Norman Laurila

A Different Light was a chain of four LGBT bookstores in the United States, active from 1979 to 2011.

Canadian attorney and business man George Leigh traveled to Los Angeles occasionally on business, and in the late 1970s felt that the Los Angeles gay and lesbian community both needed and was able to support a specialty gay and lesbian bookstore. Leigh contacted Norman Laurila, an employee of Toronto's Glad Day Bookshop, and offered an arrangement whereby Leigh would provide the funding to open a store in Los Angeles if Laurila would move to Los Angeles and manage the store. Laurila and his then-partner Richard Labonté relocated to Los Angeles to open the book store. At the time, Labonté was a journalist for the Ottawa Citizen. Leigh remained in Ontario, where he was a corporate lawyer for Texaco's Canadian division. The name of the bookstore came from the title of the novel A Different Light by science fiction author Elizabeth Lynn, suggested by Labonté.

The first A Different Light Bookstore opened at 4014 Santa Monica Blvd. in Los Angeles' Silver Lake neighborhood in October 1979, followed by a branch in New York City's Greenwich Village in 1983 and a branch in San Francisco's Castro district in 1985. In May 1990, a second Los Angeles store opened at 8853 Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood, and the New York City store moved from its original location on Hudson Street to 19th Street in Chelsea, Manhattan. The original store in Silver Lake closed in 1992.

At its height, the chain was one of the most influential LGBT booksellers in the United States, serving as a cultural hub and social center for LGBT people. It hosted events including author readings, art shows, reading groups, writing conferences, art exhibitions and panel discussions. In the mid 1970s, mass market publisher Avon was the largest publisher of gay and lesbian books including Patricia Nell Warren's best selling novel The Front Runner. A significant part of A Different Light bookstore’s first inventory was from Avon Book’s backlist.

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