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Senate House Library’s exhibition, Seized Books! LGBTQ+ books and censorship in 1980s Britain, launched a little over six months ago. In the lead up, our team worked intensively. Emails flew, spreadsheets proliferated. With time to breathe and take stock, this post is a reflective one, aiming to capture some of our combined thoughts on the experience of working together across disciplines and institutions to spotlight a collection of books last brought together some forty years previously, in very different circumstances.

Seized Books! documents the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids by Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise on the UK’s first lesbian and gay bookshop, Gay’s the Word. Between 1984 and 1986, officers seized thousands of imported books, magazines and newspapers from Gay’s the Word and other radical, lesbian and gay booksellers (such as Edinburgh’s Lavender Menace) on the spurious grounds that they were ‘indecent or obscene’.

Chaotic and haphazard as the selection process reportedly was – according to the newspaper Capital Gay, Customs officers ‘had to keep ringing up [their superiors] to find out what they were meant to take’ – the after-effects of ‘Operation Tiger’ were severe. The nine defendants charged with conspiracy to import these supposedly indecent titles faced hefty fines and even prison time. A public campaign, Defend Gay’s the Word, swiftly mobilised in response, but the legal proceedings would not be resolved for over two years. It is surprising, therefore, that ‘Operation Tiger’ has largely been written out of the history of literary censorship in the UK. The seized books themselves have received even less sustained attention. 

Honouring and Remembering Queer Books

Researching the seized titles revealed much about lesbian and gay publishing in the 1970s and 1980s, from its hotspots (San Francisco and New York) to the sheer variety of publishing houses – from the mainstream to the DIY – who were responsible for putting LGBTQ+ titles into circulation. 

It was also unexpectedly moving work. Several times we were caught up in reading, only to research the author and discover they had died far too young of Aids or complications of Aids. We have included dates for each author or editor. Checking these with one co-author, he wrote to tell us that his former collaborator, who died just a few years after their book was published, “was a close friend and the nicest person you would ever have the pleasure of meeting.  His photo is in my office, and I look at it every day.” 

Seized Books! aimed to honour and remember all those who make queer books possible, from the writers to the booksellers to the publishers to the collectors to the readers. The Operation Tiger raids occurred in living memory, the majority of the books in the exhibition were collected by co-founder and director of Gay’s the Word Jonathan Cutbill, and Gay’s the Word bookshop is still thriving in its Marchmont Street home, so it was essential to us that the bookshop – past and present – was involved in the project. Graham McKerrow, one of the co-ordinators of the Defend Gay’s the Word campaign and Jim MacSweeney, manager at Gay’s the Word, were involved throughout the planning of the exhibition and all the bookshop staff supported us in many ways. Their generosity to, and interest in, the project was a constant source of inspiration.

Sharing Research and Experiences

One objective of our wider project was to try out some data-mining techniques on digitised versions of the seized books. Another was for each of the team members to learn about practices outside of their area of expertise. While we planned to do some training around some of the more ‘traditional’ academic elements of the project, the process also opened up unexpected opportunities to peek into the worlds of our colleagues. Project managers and programmers learned about writing exhibition captions. Researchers and librarians learned about data structures. And everyone learned about the deeply essential and often overlooked work of website testing, risk assessment, and project plans. This kind of view into the detail of colleagues’ work is a rare gift and getting to work with generous collaborators – both within and alongside the core project team – rarer still.

An overarching goal for the project was to share the all-but-forgotten story of ‘Operation Tiger’ with members of the public, and the LGBTQ+ communities, who might be unaware of this important episode in queer history. We held two workshops in November 2023. One was a workshop for academics which focused on how techniques from digital humanities can help us to think about reading in different ways, including the kind of ‘reading’ Customs officers were doing when they went through the seized books and marked up the supposedly ‘obscene’ pages. The other was a sell-out public event as part of the Being Human festival.

Seized Books! - the future

Following on from this, we are excited to be supporting  a collaboration that has grown from our 2023 Being Human event and will début at Being Human 2024.

The exhibition, too, will have an unexpected material afterlife. Leila Kassir and Sarah Pyke are collaborating with PageMasters on a risograph publication to launch on 10 April 2025, the forty-first anniversary of the raids. This zine-style pamphlet will reproduce the exhibition captions and will include a new catalogue essay written by Michael Bronski, Professor of the Practice in Media and Activism in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University, and a critical friend to the curators throughout the curation process.

We are delighted that Senate House Library are supporting the exhibition as a lasting digital resource and we will continue to share updates on our ongoing work on this blog.