NEIL BARTLETT- Marking the 40th anniversary of the raid on Gay's The Word Bookshop скачать в хорошем качестве

NEIL BARTLETT- Marking the 40th anniversary of the raid on Gay's The Word Bookshop

On the 10th of April 1984 Customs and Excise, assuming Gay’s the Word to be a porn shop rather than a serious bookstore, mounted a raid on the shop and seized thousands of pounds’ worth of books, amounting to approximately one third of our stock. For context, this was in 1984, roughly around the time that Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners started using Gay’s the Word as a meeting space. They seized around 800 volumes of books, the bulk of our records, financial accounts and the address list of our mail-order customers at the time. As Colin Clews writes in his book Gay in the 80s, ‘This was the start of so-called ‘Operation Tiger’ and included raids on the homes of the shop’s directors and the retention of thousands of pounds worth of other imported books at their ports of entry. Given that the UK’s lesbian and gay publishing industry was still relatively small at that time, it follows that an LGBT community bookshop would necessarily seek stock from abroad. But it was clear that Customs and Excise decreed any book imported by Gay’s the Word to be obscene and, therefore, seized.’ Works by Gore Vidal, Harvey Fierstein, Christopher Isherwood, John Waters and Jean Genet were among the books seized. Also taken were copies of The Joy of Gay Sex and The Joy of Lesbian Sex well as academic books on the AIDS crisis in America. Here is an account from that day from the book Walking After Midnight, written by one of the bookshop directors, Glenn McKee, who was at home in his sheltered accommodation when two Custom Officers brandishing a writ granting them the right to enter, showed up at his front door. Bear in mind that Glenn, a founder member of the Gay’s the Word Gay Disabled Group, is, as a consequence of his disability, in the region of 4ft tall: ‘They held me in my flat for over six hours, searching, questioning…They took three plastic bin-liners of stuff…which included gay books like The Joy of Gay Sex. They took my personal magazines, videos and letters. All the Gay’s the Word papers were filed methodically in a cabinet and they searched through and took it all. One of the Custom Officers shouted at me and made it clear that he didn’t approve of me, my attitudes or what I was about. ‘This is filth,’ he would say. The officer who was the side-kick took notes during the interrogation in my flat. They read them back to me and I thought they were going to put things in. But in fact it was the things they left out which were important: the way they shouted, the way they used abusive language. They didn’t hit me, though they did stand over me at one stage and I thought I was for it.’ In total seven Gay’s the Word directors and two staff members were eventually charged with conspiracy to import indecent books under the Customs Consolidation Act 1876. Between them they faced around 100 charges. A campaign was set in motion and the charges were vigorously defended. A defence fund was set up and raised over £55,000 from the public. Many well-known writers also gave their support including Gore Vidal who donated £3,000. The community rallied. Our basement office became the nerve-centre of the Defend Gay’s the Word campaign. We weren’t going to take this lying down. Despite mounting public outrage Customs and Excise continued to pursue the case. Newspaper articles appeared, various MPs visited the shop and questions were asked in the House of Commons. Geoffrey Robertson KC defended Gay’s the Word in court. After a lengthy and consuming battle, the charges were eventually dropped in 1986, thanks, in part - and somewhat bizarrely - to a prior legal ruling in 1985 about the legality of importing German sex dolls. When the seized books were eventually returned to Gay’s the Word, many were damaged. No apology from Customs and Excise or the UK government has ever been issued to Gay’s the Word, or the LGBT+ community for the raid. We are sharing this important piece of the bookshop’s story with you today – well because our history is important. Without it we can’t fully appreciate how we got here, or how we might get from here to there in the future. Or how necessary is it to be ever-watchful because the freedoms and rights that some of us are fortunate enough to have today have been extremely hard-won. Our rights and freedoms are more fragile than we might suspect. What has been gained, if we fail to remain ever-vigilant, just might someday be taken away. Of course, many, many of us still negotiate prejudice, vitriol and discrimination every single day. Perhaps sometimes the phrase ‘gay pride’ or ‘queer pride’ trips of the tongue without us fully appreciating what it really means. Our history teaches us just what our forebears and elders went through so – against the odds, and tiny victory by tiny victory - they could start to make life that bit easier for us today. Of that, we should all be truly proud, and so very grateful.