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When the UK’s first lesbian and gay bookshop, Gay’s the Word, was raided by Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise in April 1984, supporters of the shop rallied to its defence. 

Officers had seized thousands of pounds’ worth of stock, claiming that the titles – imported mostly from America – were ‘indecent or obscene’. In outrage, Alison Hennegan, former Literary Editor of Gay News, wrote in The New Statesman that several of the works in question ‘are distributed here by British wholesalers and are freely available in mainstream shops’. Moreover, these supposed threats to public morality ‘appear on Required Reading lists for British undergraduates taking courses in Literature’ – as well as ‘Film, Politics, Sociology and Women’s Studies’. [1] 

An article from 1985 noted that many of the books ‘have been published in this country either before their seizure or since, by houses such as Chatto and Windus, Methuen and Michael Joseph’, adding that among the contested authors were ‘John-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams and [...] Oscar Wilde’. [2] This was not only an attack on the rights of LGBTQ+ people to access ‘accurate information about who we were and what we might become’, as Hennegan put it. It was no less than an attack on the literary canon itself. 

It’s a compelling argument which does much to highlight the absurdity of ‘Operation Tiger’. In a Briefing Note assembled by the Defend Gay’s the Word campaign, the shop’s supporters note that among the titles taken by Customs were ‘two truly unbelievable items - Edward Carpenter’s Iolaus: An Anthology of Friendship and The Book of the City of Ladies, a devotional book written by Christine de Pizan, a 14th century nun’. [3] In the subsequent committal hearing, held in the last week of June 1985, a Customs officer admitted he detained a book blurbed by Christopher Isherwood because he recognised him as ‘a homosexual author’. [4] 

But what of the lesser-known books that were seized by Customs? 

Researching the titles featured in the Seized Books! exhibition was an illuminating experience, both for what it revealed about the interrelation between the literary and queer canons and for the light it shed on a buoyant, diverse, and increasingly confident LGBTQ+ literary and publishing scene, operating primarily out of San Francisco and New York City in the 1970s and early 1980s.

As Hennegan wrote in that same New Statesman piece, many queer people at the time had shared similar experiences, of reading ‘hostilely written, ill-informed, deeply harmful books’ in isolation. Later, ‘Some of us began to write the books which now fill Gay’s The Word. Thousands of us were hungry to read them.’ It is on this new wave of liberated literature – some now forgotten, justly or unjustly – that this exhibition sheds light. But in some cases our research only took us so far.

In contrast to works by Jean Genet and Oscar Wilde, then, here are five books that we have been able to uncover relatively little information about, and that in some cases should be better known. 

Do you remember them? 

Perhaps you read them? Or maybe you recognise a cover, a title, an author’s name, or a publisher? If you recall these books or their writers, we’d be very interested to hear more. 

“What does it mean when you fall in love with your best friend?”, asks the cover of this coming-of-age story, which depicts identically clad high-school students Mike and Todd. ​​This proto-Young Adult novel models understanding and acceptance – but who is B.A. Ecker, and did they ever write anything else?

Affecting novel of one-sided letters to Superman from schoolboy Jerry Chariot and his best friend Robert Sipanno, which wrestle with everyday problems of homelife, hero-worship and Catholic schooling, as well as questions about what “a queer” is and whether Superman pees out of his “Thing”. Despite writing at least two other novels, Torchia published only one other full-length work. 

This detailed, first-person account of bars, cruising and bathhouses in 1970s San Francisco also includes an extended memoir of growing up gay in a second-generation Czech immigrant family in Illinois. “It’s a charmer”, proclaimed one contemporary reviewer – but is now relatively unknown.

Republished in 2001, the second edition is described as “A novel so outrageous it was banned in England!”, a possible reference to ‘Operation Tiger’. The blurb also claims Caffey won a PEN Award for an Outstanding First Work of Fiction, receiving a Special Commendation in 1983 – but no evidence either for this specific award or this commendation can be found.

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A Defend Gay’s the Word briefing document about the seized titles lists a book called ‘Body Parts’. Its author and publisher are unclear. The book we displayed, a collection of photographs of the male body taken by Christie Jenkins, is a candidate for the correct book but we cannot be sure. Do you remember a book titled 'Body Parts' on sale in Gay's the Word at the time of the raids? Was it this book or a different one?