HOW QUEER BOOKSHOPS CHANGED THE WORLD, worthy thesis defended with passion

HOW QUEER BOOKSHOPS CHANGED THE WORLD
A.J. WEST
Oneworld Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending June 30, 2026

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: For over a century, LGBTQ+ bookshops have been the unsung heroes of queer liberation

Home not only to books but chaotic community noticeboards, vicious rescue cats and countless meet cutes, queer bookshops have always been more than just bookshops, offering friendship, solidarity and sanctuary.

Traveling the world—Shakespeare and Company in Paris, Gay’s the Word in London, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York—A. J. West explores the remarkable history of these bookstores. Tracing their evolution from under-the-counter operations to beloved out-and-proud institutions, West reveals how the queer bookshop stood at the vanguard of LGBTQ+ rights, offering support and vital information through the AIDS crisis and bringing the fight to Section 28 and book bans.

A powerful testament not only to bookshops but to the courage of queer booksellers, from Sylvia Beach hiding books from the Nazis in laundry baskets to Craig Rodwell facing off against the police at the Stonewall riots, A. J. West celebrates the shops and booksellers that brought queer literature and lives into the mainstream.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'd give it a perfect rating if I hadn't felt so put-upon with the opening chapters speed-lining queer history.

It was my emotional reaction. I'm not wrong; I literally cannot be wrong about my feelings.

It's necessary to put not-queer, or new to their history queer, readers in the picture of what these trailblazing heroically brave people did and what they risked for us all to have access to queer stories. It is breathtaking, and eye-opening, and quite honestly shaming for those of us not willing or able to stand up against Authority for the good of all.

It is more clear to me than ever before that the urgent project of the authoritarians trying to ban queer books, the tech scum trying to make all knowledge available only on their say-so and the seeker's ability to pay any vig "They" choose to demand, and the ruling class's desire to keep you as stupid as possible intertwine like snakes on Medusa's head. The underknown prophet of this future we now live in, Sinclair Lewis, wrote: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying the cross."

Look around you...that was prophecy, not fiction.

Author AJ writes about the past in this book. It could, one day soon, feel like an elegy for les jadis if you and I are not very careful and very intentional in our actions in November 2026. It's fragile, this thing called Liberty, and it's always been very, very unpopular with with the ruling class. We-the-people have already seen how much control "They" want after women's bodily autonomy was stripped away from them in the US. Revoltingly it was enabled by a quisling woman. All of these struggles, legal battles, and societal shifts are under long-term and well-funded attack. How I wish more people had listened when Hilary Clinton spoke that truth.

Author AJ details the harms this determined regressive minority causes with seeming impunity in his chapters on the role of AIDS amelioration and drag-queen story hour bannings. Restraining the flow of often life-saving information to those in desperate need of it, and excluding people "They" don't like such as gender-nonconforming people, are terrible actions on their face. The true evil doesn't announce itself. It unfolds as Author AJ shows us consequences.


The best kind of non-fiction writing tells you a story that evokes emotional responses from the reader. I've seldom been more emotional in my response to a true story that does not involve a murder. Author AJ deserves all the kudos there are for bringing a storyteller's constructive attention to this crisis in our body politic.

IN THEORY, DARLING: Searching for José Esteban Muñoz and the Queer Imagination, a journey I support and hope to see pay off

IN THEORY, DARLING: Searching for José Esteban Muñoz and the Queer Imagination
MARCOS GONSALEZ
Beacon Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A love letter to queer of color theory and how it has helped the author to discover himself, reclaim identities, celebrate queer joy, and work towards liberation

Marcos Gonsalez found his greatest source of joy when he encountered queer theory in college. As they put it, "queers and college go together like peanut butter and jelly," and for them, this was especially true. Seeing himself reflected in the work José Esteban Muñoz was Muñoz's theory of disidentification empowered Gonsalez to reclaim their Latinx and queer identities—and inspired him to push back against the largely-white monolith of queer theory.

In the sophisticated yet intimately disarming prose of In Theory, Darling, Gonsalez takes his copy of Disidentifications to the gay bar, to the classroom, to their childhome and beyond, inviting us to go along with him as he limns the queerness of reality TV, mourns the victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre, searches for their uncle in Paris Is Burning, looks for Muñoz's legacy in the streets of New York, and situates themself in the lineage of the queer elders who have come before him.

Conversational yet deeply analytical, intimate yet wide-ranging, youthful yet sophisticated, Gonsalez's essays crackle with intellectual energy—and remind us just how life-giving theory can be.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Meditations on a mentor lost to death before his time. A love letter to the queerness of New York. A lament about the dehumanizing obscenity of capitalism.

A man coming to terms with his understanding of the world, no matter where he's sited, is going to sound much thae same: by turns pensive and self-regarding; both thoughtful...what has all thistaught me?...and selfish...I had to skip meals/live with crowds/be abused by The System to get what you got. Because it's all true and it all needs reckoning with.

Muñoz, his mentor, was developing a queer theory that decenters the white experience. Gonsalez is pursuing this monumental project as well. It is a story that needs to be told. I hope to live long enough to experience its flowering. When I was about Gonsalez's age, Martin Bernal did a similar decentering-of-whiteness in Black Athena. It was savaged. The criticisms were intensely personal. The professional-standards ones were couched in personal terms. I hope Gonsalez has learned from and will prepare for the same to happen as he pursues his process of decentering whiteness. It is, though, the fate of the revolutionary thinker to need rigor where evidence does not always exist yet to support it...that missing fifth star thus explained.

I'm ready to follow along behind him because he can say this: "No true utopia can blossom on stolen land whose keepers refuse to return it—who refuse, even, to admit that a violence has taken place, refuse to atone materially or structurally for all the enslaved and exploited who were forced to build a society, brick by brick."

That, I think, came from someone willing to question the entire enterprise of being alive in the 21st century's end-stage capitalism. Courage, Author Gonsalez. Stay on your true course, your course to find, report on, and exact the truth, from a world that's all about lies.