The night before I moved overseas, my friends and I went to the pub. We were there for about six hours and I don’t remember much beyond a blur of yelling over each other, a lot of hysterical declarations of love. At one point some boys came up to try and hit on us and one of my friends looked up and said, cold and furious, “Our beloved is leaving us tomorrow – can you go, like, now?”
It’s been eight months since I packed up my bags and fled Australia, hoping this time it would stick. Melbourne is the best Australian city and one of my favourite cities in the world, but I’d had enough – it was too hot, too claustrophobic, too far away from everything. Bristol, the English city that had captured my heart when I was travelling the year before, seemed like everything I wanted: familiar to Melbourne in its vagabond, cheerful, arts-loving spirit, but more colourful, colder, crisper. Bands went there. Also, I’d fallen in love.
This city is beautiful and I love it, its vibrant walls, its tortuous hills and open spaces, “my lover” as a pet name used for the first time in my hearing outside of Buffy. I have a group of nice friends here and a gorgeous new house with the necessary eccentric landlord, and my career prospects are actually starting to look a little different from the “oh god what kind of idiot still gets an arts degree” sludge that they’ve been for the last few years. But there’s one thing I can’t get over, the thing that keeps me pining after my old town: Bristol, where are your dykes?
Because I come from Melbourne, where the queer scene for people in their early twenties rages, where at the centre of the storm is a brilliant and terrifying group of women and genderqueer people, where dykes prowl the streets of Brunswick and Northcote like a werewolf pack. I came of age there, in this city overrun, where the way girls looked at me made the back of my neck prickle, where there was always someone with delicate hands and an oversized tweed jacket looking to get you in trouble.
It might be that I’m just bitter, or not looking hard enough, or that this is what most cities’ queer scenes are like, but if there’s a place in Bristol crowded and dangerous with dykes like I remember, it’s not one that I can find.
My girlfriend, when I arrived, was the vice president of Bristol University’s LGBT+ society, and so I was fairly confident that I had a good “in” for the queer scene. But Bristol University’s LGBT+ society, while friendly to tag-alongs like me, is undeniably a place for students. It’s an insular group, with most of its members scattering to other UK cities when they’ve graduated, and though I’m only 22, being a non-student makes more of a difference than you’d think.
Perhaps I should have expected that; the trouble is, if you’re not a student, there doesn’t seem to be any alternative. There’s Queercaf, a group run by passionate people who want to combine queer parties with politics, and they do an admirable job, but events are few and far between and most of the people who go are well into adulthood – over 35 and bringing their kids. There’s Indigo, a queer group dedicated to women, but it’s an older audience again. Everything else is dominated overwhelmingly by cis gay men, with all nights ending at Bristol’s famous OMG club, possibly one of the worst gay clubs I’ve ever had the misfortune to be in and home to definitely the worst drag queen.
Back home, Melbourne thrives through a mix of good ideas and brilliant coincidences. Rather than gay clubs, all of the queers I knew would go to nights – Thursgay at Mr Wow’s Emporium, IQ just across the road on Tuesdays, Closet held once a month (its posters frequently getting in trouble). Melbourne managed to avoid the tendency for gay clubs to be overrun by men, and particularly by older men, who – gay or not – can be an uncertain and unwanted presence in a room with a lot of women and genderqueer people, mostly by sending them off to the two or three gay clubs that do exist, so they don’t infiltrate these larger nights. I was introduced to the scene via my university’s queer club, but the group was never contained just to Melbourne Uni students. You’d meet graduates, or kids from other universities, or kids who weren’t going to uni at all, and then they’d invite you to parties where you’d meet still more people. The house parties in Melbourne’s queer scene became a familiar and delightful fixture of weekends: the Beyonce themed one that featured a giant chalk painting shrine to her (pictured), the Halloween I dressed up as Johnny Knoxville, the one where three of us sat around a bonfire when my friend came back from the loo to find the other two making out and said, sadly, “I thought we were talking about our daddy issues!”
