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
M. MICK POWELL signing Dead Girl Cameo


A dazzling docupoetic debut collection interweaving personal loss with the life stories of Aaliyah Haughton, Whitney Houston, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, Phyllis Hyman, Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, and others to explore sexuality, survival, queer mourning, and the afterlives of stardom.
"I made, of my bones, an earth for you: turned the oceans
your favorite shade of light, that deepened, nearly bruised
dusk. Reflected in my palms, what I've made into water
glows amethyst"
In m. mick powell's polyphonic, haunting debut, a chorus of voices conjures up intimate pop herstories to map how the poet's queer Black girlhood was molded by their memory. With tender reverence, powell meditates on the deaths of her own beloveds while reflecting on the many stages of an icon's life: How did these women challenge conventional representations of Black femininity and transform the musical landscape? How did they navigate abuse and alienation in the limelight? How do the mythologies that survive them establish afterlives of queer femme possibility?
Through sensual imagery, speculative verse, and splendid wordplay, Dead Girl Cameo takes us beyond the headlines, innovating a Black feminist poetic that traverses the richly textured realms of grief, girlhood, love, widowing, femme friendship, and queer fandom.
m. mick powell (she/they) is a queer Black Cape Verdean femme poet, an artist, an Aries, and the author of the chapbook chronicle the body. Their poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and a Pushcart Prize and have been published in Frontier Poetry, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. An Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, mick’s work situates Black queer femme existence and experience as rupture, revolution, revelation, and revival. She enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love.
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.