Fifty years ago, LGBT+ people demanded equality – and unleased a queer creative tide. Now, many queer books are disappearing. And you can help save them.
Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive has grown out of Edinburgh’s lesbian and gay bookshops that were running in the 1980s and 1990s. Now Sigrid Nielsen and Bob Orr who were partners in the original Lavender Menace Bookshop, 
have come together and established the archive to collect the ground-breaking titles that were available then and which are little known a generation later.
Become a Menace and donate to Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive.
Why? To protect our cultural and literary history to say to the world that we’ve always been here. Embracing diversity is liberating – ‘our liberation is your liberation’ to quote a chant from the early 70s.
By conserving out of print queer books, collecting and storing them we will be able to make them easily accessible to researchers, writers and readers, acting as an information hub.
Become a Menace and help secure a home for our ever-expanding collection of over 2000 titles.
By celebrating those queer authors who flourished before the millennium by organising intergenerational events about their works called Conversations with Writers, either in-person or online.
Become a Menace and help pay authors and contributors to take part in readers’ events.
By connecting you to our culture, we are able to show that we have a rich history of writing which is often hidden from us. Even contemporary works are in danger of being buried.
Become a Menace and help enable educational and heritage seminars.
Become a Menace with a monthly donation of £5, £10 or £20, or support us with a one-off payment.
And subscribe to our newsletter. You will be the first to know the news about our ever-growing collection of over 1000 donated books – and organise events with queer writers and readers.
You can find out what we're doing at Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive's website.
And have a look at the video below about the archive. We called it Unsung: Queer Books that Tell our Story. It was produced by prettybright with the support of Edinburgh City Libraries.