It’s strange to me that there is no broader dyke scene in Bristol: that that community seems to be entirely missing. I wonder where they are, Bristol’s dykes, where they go and who they hang out with, whether, like me, they are the one queer girl in a group of friends. I hunt for them with all my Melbourne dyke instincts; whipping my head around when I hear a girl with an undercut drawling about Kristen Stewart, or grinning wolfishly if a girl catches my eye. Sometimes I’m sure, but I never get any invitation to a secret club.
I love living in this city, and I don’t want to leave it. I’m nervous talking to my friends or my girlfriend sometimes about this shock, this homesickness, because it feels accusatory in a way that normal homesickness doesn’t. I’m not blaming Bristol – probably this is the norm, gay scenes are dominated by a couple of shitty clubs and a pack of men. There is something special about Melbourne and its sprawling, devoted community, and when I discovered it, seventeen and overwhelmed, I thought these were the kind of people I’d hang out with forever.
And I do miss it, I do. I don’t miss feeling inadequate and intimidated, I don’t miss the insane politics, the veganism, the in-fighting and factions, the people who don’t recognise you even though you’ve met them three or four times, but I miss it all the time. I miss Thursgay every week which was always playing my song, always, which played pop songs with all the joy and ferocity they needed, which took Taylor Swift and Beyonce and Wheatus as importantly as they needed to be taken – not seriously, but with weight. Not gravitas but gravity, knowing how to send a room up and down. I miss the undercuts, the glitter, the op shops, the oversized sweaters and see-through bras, I miss the long thick plaits and the monobrows, I miss the hiking boots and the untied laces.
I miss the butch girls and the bois, big and firm and putting a hand on your neck on the dancefloor, I miss the smaller queers, with their shaved heads and their winged eyeliner and the kind of fragile strength about them, like they’ve clawed their way back from the edge and so now they can probably carry you, too. I miss the hard femmes, whose particular version of femininity left me deeply uncomfortable, I miss their faith in vintage pin-ups and a curler. I even miss the first year boys: not their presence, but their scarcity. I miss the turquoise lipstick, the round high circles of blush. I miss my friends, I miss knowing people everywhere I went, I miss sitting in a corner of a park with a bottle of shitty wine and getting ready to dance. I miss napping on couches and waking up to people talking about coming out to their parents and making badges that say FUCK THE CIS-TEM, I miss the endless rows, I miss throwing my hands up once a week at least and saying fuck it, being done. I miss caring that much, not regarding it with a lazy whatever-whatever-ness, a kind of cynicism that I’m not good enough for. I miss being surprised. I want to spill down to Mr Wow’s, I want all of us there again, I want to be there, too, terrifying the token clueless lad and telling him to go, like, now, with a jug in front of me, safe and sound and loud.
Tags: australia, community, dykes, lgbt, mikaella clements
Related Posts
Quotes From The Inevitable Hollywood Adaptation of Anne Lister’s Diaries
Femslash Friday: On the Promise of Canonical Kimber/Stormer
Femslash Friday: Gerda/The Robber Girl: Love and Knives Under the Northern Lights
Sad Queer Classics, Fixed
The L Word, Fixed
Substance Abuse in the Trans Community: Why We Need Better Resources
I think the Cardiff gay scene is probably better, and it’s only over the bridge/through the tunnel. Have you tried?
My love, my sweet sweet girl, you already know exactly how I feel. This city misses you just as sharply and as sorely as you miss it.
Oh hi! I’m from Bristol …. and I know exactly what you mean about the gay scene. But I loved this piece, you write beautifully!
Hi Bristol! COME HANG OUT.
I moved to Bristol just a few months ago and keep thinking the queer scene MUST be here, hiding in plain sight, right under my nose… it’s strange that there isn’t anything visible. Maybe we can change that?? 🙂
Yes, for sure! Find me on twitter and we def will.
Hm, have you tried joining the Green Party? I’m Midlands/Northern so I don’t know the southwest all that well, so my perception is that it’s pretty hippy. I think your Bristol dykery is going to be more of the Birkenstocks and tiedye than undercuts and clubbing. (Me and a friend once described Hebden Bridge to an American as “Birkenstocks and drumming groups” and she said, “Oh. Huh. Portland Oregon.”) I couldn’t possibly comment.)
