Audio excerpt from the radio program "Southwind," a Southern culture program that aired on WABE-FM from 1980-87. In this excerpt, during a conference on banned books in Atlanta, Christopher's Kind owner Gene Loring speaks about police raids targeting his store. Courtesy of the Atlanta History Center, Southwind recordings.

Audio excerpt from an interview with Charis Books & More co-founder Linda Bryant discussing the financial gift that enabled her to open the bookstore and the process of selecting the location in Little Five Points. Courtesy of Georgia State University. Special Collections, GSU Activist Women Oral History Project.

During the early years of gay liberation, queer literary voices required both publishers willing to produce them and booksellers willing to distribute them. Linda Bryant and Barbara Borgman stepped into the latter role in 1974 upon opening Charis Books and More, a feminist bookstore closely affiliated with the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance and dedicated to stocking anti-racist, anti-sexist, woman-authored, and LGBTQ+ books. Charis was also the workplace and first public reading location for lesbian playwright and author Shay Youngblood when she was only nineteen years old, roughly ten years before she published her first book, The Big Mama Stories. Over time Charis became a kind of community center, especially after creating the nonprofit Charis Circle in 1996 to arrange justice-oriented feminist and queer-friendly programming. A quite different kind of bookstore, adult gay bookstores also operated as places of sexual expression and exploration, showing adult films in movie galleries and housing “game rooms” for patron encounters, a purpose that drew the ire of local authorities and eventually violence. In 1980 the bookstores After Dark and Down Under were destroyed by arson and an explosion, respectively. The same year, Gene Loring opened Christopher’s Kind in Midtown Atlanta, becoming the “only [store] in the metro area with reading material aimed entirely at homosexuals.” Loring, too, struggled with harassment from authorities, who singled out booksellers at the store for selling adult magazines. In 1985 Loring sued Bellsouth Advertising & Publishing when they suddenly refused to continue listing the store in the Yellow Pages due to the inclusion of the words “gay” and “lesbian” in the ad copy; a DeKalb County judge ruled in favor of Bellsouth, and shortly thereafter Christopher’s Kind went out of business. Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse was opened by Philip Rafshoon in 1993, and like Charis and Christopher’s Kind, it operated as a community space as well as a store, hosting readings, book signings, and meetings where LGBTQ+ Atlantans could connect with each other, with politicians running for office, and with community organizations engaged in justice work. The closure of Outwrite in 2012 marked the end of the last explicitly LGBTQ+-focused bookstore in Georgia, at a time when few remain in the country. But like many now-defunct LGBTQ+ businesses in the state, its presence made a lasting mark on the community for which it was built.

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