Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive and Blog

Lavender Menace Queer Books Archive and Blog Lavender Menace opened as a bookshop in Edinburgh in 1982 and we now collect, conserve and celebrate the books we sold then.

Now that we have a new sports section, today’s post highlights q***r roller derby novels and graphic novels. BLOOD CITY ...
20/09/2026

Now that we have a new sports section, today’s post highlights q***r roller derby novels and graphic novels.
BLOOD CITY ROLLERS by VP Anderson - kidnapped by undead kids on skates! Forced to join a vampire roller team with a gorgeous captain! Never mind winning - will Mina survive the season? A Gothic graphic young people’s novel.
BRUISES by Tanya Boteju - Daya is the sole survivor of a crash which killed her parents. Can she deal with grief through the pain and confrontation of roller derby? A gentle romance amid an aggressive sport and a cast of q***r characters.
LUMBERJANES Vol 9: On a Roll by Kat Leyh and Carolyn Novak - The graphic novel series follows a group of friends at a girls’ summer camp in the midst of a forest full of supernatural creatures. The gang find themselves challenging a group of stubborn sasquatches to a roller derby match.
THE DERBY DAREDEVILS: Kenzie Kickstarts a Team by Kit Rosewater - 10-year-old Kenzie is determined to start a roller derby team in this first volume of a series which includes same-sex crushes and trans characters. The book some of us dreamed of when all we had was Nancy Drew.
These are only a few of the titles in this wildly popular genre. Check out Glasgow Women's Library’s web page for some of their suggestions, or goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/177881.Q***r_Roller_Derby for a list of 15.) See Auld Reekie Roller Derby for the real-life version.

‘You will never be forgiven for this book. Twenty years from now you will still be attacked for it,’ said an editor at G...
20/09/2026

‘You will never be forgiven for this book. Twenty years from now you will still be attacked for it,’ said an editor at Gore Vidal’s publishing house when he submitted The City and the Pillar for publication in 1947. Vidal, aged 20, had already written two well-respected novels and seemed on the road to success. The City and the Pillar was about gay men who were ordinary and ‘masculine’ - putting it into print was career su***de. But he told the editor that if he was still being attacked twenty years later, it would mean the novel would still be in print in 1968 - not a bad outcome. The City and the Pillar was still in print in 1995, when Vidal reflected on it for a website called threepennyreview.com, and it is still in print today, nearly 80 years later. (It doesn’t need to be rescued by our archive, but we’ve been given three copies by generous donors.) Far from committing career su***de, Vidal made a career of all kinds of books including some which were groundbreaking and outrageous - he also wrote the first American novel with a trans hero, Myra Breckenridge. He described his literary style as ‘knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.’ He believed everyone was bisexual and echoed one of the characters in The City and the Pillar: ‘Why anyone is anything is a mystery, and not the business of the law.’

The Front Runner is a 1974 novel by Patricia Nell Warren that follows a closeted athletics coach and the gay runners he ...
18/09/2026

The Front Runner is a 1974 novel by Patricia Nell Warren that follows a closeted athletics coach and the gay runners he trains. One of them has a shot at being the first openly gay athlete to win at the Olympics, but there are big challenges to face. This tale of love and loss became a q***r classic, as well as a mainstream hit.

The Front Runner also inspired the name of the Frontrunner clubs for LGBTQ+ runners, of which there are over 100 around the world. Patricia Nell Warren took part in runs and events with the Los Angeles Front Runners. There's also a local group, the , who meet every Wednesday night and Saturday morning. People of any ability, age and identity are welcome to join them for a run or walk.

We have a copy of The Front Runner in the archive on our recently added Sport shelf, which you're welcome to come and peruse at any time.

Category Is Books on the south side of Glasgow calls itself ‘fiercely independent and q***r’ - and its signs, inside and...
17/09/2026