(I’m also over 35 -just! – and have a kid – just! – but I wasnt always! I have always worn Birkenatocks, but that’s more to do with living in Germany than hippiness. Any Leeds queers want to hang out?)
I love Hebden Bridge!
Hebden Bridge is indeed lovely. My gentleman caller is in Halifax which is less lovely so we go and visit the prettier places!
York queer, often in Leeds *waves*
(Also just asking but HOW does ANYONE have a thing for Kristen Stewart? How is that physically possible? It’s like your all-time favourite food being tofu)
God Bless the Bristol Sound, I always say.
Oh god the vegans though, they are the WORST.
This was really great — you capture a lot about homesickness and also brought to life a subset of the queer community. Very nice!
Ugh, I’ve got a hunch that all the Bristol dykes might’ve ended up here in Brighton. I know how difficult it is to make new queer friends. Hang on and keep trying, and if you get tired come down here and visit, there’s always room for great queer writers!
This is beautifully written. I live in the US but the community you describe is so familiar. It sounds a lot like the queer scene at my college, and though I didn’t quite fit in there (too introverted, too femme) I miss its presence in the “real world.” College had “Queer Beers” with $4 pitchers of PBR and student DJs; the city I’m in now has upscale gay dance clubs packed with cis gay men and $8 well drinks.
Man, what’s with cis men taking over every queer scene that exists?
ETA: upon reflection, maybe they get pushed out of their bars by bachelorette parties.
Oooh, let’s make a support group for “introverted and femme” lesbians.
I want in!
This was so interesting and a little melancholy to read as a Melbourne dyke, because I know the scene is there but mostly haven’t felt like a part of it. I was at Melbourne Uni at a time when the queer department felt not so great, and even after moving to the northern suburbs I realised that club nights were never my thing. I feel like I’ve had to build my own queer community – slowly, over many years, by finding the one queer person in a group that shares my interests, and meeting their friends, and so on and so on until we had enough people for a queer knitting group and a queer let’s-drink-beer-and-watch-sports group. Melbourne’s ‘party’ queer community is fantastic, but I didn’t walk into it and feel like I was home. I had to make my own – much like people probably had to be proactive to get the dominant Melbourne scene going,t oo.
Same. I’ve never been into clubbing, though I do enjoy a good wifwolf hunt once in a blue moon. If you’re still looking for community, there’s some pretty good events at Hares and Hyenas (book club, stitch and bitch, poetry nights and chill rent parties), there are plenty of clubs on Meetup (of which I think the Lesbian Social Club is a huge one), or there’s Pink Sofa which I haven’t tried but some friends recommend, or there’s a queer book club at the City Library in Flinders Lane, or volunteering for the Queer Film Festival, Midsumma or Joy FM is pretty easy, or you can just hang around at Preston Lentil as Anything for an afternoon.
(By the way, the lady with the green hair is a total cutie, good glasses game there)
There seem to be a handful of us here, too. I’d be up for a Toastie meetup, since clubs are emphatically not my thing.
words can’t describe how overjoyed i feel to hear that this sort of scene actually exists in australia. my town is too rural and not rural enough at the same time (too rural to have an actual queer community, not rural enough to warrant a mass exodus to sydney on the weekends to go drinking) so i haven’t found it yet but i hope i do someday soon. i loved this piece a lot.
I really loved this: such a great piece of writing about scenes and all they entail.
Your writing’s gorgeous, melancholy, hopeful, evocative, lovely. Thankyou!
as someone who is currently in Melbourne, having come from somewhere smaller, colder, and with much less everything (the comment that “Bands go there!” cracks me up as a southern kiwi who accidentally spent half her paycheck on gigs in one month because, I’m in Melbourne! Bands come here!) I totally get that feeling of missing your tribe, your clan, these people and places and scene that you just can’t quite crack or find in your new place. Mine were the arts kids, the performance artists and fine arts degrees, the sculptor living with the opera singer living with the actor getting coffee from the performance artist barista in the cafe downstairs. Melbourne’s art scene to me is phenomenal and huge and somehow also diaphanous and impossible to really get involved in; no more 2pm sunday phone calls for urgent costuming assistance, no more spitballing burlesque art ideas over coffee and beers, no more makeup smeared pillows at 2am after shows. I miss those people, and that scene, but good god did I need to get outta there.
