Bookshops, especially queer ones, are more than retail spaces. They are often refuges, meeting points, and lifelines. They can be seats of liberation, connection and social change. This panel, chaired by award-winning library manager Zoey Dixon, brings together A.J. West, Layla McCay and Jane Cholmeley, for a celebration of queer bookshops and the communities they build.
AJ West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed The World, is a passionate tribute to the radical histories and survival of LGBTQ+ bookshops. Layla McCay’s The Queer Bookshelf, is a celebration of queer reading lists, visibility and the power of representation on the shelf, and Jane Cholmeley’s A Bookshop of One’s Own, reflects on the founding and legacy of the iconic Silver Moon Bookshop and the feminist and queer networks it helped sustain. This panel traces the glorious cultural and political impact of spaces built around books.
Together, they ask what it means to have a space to gather, to recommend, to shelter, and how bookshops have quietly helped save queer lives.
