25th anniversary of the raid on Gay’s the Word
On April 10, 1984, ‘Operation Tiger’ went into effect. Customs and Excise officers walked into Gay’s the Word bookshop in London, told its customers to leave, and seized all imported titles. Officers also raided the houses of the bookshop’s directors. In November 1984 Gay’s the Word was charged with the conspiracy to import indecent literature.
The 1980s marked an era of backlash against the cultural and political changes of the 1960s and ‘70s. Religious groups were once again on the rise, as were many cults. This was a sure sign that cultural insecurity, which was a by-product of the political revolutions of the ‘60s & ‘70s, was sending people to the refuge of authority. The economic changes brought about by the oil crises of the ‘70s was blamed not on the machinations of American foreign policy but on more transparent scapegoats. America turned to a cue-card-reading actor who understood little about actual politics, Ronald Reagan, to be its president. Britain turned to the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, who distracted the populace with a war in the Falklands to provide them with patriotic purpose. It was a war waged by the playground bully, much like Reagan’s raid on Grenada.
Thatcher and her Conservative government trumpeted Family Values – at least for the general public, if not for the Party itself, as later scandals would reveal. It systematically targeted scapegoats, as any playground bully would. ‘Operation Tiger’ went into effect on April 10, 1984. Gay’s the Word bookshop was raided, its imported titles seized, and thousands of books that were on their way from the United States were denied clearance. An antiquated law that was part of the Customs Consolidation Act of 1876 was used to charge Gay’s the Word with conspiracy to import indecent books.
UK publications are governed by the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, which allows for a literary and artistic defence to be mounted, as happened with the trial of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960. The Customs and Consolidation Act did not allow for this, which in effect meant that books that could be published legally in the UK could be equally illegal to import. The titles that Gay’s the Word imported were by and large not available in the UK, and so an outdated law provided the convenient path to prosecution. At that time, Gay’s the Word was the only bookshop in the UK in which one could buy Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series. Maupin’s books were amongst those seized, as were titles by Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams.
There were parallels between the case against Gay’s the Word, and that brought against Gay News in 1977. The uptight ‘moral crusader’ (i.e. busybody) Mary Whitehouse and her band of cronies brought a case against the Gay News after it published a poem in which a soldier fantasised about having sex with Jesus. On the Cross. After he had died. It was the last successful application of the blasphemy laws in the UK. That the poem is tasteless and, frankly, not very good, is not the issue. To apply blasphemy laws in a secular democracy was an absurdity. Part of the Gay News’ defence fund went to aid Gay’s the Word and there was great solidarity between the two.
Camden Council, Gay’s the Word’s landlord, condemned the raid. Interestingly, when the bookshop was first proposed, it was Camden Council who opposed it on the grounds that it would no doubt be a sex shop. Camden councillor Ken Livingstone helped to overturn that decision. That a gay bookshop could be about literature, ideas and community was simply not considered. It seemed that Customs and Excise had taken the same view. After the raid, support came in from writers such as Gore Vidal and Angela Carter, as well as from Britain’s first out politician, Chris Smith. The National Council of Civil Liberties, Trade Unions, MPs, and LGBT groups throughout the country rallied to support the beleaguered independent bookshop.
In June 1985, the case was brought to court. Significantly this was two months after the laws on importing alleged obscene material had been revised as the result of a case against a company called Conegate, which had tried to import sex dolls from West Germany. Customs and Excise seized the dolls as “indecent or obscene articles”. When the seizure was upheld Conegate appealed to the High Court, claiming that 30 and 36 of the Treaty of Rome had been contravened. Conegate claimed that since there was no prohibition in the UK on the manufacture and sale of such dolls the law was redundant. To allow it to stand would be an “arbitrary discrimination or a disguised restriction on trade between Member States”. The matter was referred to the European Court, which ruled in the favour of Conegate. It was no wonder the Conservatives railed against the EU. It proved to be a bulwark to their draconian mission. What this meant for Gay’s the Word was that the judge threw the case out, and Customs and Excise dropped the charges. No apology was or has to this date been issued.
Gay’s the Word opened its doors thirty years ago on January 7, 1979. It was founded by a man with a name calculated to amaze the innocent: Ernest Hole. Ernest had worked at The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore in New York, which had been founded by Craig Rodwell, who had been a former lover of Harvey Milk and a significant activist figure in the pre-Stonewall years. Ernest brought the know-how he learned there to London. The bookstore was named after the Ivor Novello musical Gay’s The Word.
Gay’s the Word is more than a bookstore. It is a community hub. And it promotes that through book readings, group meetings and events. In 2006 a documentary on the history of the bookstore by Douglas Belford was screened at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.
