Giovanni's Room

Giovanni's Room opened in 1973, making it one of the oldest LGBTQ+ bookstores in the United States and a landmark of American queer cultural history. Named after James Baldwin's 1956 novel, the bookstore on South 12th Street has been selling queer literature, theory, and culture through five decades of American life — through the height of the AIDS crisis, when the store served as a distribution point for survival information as much as books; through the culture wars of the 1990s; through the mainstreaming of gay culture in the 2000s and 2010s; and into the current era of renewed culture-war pressure on LGBTQ+ visibility. The store's inventory reflects the full breadth of queer literary culture: fiction and poetry by gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer writers; academic and theoretical texts in gender and sexuality studies; history and biography; erotica in a separate section; and a careful selection of children's and young adult books. Events — author readings, book launches, community discussions — have been a feature of Giovanni's Room since its earliest years. The physical shop is a pleasure to browse: well-curated, knowledgeable staff, and the specific atmosphere of a bookshop that has been selected with genuine editorial intelligence. For any gay visitor to Philadelphia with an interest in literature, a visit to Giovanni's Room is non-negotiable.