It is with delight and nostalgia that I find myself reading about Lavender Menace in Edinburgh (‘We hid our stock in case we were raided’: Scotland’s pioneering LGBTQ+ bookshop, 25 July). While Lavender Menace had closed by the time I arrived in Edinburgh in the late 1990s, West & Wilde was still open. Indeed, I worked there, albeit briefly towards the end. I was therefore surprised, to say the least, to see it described as a “political bookshop”. Is this a euphemism? It looked lesbian and gay to me. After all, the clue’s in the name!
When I was growing up gay in the suburbs, there was no internet history to delete, lest my parents discover my secret. I had to order gay novels from a magazine, hide them deep in my bedroom closet (forgive the pun), and dispose of them once read. They were the only source of information about what it meant to be gay and the protagonists my only role models. Access to LGBTQ+ literature saved my, and many people’s, lives. Anyone brave enough to promote LGBTQ+ literature in the hostile environment that was Margaret Thatcher’s Britain must be honoured.
Vincent Finney
Totnes, Devon
