43 Gillygate - Libertas
History: Libertas, a lesbian-run bookshop founded by Jenny Roberts and her partner Ann Croft, opened in 1998 at 43 Gillygate, York. The name "Libertas," suggested by Ann Murray, reflected both its literary focus ("liber" for book) and its broader mission of empowerment ("libertas" for freedom). The shop quickly became a hub for queer women, offering a variety of books, gifts, and merchandise related to LGBTQ+ experiences. It also served as a community meeting place for groups like DykeLife, an alternative newsletter to DIVA. Libertas expanded its reach online in 1999, becoming “Europe’s Number 1 Lesbian Bookstore” before closing its physical location in 2003.
Despite its closure, Libertas left a lasting impact. Its website continued operating until 2004, and a sweatshirt featuring its logo is now part of York Castle Museum's collection, featured in the "Out of the Closet" exhibition. Jenny Roberts also founded the York Lesbian Arts Festival, adding to the cultural significance of Libertas in the city's queer history.
we are (not) the same
For T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, & Frank O’Hara
I’d rather have a Dr Pepper Strawberries & Cream with you. I want to see the sun catch the dust gathering in your eyelashes, with the taste of a Campino slaking this thirst -
I had, here, to pause to serve a customer. I wonder if TS had to handle a foreign withdrawal at the bank between all these women coming and going
- for anyone else.
And you lower yourself down into the leaves of grass, pressed down and becoming part of a field I may never again have the time to read, and I make time, and make time,
and you having verse after -
I pause to light this cigarette and see Frank shine a light on abstract expressionist works of art, Jackson, through a crack in my bedroom wall, he smiles a smile I can’t yet, raising their red cans in unison
-verse, I break you up into indelible chunks and I’m consumed by you all, all for you. And partly, partly.
We hang out technologically rendered faces in the excess of our living rooms, scarcely enough, and you pose again so I may know -
Uncle Walt volunteered as a nurse for wounded soldiers, and I can’t even get this poem finished from behind the shop counter, darkened by a flagging spirit, I crave my childlike innocence to return with its calls and its passions, o me, o energy!
-that looking at you again I see all the poetry that I will write, and can’t find a biro quickly enough. And I have to cheat the world from reading you too. Maybe I hide the biros to keep you a little longer.
Prompt
Picture a woman who has impacted your life—her laughter, her defiance, her quiet strength. Now, feel the pulse of the old lesbian bookshop in your bones, as though you could hear Sappho herself whispering through the cracks in the pavement. Walk along the street with your hand on the walls as though you're running your fingers along the spines of countless books as you trace the space between the bricks, each brick a voice that could reshape your world. Take a moment—feel the power of all these words you’ve never read, imagine the white heat of defiance, the boundless liberation in their pages.
Channel her—this woman, this force in your life—into your writing. How would she fill the pages that once lined this space? What would her voice sound like if it was speaking here? Could her story rival Sappho’s? Write as though the walls of the bookshop are pressing your words into the world. Let your poem be bold, audacious, dripping with passion and determination. What does it mean to write into the void left behind by a place like this? What kind of poem would you write if it was the last poem anyone would ever find in the rubble of this forgotten bookstore? Push your words further, until they feel too wild to contain. Make her proud. Conjure her voice in between your written words.