Edinburgh: gay sprinkled everywhere

The historic Dean Village. PHOTO: WIKIPEDIA

Local bookseller Mairi Oliver gives her recommendations of Edinburgh from Lonely Planet's LGBTQ+ Travel Guide.

Try as she might, queer bookseller Mairi Oliver (she/her) never could keep herself away from her home country for long.

"My family is Scottish, but I grew up abroad," Mairi said. "I came back to attend university in Scotland, then I left, then I came back again ... then I left, then I came back again ...

"It just kept calling me back. I last returned to Scotland in 2014 and I haven’t left again since, and I moved to Edinburgh to open the bookshop in 2017."

The bookshop in question, lauded as Edinburgh’s radical bookshop, is called Lighthouse, but it wasn’t always. The space used to be home to a different bookshop called Word Power.

"I used to visit it when I was a student at St Andrew’s University up the coast and my sister was at Edinburgh University; I’d visit her so I could go to Word Power and find queer books. There was none of that at St Andrew’s; it was an incredibly straight university when I was there, so I came to Word Power for queer books," Mairi said.

Owner Elaine Henry had been running Word Power since 1994. Once she was ready to retire, Elaine put a call out to the Edinburgh community to try to find someone to take over the shop so it wouldn’t close.

"At the time, I went home and cried, like, ‘It’s the end of an era!’ And my mum was like, ‘Why are you crying about this? Go find some money! You could do this’," Mairi said. "I’d been working in bookshops at that point for the better part of a decade, so I knew how to run one. And so, I bought it. I took a few weeks, renovated the space, painted it, and refreshed it. Made it pretty, made it accessible, clear, and bright, a place you could get around in a wheelchair. It reopened as Lighthouse two weeks after I got the keys."

Considering Edinburgh’s storied history as a literary city, it’s no wonder that that’s where Mairi decided to put down roots when she finally settled back down in Scotland.

"If you’re a quiet queer, and I’m a quiet queer by nature, and a bookish queer — then I think it’s kind of perfect," Mairi said.

Mairi Oliver’s recommendations

Queerness all around

One of the things I love about Edinburgh is that it doesn’t have a dedicated queer area. You get to find your neighbourhood and then find community in whatever neighbourhood it is. You get to just sprinkle the gay everywhere a bit, and though people will point to Leith or to the Southside, there isn’t just one cool area or a gay district centred around a club area. I think that made it easier for me to live my queerness all around the city.

Very, very few places feel like somewhere I couldn’t go with short hair and a rainbow pin, or my pronoun badges, or whatever. There isn’t a sense that places are unfriendly to queer people or an area that feels conservative or that you have to steer clear of — with the caveat that I am privileged to navigate the city as a middle-class, cis, white woman.

Queer lit

You can visit the Lavender Menace archive.

It’s full of gay books from the ’80s and ’90s and its this lovely intergenerational space. The original founders are usually there — they’re in their 70s now — but the people working there range from baby gays that are, like, 18 or 19 to people in their 30s and 40s; it’s across the whole age range.

It’s worth the visit for a bit of history.

Typewronger Books is a hub for Edinburgh’s zine culture. PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES

There’s also Typewronger Books, also queer-owned, and one of the hubs for Edinburgh’s zine culture. Tee Hodges, who founded it, is a non-binary printer who has their own Riso printer.

They run printing workshops and teach people to make zines, and they run an annual Edinburgh Zine Fair, which is always worth looking out for. Tee also used to fix typewriters, hence the name. It’s a wonderfully weird space, and deeply Instagrammable.

Down in Leith, you’ve got Argonaut Books, and in Porty there’s the Portobello Bookshop; both may not be queer-run but they’re usually full of gays. I mean, the bookshops in Edinburgh ... the queers are deeply embedded in the bookshops.

Book nooks

A large park, the Meadows, is beautiful all year round.

Near Lighthouse you’ve got August 21, which is a really cool queer-owned cafe in Southside.

If it’s a nice day, you can sit in the Meadows, which is the big park here, and you’re close enough to everything at that end of the city.

There’s a really great coffee culture in Edinburgh, so there’s no shortage of good cafes. Places like Fortitude, Foodstory, Cult, and Black Medicine.

Wining & dining

The New Town Fox is a brunch place near New Town. I have gone there many times and overlapped with a Bears Brunch, and there’s nothing like a bunch of bears in their Sunday-morning fishnet tees having pancake stacks. It’s so wholesome.

