Manhattan’s ‘last queer bookstore’

What devotees are calling the “last queer bookstore” in Manhattan is expected to close its doors for good in a matter of months.

That’s unless another queer independent bookshop — located in Brooklyn — manages to save it from an untimely demise.

The Bureau of General Services — Queer Division has spent more than a decade nestled in the LGBT Community Center in the West Village. It may be the only explicitly queer bookstore in Manhattan after the recent shuttering of similar shops, including Bluestockings on the Lower East Side.

But the Bureau’s fate is in jeopardy after its owners, Donnie Jochum and Greg Newton, announced personal plans to relocate in April, meaning that the beloved bookshop would close unless they were able to find someone willing to purchase it.

Enter Hive Mind Books in Bushwick.

Hive Mind began as a traveling bookstore in 2021 and later relaunched as a pop-up bookshop around the city before it opened a brick-and-mortar location on Irving Avenue and Harman Street in late 2024.

And Hive Mind is now on its way to acquire the Bureau, the Bushwick shop’s owner and founder told Gothamist.

“My friend sent me a screenshot of that email kind of as soon as she got it and I said, ‘Please send me that right away and tell me that we’d love to talk with them,’” Jules Wernersbach said.

After months of back-and-forth looking at “all the spreadsheets and all the numbers” of the Bureau, Hive Mind’s founder and owner said taking over the Manhattan site was an obvious decision.

“Understanding that the business is healthy and people just want it and love it so much — of course they do, they’re such a community here,” Wernersbach said. “People want this here, they need it and they’re relying on this store for gathering, events, for cultures or just coming in for chit chat.”

On Wednesday, Wernersbach and Hive Mind’s team launched a GoFundMe with an ambitious goal of $50,000. By Friday evening, it had already raised half of that in a matter of days. The Bureau’s own social media accounts have been promoting the fundraising and purchase effort as well.

The fundraiser’s momentum comes amid coordinated efforts to restrict access to books containing LGBTQ themes in schools and libraries across the nation.

Library patrons challenged more than than 50 books in New York state in 2023, the Times Union reported. And nationwide, more than half of the books banned in the 2023-2024 school featured people of color or the LGBTQ community, according to an American Library Association report also referenced by the Times-Union.

“It’s a testament to everybody understanding why it’s so important to preserve spaces for queer art, for queer community and for queer literature as it’s being banned nationwide rampantly,” Wernersbach said. “People really understand that we have to keep these things here.”

They said Hive Mind’s $50,000 goal would help cover a significant portion of purchasing The Bureau from its current owners, as well as starting to increase its payroll, to pay the current host of volunteers who staff the Bureau sans pay.

The funds would also go toward hiring an event manager for both spaces and reopening the cafe located on the first floor of the Bureau, which has been closed for over a year, Wernersbach said.

Hive Mind — which will transition into a worker-owned cooperative in about a year — also plans to update the Bureau’s software system, and create an e-commerce site so books can be purchased online.

Hive Mind’s fundraising efforts have the full support of the Bureau’s current owners.

“This will help to draw more attention to the bookstore, which is tucked away on the second floor, not to mention much-needed revenue,” Newton said. “The joining of the Bureau to the café and to Hive Mind Books will create a mutually-supporting network of queer cultural spaces in NYC that can do so much more than the Bureau could ever have done on its own.”

Wernersbach said there are no immediate plans to change the Bureau’s identity. They note that while both Hive Mind and The Bureau operate as queer bookstores in the city, they attract different audiences due to their distinct locations and the demographics of their customers.

“We are going to keep the two identities of the bookstores distinct,” said Wernersbach, whose own debut novel on work and labor movements is scheduled to come out on Tuesday. “The Bureau is so well known and so well loved for what it does. We like it, we like what they’ve done and we want to keep their identity as it is.”