Damian Barr hosts an evening of conversation, poetry, stories and author readings from a range of special guests, including Kirsty Logan and Juno Dawson, to mark the 40th anniversary of the iconic bookshop, Gay’s the Word. Created to be a community resource as well as a bookshop, it is famed for nurturing the curiosity and wellbeing of the LGBT+ community. Surviving police raids, book seizures and homophobic harassment, today it is celebrated as a much-loved London institution with an international reputation.

Gay’s the Word, in Bloomsbury, was founded in early 1979 and named after the last musical written by Ivor Novello. It was the UK’s first dedicated lesbian and gay bookshop. Numerous groups have met at the bookshop throughout its history. From 1984 to 1985 Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners convened there and collected money outside, as immortalized in the 2014 film Pride.