Category Is Books on the south side of Glasgow calls itself ‘fiercely independent and q***r’ - and its signs, inside and outside the shop, live up to that promise. Our favourites are YOU BELONG, inside the shop, and TRANS LIVES ARE BEAUTIFUL, one of the many seen in the windows. It’s impossible to know what these messages may have meant to q***r (and other) people passing the shop at some difficult point in their lives. Bug and Fin, founders of Category IS, told Glasgow Times that after eight years of running the shop with few issues, they’d begun to see a rise in harassment - and then, recently, their window was targetted. Within hours their Go Fund Me page had raised the £10,000 needed for new shutters, and the page finally raised £14,000 before it closed. Any surplus will go toward unexpected costs of the shutters or to other q***r organisations in need. We’re very sad to hear of this attack - it strikes a note with us, because we remember the early 1980s, when Lavender Menace had a huge window shutter, which had to be hauled up the stair every night and screwed down with thick bolts. When we moved to West & Wilde, on the ground floor in a busier street, the attacks became more serious. So we’d like to encourage everyone to keep supporting Category IS - get yourself to Glasgow, buy that book you decided you could wait a little longer for, share their posts, go to a book launch or a meeting, check out the secondhand section. On the positive side, Bug and Fin say the new shutters will be a new opportunity for more colourful, fiercer, and more trans magical messaging.

The lifts at St Margaret's House are currently out of order. Unfortunately, this means that the archive isn't currently ...
17/09/2026

The lifts at St Margaret's House are currently out of order. Unfortunately, this means that the archive isn't currently accessible to those who can't use the stairs. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

The latest addition to our collection is Proud Lady in a Cage, a collection of short stories by Fred Urquhart. All the s...
17/09/2026

The latest addition to our collection is Proud Lady in a Cage, a collection of short stories by Fred Urquhart. All the stories are strongly influenced by Scottish history, with supernatural themes and a strong sense of place evoked through dialogue in the Scots language.

Fred Urquhart was born in Edinburgh in 1912 and became one of Scotland's leading short story writers of the 20th century. He spent 30 years living in Sussex with his partner, ballet dancer Peter Wyndham Allen, before settling in Musselburgh after Allen's death.

The Heritage Collections at the Edinburgh University Library hold the Fred Urquhart Papers. These include many unpublished manuscripts, working materials for his major publications, and correspondence with other Scottish writers such as George Mackay Brown and Neil M. Gunn. Anyone can make an appointment to go and explore these papers for free.

ONLY ONE WEEK LEFT to apply for our two new roles!As a reminder, we're looking for:General Manager- Part-time (24 hours ...
15/09/2026

ONLY ONE WEEK LEFT to apply for our two new roles!

As a reminder, we're looking for:

General Manager
- Part-time (24 hours a week)
- £38,000 pro-rata
- Job description: lavendermenace.org.uk/general-manager

Research Coordinator
- Part-time (24 hours a week)
- £29,000 pro-rata
- Job description: lavendermenace.org.uk/research-coordinator

If you're interested in either role, please read through the job description and send us your CV and covering letter by Tuesday 22nd September.

With a new semester starting, it's the perfect time to join a q***r study group! Whether you're a q***r student, researc...
14/09/2026

With a new semester starting, it's the perfect time to join a q***r study group! Whether you're a q***r student, researcher, or writer, you're very welcome to join us for a calm and supportive study session next Monday.

Find out more and book your spot: https://lavendermenace.org.uk/event/future-drop-outs

Born this day in 1917, Nancy Spain was a popular writer and broadcaster of the 1950s and 1960s who lived openly as a le*...
13/09/2026

Born this day in 1917, Nancy Spain was a popular writer and broadcaster of the 1950s and 1960s who lived openly as a le***an with her partners - editor of She, Joan Werner Laurie, and rally driver Sheila van Damm. Starting in 1946, she wrote a series of camp detective novels set at a fictional girls' school called Radcliff Hall, two of which we have in our collection. Also at the archive is one of her memoirs, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way, covering her time building a home on the Greek island of Skiathos. Nancy Spain was the great-niece of Mrs Beeton, inspiring her to write two biographies of her relative, as well as her own cookbook, which you can peruse at Lavender Menace.

We had a great time at the audio-described tour of our Past Shelves exhibition last Saturday. Thanks again to Lou and De...
12/09/2026

We had a great time at the audio-described tour of our Past Shelves exhibition last Saturday. Thanks again to Lou and Debbie for putting it together! It was a really insightful tour that provided a holistic understanding of the exhibits - experiencing their sound and feel rather than just appearance. We finished by making tactile posters inspired by items in the exhibition.

If you missed the tour, you can still listen to audio descriptions of some of the objects at any time here: https://lavendermenace.org.uk/past-shelves-audio

There's only one week left to go, so if you still want to look round Past Shelves: Histories of Q***r Reading, get down to Museum of Edinburgh before we wrap up on 20th September!

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