and Transgender Community’s PROPHILE Magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, September 1997.
Michael Johnstone Fonds, Hamilton Public Library Local History and Archives
The Women’s Bookstop, the first and only feminist bookstore in Hamilton, Ontario, opened in 1985 on 333 Main Street West. In the midst of the AIDS epidemic and in the beginning of resistant Queer Nation politics, The Women’s Bookstop offered a new space – outside of mainstream commercialization – for women and queer folks to gather, theorize, and celebrate. Renee Albrecht, the founder of The Women’s Bookstop, defines the early stages of the bookstore as an “explosion of learning” once the shelves and sections began to reflect some of their queer clientele, specifically lesbians and lesbians of colour. Lesbian and queer bookstores, specifically, offered “real and fictional” voices “whose words” could “provide comfort, encouragement, and guidance.”1 These bookstores were a relative safe haven for queer folks to explore, validate, and justify their identities by reading others’ experiences with gender and sexuality.
If unnoticed walking through the doors, a bookstore can be the perfect place to understand your queerness without “outing” yourself to a wider, perhaps heteronormative, community. Albrecht remembers one queer woman who almost “tiptoed” into the store but eventually gained courage as she saw the entire section dedicated to queer women authors. The Women’s Bookstop was also a social, intimate space, as past employee Cole Gately defines, where “people would come in, they would buy books but really they wouldn’t be buying books. They’d be coming in to try and meet other lesbians.” While books could be the focal point, The Women’s Bookstop was ultimately a place for folks “to feel at home,”2 to build communal relations and kinships, and to resist the heteronormative mainstreaming of culture by supporting a small, queer business.
While women-based and queer bookstores provided refuge and joy for queer communities, their very presence was undermined and questioned by heteronormative society, either through misogynist vigilante violence or Canadian governmental censorship of queer materials.
In 1983, three years before The Women’s Bookstop opened, “The Toronto Women’s Bookstore was destroyed by arson” when a nearby abortion clinic was targeted and “firebombed.”3 These bookstores in Canada supported and championed more than just books, and the owners, employees, and clientele often had strong connections with the surrounding queer community and in political movements advocating for women’s rights and bodily choice.
Similarly, across the country in Vancouver, Little Sisters bookstore (est. 1983) endured “anti-gay bombings in 1987 and 1992.”4 Little Sisters also experienced a different type of anti-queer violence when they were persecuted by the Canadian government’s censorship and obscenity laws, which were sometimes understood as calls for the repression of queer sexuality materials and resources.
In 1985-86, Little Sisters had their copies of the queer magazine The Advocate “routinely stopped, seized, or destroyed at the border,” and Canada Customs ended up burning “every single copy” of the magazine.5 After this, in 1994, Little Sisters took Canada Customs to court and advocated for the freedom to express and distribute queer materials, texts, and other resources.6
Despite Canada Customs’ attempts to suppress queer expression and advocacy, the trial subsequently provided a national platform for queer activists, authors, and theorists, like Gary Kinsman, Becki Ross, and Jane Rule, to testify to the importance of queer bookstores and queer texts.7
These Canadian queer bookstores continue to represent the resistance against a different type of queer suppression: the mainstreaming of queer culture and spaces. During the Little Sisters trial in 1996, owner Janine Fuller stated, “while mainstream depictions of lesbians are considered chic, lesbian produced materials are not.”8 With the emergence of “mainstream bookstores,” queer or feminist bookstores face up against a capitalized commerce experience with “special orders, online shopping, and deep discounts.”9 However, as scholar Kathleen Liddle outlines, queer bookstores are a “powerful antitode to mainstream culture that marginalizes difference,” and they offer “much more than a place to purchase books.”10
These bookstores offered a communal space to resist this homogenization of mainstream culture. This is how Cole Gately, trans activist and community steward of the 2SLGBTQ+ Community Archives in Hamilton, describes The Women’s Bookstop. There was “a real sense of familiarity and family around” the bookstore and its surrounding, thriving queer community. The bookstore was not only a place of commerce; it was also an intimate communal space where kinships, relationships, and socio-political organizations flourished and thrived.
The Women’s Bookstop hosted events both at the store and in and around the Hamilton region. These events included women-focused dances at the YWCA on Ottawa St. and readings centered around queer writings by local women about women; the Bookstop also had connections with community outreach programs that provided helplines or community centres for sexual assault or domestic violence. In her 2016 book, The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability, Kristen Hogan describes feminist bookstores as “sites of practicing relationship building.”11 The Women’s Bookstop was certainly a space for this type of queer relationality.
