Hive Mind Books is a queer bookstore and coffee shop located on Irving Avenue in Bushwick. The shop opened around six months ago, but Hive Mind has existed as a community and traveling bookstore since 2021. I found out about the store’s opening through friends who live in the (very queer) neighborhood, and visited it promptly afterwards to find stacks of books ranging from new bestsellers like Torrey Peter’s Stag Dance to indie staples like Chloe Caldwell’s Women. The store has a robust itinerary of events–hosting its queer book club and open mic series, among many others. I spoke with one of the store’s co-owners, Jules Wernersbach, to learn more about Hive Mind’s beginnings and future. 

Emma Foley: Why did you start Hive Mind Books? When did the idea of a queer-focused book store come to you?

Jules Wernersbach: Hive Mind Books started in 2021, in the hazy year when we were all figuring out how to live again after Covid restructured society. We met as booksellers about 14 years ago and shared a similar dedication to books and a love for reading, and a frustration with bookstores that used the word “community” as a way to serve their bottom line, denying the needs of its own community of booksellers, and being more concerned about profit than the store’s literal community impact. We didn’t like that. We wanted to work for a bookstore that centers people over profits, so we made one. 

Photo © Copyright Hive Mind Books

After operating as a traveling bookstore for a while and selling books around Brooklyn (and a lot of other places), and observing the city’s literary landscape, it became clear that there was a real desire for queer literature, but no bookstore in Brooklyn at that time was dedicated to queer books. There were no queer bookstores in Brooklyn! So we made one. We’d been hosting our own queer book fairs in local bars and heard so many times how hard it was for people here in the biggest friggin city to find a lot of these books. We want to keep queer and trans literature circulating. We added the coffee shop element to the brick and mortar to encourage the community feel of the space. You can hang out here, you don’t just have to browse, buy, and leave. And, of course, we host a ton of events, all of them specifically for queer and trans readers and writers. 

EF: Is there a reason why Hive Mind opened in Bushwick, specifically?

JW: I live about a six minute walk from the store. I moved to the neighborhood with my girlfriend in 2023. She’d lived in Bushwick previously and we wanted to move in together. Our neighborhood is very queer. I was putting up fliers for a Queer Book Fair at a queer bar down the street when I noticed the vintage shop that had been in this space was going out of business. I’d been casually looking at rents in the neighborhood, because I love it here, but everything was way out of our price range. This rent was manageable. The place is on a corner with big street-facing windows, it gets amazing light, and it already had this crazy colorful flower tile all over it from the last tenants. It just seemed like a nice place to land. We’d spent months lugging boxes up and down steep flights of stairs and in and out of our cars. Our backs hurt. It felt right. 

EF: I noticed that since opening, Hive Mind has already put on a ton of events. How have the open mics, reading and writing nights, book club, etc. been going? 

JW: Really well! I’ve been doing book events for 20 years. It’s so much fun to do them for our own store. We curate a lot of programming for queer and trans writers, too. People love our queer writing nights. I love our open mic. It’s felt really special to have regulars at these events already, to have people come with so much love and genuine self. We opened one week before the presidential election. We would’ve done a ton of events anyway, but I felt how needed it was for us to have any reason at all to come together. Like I say all of the time at our events: it’s a good time to know your neighbor. People feel that and are responding to opportunities to do that. We are stewards of this space, that’s how I see it. We have the keys to the front door and make sure the rent gets paid on time. It’s here for everyone else to use, to find a sense of humanity, friendship, spontaneous connection, to facilitate the “contact” that Samuel R. Delany describes in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue as necessary and valuable for healthy urban culture. 

EF: Any plans for the store in the future?

JW: We’re taking this first year as it comes, getting to know our flow and what people are looking for from us in terms of books and curation, coffee, coworking, and events. You really just have to ride the first year of a business, try some things, observe, listen to people, and watch your expenses. We’re expanding our team and thinking about how to structure ourselves. The best thing we can do right now is build a firm foundation. Our responsibility to the people who are finding meaning and use in this place is to be a healthy, sustainable business. 

After that, we talk about doing all kinds of things. Saying more feels like telling someone what you wished for on your birthday candles. We’re only six months in. I’m still holding my breath, waiting to see what comes.

Emma Foley is a writer and editor at Three Rooms Press.