to move to a bigger space soon.
While there are other LGBTQ+ history archives in the UK, Lavender Menace is the only archive solely focused on preserving literature. I ask the pair, why books? “For a long time, you’d have been in real trouble if you wrote the truth about your life,” says Nielsen. “Police raids and being destroyed in newspapers were very real for queer people. Little by little that changed in the twentieth century. People were suddenly free to speak and people started to write. They wrote good stuff, bad stuff, terrible poetry, comic books, cookbooks, travel books. We were finally able to be open and literature is a way to look into that time. These books are a crystallised form of the energy of freedom.”
• Find out more about the Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive and how to get involved by visiting lavendermenace.org.uk.
