The lights were a little bright inside for dancing compared to a bar or club somewhere else in Brooklyn, but better for reading because this was a bookstore, after all.

Gladys Books & Wine opened this week in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, and was packed with mostly young, Black lesbians hungry for culture and connection off line and IRL, and celebrating the new and nerdy addition to the neighborhood.

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The narrow bookstore on Malcolm X Boulevard was packed with dozens of lovers of books who also love women, smiling, laughing, and talking among the shelves and the art devoted to Black and women creators, according to The New York Times.

Following a reading and Q&A with Briona Simone Jones, author of Mouths of Rain, a DJ got the joint swaying.

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Gladys Books is the creation of Tiffany Dockery, 37, who was laid off from her job at Google a year ago this month.

“I felt like God was saying, ‘All right, at what point are you going to actually do something that you believe in?’” Dockery said.

“I both love to read and I love buying books, which are similar, but not exactly the same thing,” she said about manifesting her next big thing.

So Dockery cashed out her 401(k) and opened up the bookstore and wine bar aimed specifically at Black lesbians.

It was a decision to “step out on faith,” she said.

As Gladys Books filled to capacity, Dockery was beaming and accepting congratulations.

“The amount of Black women who said ‘thank you’ and ‘I’m proud of you’ to me felt like the ultimate payoff,” she said. “It genuinely felt like my grandmother speaking to me through them.”

Her grandmother is the eponymous Gladys of the bookstore’s name, an orphan who traveled from Mississippi to Chicago during the Great Migration and was, Dockery said, “the person who always looked at me like I was special, and saw something in me.”

Her portrait holds a prominent place on the bookstore’s art-filled walls.

On the shelves, works like Sing a Black Girl’s Song: The Unpublished Work of Ntozake Shange share space with Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson and James Baldwin’s coming-of-age classic, Giovanni’s Room.

Books, said Dockery, are an antidote to “chronic online-ness.”

“I’ve had to read more, opening a bookstore, and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is better for my brain!’” she said. “I can genuinely feel my brain recalibrating as I read instead of scrolling on TikTok at night.”

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