The Oldest & Very Best LGBTQ & Feminist Bookstore in the Country
New Releases
The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America,1960 and After
“Gay bars have operated as the most visible institutions of the LGBTQ community in the United States for the better part of a century, from before gay liberation until after their assumed obsolescence. In The Bars Are Ours Lucas Hilderbrand offers a panoramic history of gay bars, showing how they served as the medium for queer communities, politics, and cultures. Hilderbrand cruises from leather in Chicago and drag in Kansas City to activism against gentrification in Boston and racial discrimination in Atlanta; from New York City’s bathhouses, sex clubs, and discos and Houston’s legendary bar Mary’s to the alternative scenes that reimagined queer nightlife in San Francisco and Latinx venues in Los Angeles. The Bars Are Ours explores these local sites-with additional stops in Denver, Detroit, Seattle, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Orlando, as well as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Texas-to demonstrate the intoxicating, even world making roles that bars have played in queer public life across the country”
Sale! Sale! Sale!

Last Tuesday of the Month Sale
Claudia Lavergne Brind-Woody is an American business executive. She is the Vice President and Managing Director of intellectual property at IBM. On January 30th, she will be turning 69. Happy Birthday Claudia
We will be celebrating the day with a special sale.
Everything will be 25% off! Don’t miss out on the savings.
Events
BOOK LAUNCH! SOPHIE LEWIS signing Enemy Feminisms in conversation with Kristen Martin

From the author of Abolish the Family, a provocative compendium of the feminisms we love to dismiss and making the case for the bold, liberatory feminist politics we'll need to stand against fascism, nationalism, femmephobia, and cisness.
In recent years, "white feminism" and girlboss feminism have taken a justified beating. We know that leaning in won't make our jobs any more tolerable and that white women have proven to be, at best, unreliable allies. But in a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of building the feminist world we need.Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today's anti-abortion and TERF feminists. Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an inherent political good. Only when we acknowledge that can we finally reckon with the ways these feminisms have pushed us toward counterproductive and even violent ends. And only then can we finally engage in feminist strategizing that is truly antifascist.
Sophie Lewis is a writer. Her books, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, and Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, have been translated into nine languages. Sophie grew up in France, half-British, half-German, but now lives in Philadelphia and teaches online courses on utopian theory at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She also has a visiting affiliation with the Center for Research on Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Lewis' writing appears in n+1, Harper's, the LRB, the New York Times, and e-flux.
Kristen Martin is a writer and critic based in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, NPR, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow is her first book.
Best Seller
Blackouts
A Most Anticipated Read: The New York Times, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, The Bay Area Reporter, Datebook, Electric Literature, The Stacks, Them, Publishers Weekly
From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories–personal and collective.
Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a book–Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns–and its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan’s tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator recount for each other moments of joy and oblivion; they resurrect loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. In telling their own stories and the story of the book, they resist the ravages of memory and time. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?
Book of the Week
Orlando: A Biography
As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate sixteen-year-old nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colorful delights of Queen Elizabeth I’s court. By the close, three centuries have passed, and he will have transformed into a thirty-six-year-old woman in the year 1928. Orlando’s journey is also an internal one—he is an impulsive poet who learns patience in matter of the heart, and a woman who knows what it is to be a man.
New Local Releases
Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games
A wide-ranging anthology of essays exploring one of the most vital art forms on the planet today
From the earliest computers to the smartphones in our pockets, video games have been on our screens and part of our lives for over fifty years. Critical Hits celebrates this sophisticated medium and considers its lasting impact on our culture and ourselves.

Introducing Queer Atlas
Welcome to Queer Atlas, a podcast broadcasting out of Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni’s Room. Queer Atlas has been created to highlight queer & trans art, activism, and spaces here in the city of Philadelphia. Each episode features an interview from a special guest, conversations about new and old LGBTQ media we are enjoying, as well as a peek at life in our store.