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.”
