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
RAHIM THAWER signing The Mental Health Guide for Cis and Trans Queer Guys

An inclusive, evidence-based guide to healing and thriving as a cis or trans queer man.
As a cis or trans man who loves men, you face unique and challenging circumstances, including homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia, struggles with body image, and rejection from family. In addition, the lingering effects of bigotry, discrimination, microaggressions, and hate crimes can have a traumatizing and devastating impact on your mental health and well-being. This compassionate guide offers powerful skills to help you heal the pain of trauma and thrive authentically in a world that often misunderstands or marginalizes your identity and experiences.
The Mental Health Guide for Cis and Trans Queer Guys offers you a safe, inclusive space to examine, understand, and heal from systemic and interpersonal threats to your mental well-being. Based on proven-effective cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), this book provides proven-effective tools and exercises to help you reflect on, confront, and manage difficult emotions; improve self-image and self-esteem; and develop healthy coping skills.
This guidebook will help you:
- Cultivate greater self-awareness
- Move past negative thinking habits
- Heal emotional wounds and build resilience
- Challenge heteronormativity and gender role rigidity
- Care for your sexual health
Also included is a #DiggingDeeper community wellness campaign to help you reflect on the deeper questions of the book and share your own challenges and triumphs with others on social media.
If you’re struggling with mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, or trauma—or feel oppressed or misunderstood by the world around you—this book can help you overcome the negative internalized messages that are causing you emotional pain, and build the self-awareness, confidence, and courage needed to embrace your unique identity and thrive.
Rahim Thawer, MSW, RSW, is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist from Toronto, ON, Canada. He is a clinical supervisor, facilitator and public speaker, university instructor, writer, and host of The CBT Dive podcast. He's trained in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), Gestalt, psychoanalytic, and sex therapy approaches. His clinical practice and writing explore the intersection of systemic oppression and mental health, while also honoring innovation in queer relationships.
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.