In 1984, àËÅöÊÓƵ's Gay's the Word book shop was raided by HM Customs and Excise, seizing LGBTQ+ books & charging staff. A public fight for LGBT rights ensued.
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Learn more about ‘Operation Tiger’ and Gay’s the Word, the bookshop at the centre of the raids, with these talks and podcasts, book chapters, and library and archive material.
Talks and podcasts
Graham McKerrow, editor of Capital Gay newspaper and one of the Defend Gay’s the Word campaign co-ordinators, gave a talk at Senate House in 2018 about the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids and the wider context and experience of being gay in the 1980s.
Video
Seized Books! exhibition co-curator Sarah Pyke was a guest on the BBC Radio 3 Arts & Ideas podcast New Thinking talking about ‘Operation Tiger’. The episode discusses censorship, queer oral history and testimony.
Tash Walker and Adam Zmith discuss ‘Operation Tiger’ and state censorship in episode 10 of The Log Books podcast.
Book chapter
Further to his talk at Senate House in 2018, Graham McKerrow wrote about ‘Operation Tiger’ and the Defend Gay’s the Word campaign in an open access book chapter called ‘Saving Gay’s the Word: The Campaign to Protect a Bookshop and the Right to Import Queer Literature’.
Library and archive resources
Archival material relating to the ‘Defend Gay’s the Word Campaign Archive’ is held at the Bishopsgate Institute.
Bishopsgate Institute also holds a full run of the Capital Gay newspaper, edited by Graham McKerrow, who was one of the co-ordinators of the Defend Gay’s the Word Campaign. The paper reported on the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids.
The Radical Bookseller journal also reported on the ‘Operation Tiger raids’, and similar raids on other radical bookshops. A full run of this journal is held at Senate House Library.
- at Senate House Library
Gay’s the Word bookshop
Gay’s the Word bookshop is still going strong, located in the same Marchmont Street premises that were raided in 1984.
