Gay’s the Word, London’s Independent Gay & Lesbian Bookshop
by Carla Barrett
“Where can I buy literature on the LGBT theme?”
GAY’S THE WORD, London’s Independent Comprehensive Gay & Lesbian Bookshop, Russell Square, London.
A wonderful bookstore serving the LGBT community since 1979, Gay’s The Word is the UK’s pioneering independent lesbian and gay bookshop. The bookshop was established in1979 in the historic Bloomsbury district of London. It is an independent LGBT book specialist, offering a wide choice of gay books and film that goes well beyond the mainstream. With friendly, helpful staff, the shop has a genuine community atmosphere and hosts regular book events and discussion groups.
The author Armistead Maupin describes Gay’s The Word as “the fountainhead of queer literature in Britain.”
“Truly a fine example of how an independent bookshop should be” – Time Out
“It’s not just a bookshop, but the hub and affirmation of a whole community” – Sarah Waters
Visit the website: gaystheword.co.uk
Follow on Twitter: @gaystheword
New models of poetry community, Prof Peter Middleton
by Laurence Georgin
Poets have always tended to form communities, and since the early twentieth-century this has become the norm. The absence of market value for this art-form means that poets can often only survive through the mutual support of each other as readers, editors and publishers. Between the mid-1940s and the 1970s, two largely independent groups of mostly gay male poets in New York and San Francisco began to develop a poetics based around their experience of community. Their subject matter and their poetic forms were shaped by intense self-questioning about what it meant to be part of a community based around experiences of dissident sexual identity. Read more…
Southampton Stonewall Lecture 2014: Creating Our History, Celebrating Our Present: On the Entanglements of Queer Memory and History
by Laurence Georgin
Part of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month
The Southampton Stonewall Lecture speaker in 2014 is Professor Laura Doan from the University of Manchester. 
LGBT History Month seeks to claim our history, celebrate our past and create our future – a project not wholly dissimilar from all history-making practices organized around modern categories of identity. In this lecture I want to think about the workings of memory and history in relation to homosexuality. By scrutinizing the political impulses that produce gay icons such as Alan Turing, I am interested in figuring out what LGBT and queer history is good for.