You’ve got Kafe Kweer, who do some great vegan food and showcase queer crafts and prints. They’re at the Tollcross end of town, and there are great walks along the Union Canal around that area.

Kafe Kweer does some great vegan food.

If you want to drink on a patio, have a good cocktail, and be surrounded by queers, you can do that at the Eastway Tap or Paradise Palms. Palms is home to Saffron Cherry, an amazing queer POC drag night, and a bunch of other really great queer nights.

They do fantastic vegetarian and vegan food, too. You can go for mac and cheese or vegetarian pub grub.

The Regent Bar is also an amazing gay bar in Edinburgh. It’s popular with an older crowd, but it’s gay. And one that really does feel gay, whereas somewhere like the Safari Lounge feels very queer. But you could still walk into the Regent wearing whatever, in whatever set-up you are, and feel totally safe and welcome. It’s just that it feels more delightfully like an older men’s bar. Queer bars like CC Blooms, Planet, and the Street also offer a big night out, if that’s what you’re after.

Getting outside

Portobello Beach is 20 minutes from the city.

We’re spoilt for parks. Moss dykes are going to have a great time on Arthurs Seat. People think of Edinburgh and they imagine the old buildings and stuff, but we have this massive volcanic rock in the middle of the city, and the park around it is so lush. You can really get lost in it, and it’s beautiful all year round.

Then you’ve got Porty Beach, as Portobello is just 20 minutes from here by bus. One of the reasons I settled in Edinburgh was that I wanted to be near the sea, but in Scotland, near the sea can be hard to find if you’re outside of a small village. But Edinburgh has that, just 20 minutes outside the city in Portobello. It’s a very visibly queer-friendly space. They have their own Pride in June, and a great queer-friendly bakery called Go Go Beets.

The Water of Leith Walkway.

There’s the walk along the Water of Leith Walkway. You can start at the National Galleries of Scotland, which has a cool outdoor space with landscape sculptures. Then you can walk the length of Leith Walk, which has these burbling streams along the way, and lots of birds.

Edinburgh Queer Hiking has hundreds, if not thousands, of members, and they do regular hiking trips. They’ll take people who don’t live in the city, who are here for a week or a weekend, on guided walks. There’s also Queer Swim Edinburgh, where they’ll take you on a guided tour down towards the Newhaven area to places where you can swim. That’s especially nice if you’re nervous to try wild swimming on your own for the first time, or maybe it’s your first time in a swimsuit since transitioning, or whatever the case may be.

To the same end, the Edinburgh Queer Facebook page is also quite easy to join if you’re coming for a visit. People post in there all the time being like, "I’m visiting this weekend, what should I do while I’m here?" And people comment with events that are happening or places to check out.

I know Facebook is old-school, but it's a good place to get recommendations.

Arts-centric city

You’ve got Summerhall, which is not in itself queer, but it’s an art hub. They have a great cafe there called MF Coffee, and in what was once the Small Animal Hospital of the Dick Vet School, there is now a bar and restaurant called the Royal Dick. The indie/alternative art scene also includes Sett Studios in Leith, Edinburgh Printmakers, Fruitmarket and Agitate Gallery, who all regularly host queer artists.

The Wee Red Bar does classic dyke-documentary screenings and hosts trans punk bands and rad poetry nights. Very art-school vibes.

I’d say several nights a month they host something queer there. Queer Film Night puts on a free monthly screening just over the Meadows in the Student Co-op. Leith Arches will regularly have something gay going on, too.

Getting around

It’s a very hilly city. It’s a city that’s literally built on three layers, where one bit was built over another bit. So, I wouldn’t recommend cycling, but it’s a great city to walk in. You can walk from one side of Edinburgh to the other in, like, an hour and a half.

That said, it’s not a particularly accessible city. So, if people are mobility-restricted, in many ways, it’s not a good city to visit. My sister is a wheelchair user, and if she didn’t have a power chair, it would be very hard for her to get around.

It’s an old city with old buildings that often have stairs only.

The buses are really good, though. They’re tap-on, tap-off with your card or your phone. You don’t need to buy a bus pass. The bus drivers are a really good bunch. If you’re like, "Does this bus go here?" they’re the kind of people who will actually tell you yes or no. It’s relatively inexpensive, too.