In connection with their communal and regional relations, the Bookstop also participated in the FBN (Feminist Bookstore News) to connect their work with a larger, women-based, international community. The FBN, founded by Carol Seajay, connected “bookwomen, primarily lesbians and including an important series of cohorts of women of color, in more than one hundred feminist bookstores in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s” in order to “hold each other accountable to lesbian antiracism as well as to ethical representation and relationships.”12 The Women’s Bookstop was involved in the FBN to network and connect to a wider, North American understanding of feminism, queer rights, and the importance of bookstore spaces in maintaining the interest and value in queer physical spaces and tangible texts. The FBN connected the Women’s Bookstop within a larger cultural conversation and, with the use of comprehensive booklists, brought forward “new ways to understand individual texts in conversation with others.”13 In this understanding, queer communal relationality goes beyond store fronts and ultimately resists mainstream culture’s attempts to border and define queerness, queer relations, and queer spaces.
Like other feminist and lesbian bookstores of the time, The Women’s Bookstop was a meeting-point for the queer community in Hamilton and provided a “respite from mainstream culture”14 in the form of events for local authors, intimate dances, and a wide range of lesbian, feminist, and queer literatures. This communal relationality went beyond the doors of the Bookstop and intersected with local centres, political-workers organizations, and with a larger lesbian feminist collective of the FBN. As Kathleen Thompson, owner of Chicago’s first feminist bookstore Pride and Prejudice, once said, the bookstore was “almost like a port, for everything that was going on.”15 With the store as the heart, queer communities could continue to build literary foundations and relational kinships that will ultimately resist the violences and homogenizations of mainstream, heteronormative culture.
Citations:
[1] Liddle, Kathleen. “More than a Bookstore: The Continuing Relevance of Feminist Bookstores for the Lesbian Community.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 9, no. 1-2, 2005, pp. 150.
[2] Albrecht, Renee. (2021). Oral History Interview. Points of Pride Project. Hamilton Civic Museum
[3] Millward, Liz. Making a Scene: Lesbian and Community Across Canada, 1964-84. UBC Press, 2015, pp. 120
[4] Jennex, Craig, and Nisha Eswaran. Out North: An Archive of Queer Activism and Kinships in Canada. Figure 1, 2020, pp. 216.
[5] Janine Fuller qtd. in Heather E. Cameron’s “Queer Experts at the Little Sisters Trial.” Canadian Women Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 1996, pp. 80-83.
[6] Fuller qtd in Cameron, pp. 80-83.
[7] Fuller qtd in Cameron, pp. 80-83.
[8] Fuller qtd in Cameron, pp. 80-83.
[9] Liddle, 147
[10] Liddle, 147
[11] Hogan, Kristen. The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability. Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 119
[12] Hogan, xiv
[13] Hogan, 38
[14] Liddle, 157
[15] Enke, A. Finn. Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism. Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 71
Sources:
Albrecht, Renee and Cole Gately. Points of Pride Project. (November 2022). The Women’s Bookstop [Digital Post]. Points of Pride Project. Hamilton Civic Museum, 2021. https://hamiltoncivicmuseums.ca/exhibition/points-of-pride/
—. Building Hamilton 2SLGBTQ+ Community Archive. “2SLGBTQ+ Archive/Documentary Project. ” Interviews.
Cameron, Heather E. “Queer Experts at the Little Sisters Trial.” Canadian Women Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 1996, pp. 80-83.
Enke, A. Finn. Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism. Duke University Press, 2007.
Gately, Cole. “Archiving Hamilton’s 2SLGBTQ+ Histories.” Building the Hamilton 2SLGBTQ+ Community Archive: Critical Conversation, 21 Oct. 2021, https://buildingthearchive.hamont.org/ Archiving-Hamiltons-2SLGBTQ Histories_Thurs-Oct-21-2021
Hogan, Kristen. The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability. Duke University Press, 2016.
Jennex, Craig, and Nisha Eswaran. Out North: An Archive of Queer Activism and Kinships in Canada. Figure 1 Publishing, 2020.
Liddle, Kathleen. “More than a Bookstore: The Continuing Relevance of Feminist Bookstores for the Lesbian Community.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 9, no. 1-2, 2005, pp. 145-159.
Millward, Liz. Making a Scene: Lesbian and Community Across Canada, 1964-84. UBC Press, 2015.