So. Long and rambly, but: I feel ya. You’ll get there, you’ll pick up people and ideas, and you’ll realise one day that while you’d love to bring that bar, those people, to you – you’re pretty good with being where you are, for a while. (She says smugly, also planning a move to Europe, smugly)
(also: write more, please)
Wow there is something so pleasing about reading something that exists in your own city, about a scene that you belong to. I mean, I was at Thursgays last week! There is something magical about Melbourne’s scene, which I only realise when talking to people from out of town. “Yeah So Juicy is okay, but Thursgays is great” and “Never ever ever end your night up at The Peel”. The way my friends and I rate and insult certain gay bars is an insane privilege to have!
Though I am a frequent attendee of Melb gay nights, I have never fully joined the crowd and got to know everyone in the same way you did (preferring instead to use my regular, close friends as a mirror to sing my Destiny’s Child ballads to). But I know that we probably have at least a couple mutual facebook friends, and it is a pleasure to have read something on my favourite website that I can recognise so keenly.
Psht, try living in Norfolk and looking for gay women, then get back to me
hahaha tell me about it!try north norfolk…
Someone told me (before I moved from a place I deeply loved to a new country for job reasons) that your first year in New Country is Just Awful. That doesn’t sound like it’s entirely true for you (it was true for me! it’s better now), but hey, culture shock is a real thing. The grocery stores are all arranged differently, you actually have to read the transit map to figure out where you’re going, and every day is a series of small, high friction encounters between you and your environment, and you’re exhausted all the time for no reason you can clearly define. I’m sorry your new home isn’t your old home. I’m happy you have a partner who is there for you, and new friends. You will either find your peoples or you won’t, and if you don’t you can go on another explore someday to find them. ::international moving solidarity internet hugs::
i live in the inner west of sydney and i know there’s a “vibrant” queer community here somewhere but i came out so late in life i feel totally disconnected from it. somehow the most at home i’ve ever felt was the month i spent hanging out on a mate’s couch in atlanta, georgia.
“the smaller queers, with their shaved heads and their winged eyeliner and the kind of fragile strength about them, like they’ve clawed their way back from the edge and so now they can probably carry you, too.” i just need to thank you, profoundly and profusely, for that sentence… <3
I know it’s probably not quite what you’re after, but a lot of people I know rate People Like Us as a nice LGBT mixed party https://www.facebook.com/pages/People-Like-Us/160…
I work for a gay bar in London that has nights full of all the lesbians you have described and more, so if you happen to find yourself in the capital on a Thursday, come to Clam Jam at Dalston Superstore https://www.facebook.com/clam.jam.37
And if all else fails, you just have to create your own scene in Bristol. If you build it, they will come. If you throw a night aimed at the type of girls you wanna hang with, then chances are those are the girls that will come! Nothing happens until you make it happen.
xx
I know it's probably not quite what you're after, but a lot of people I know rate People Like Us as a nice LGBT mixed party https://www.facebook.com/pages/People-Like-Us/160…
I work for a gay bar in London that has nights full of all the lesbians you have described and more, so if you happen to find yourself in the capital on a Thursday, come to Clam Jam at Dalston Superstore https://www.facebook.com/clam.jam.37
And if all else fails, you just have to create your own scene in Bristol. If you build it, they will come. If you throw a night aimed at the type of girls you wanna hang with, then chances are those are the girls that will come! Nothing happens until you make it happen.
xx
We're all in Manchester. Well, the ones who aren't in Hebden Bridge anyway.
Yes let's!! Hit me up on Twitter, seriously!
Hi *waves frantically*, I moved to Bristol last year and I’m only just finding the gay / patriarchy-crushing ladies. I didn’t meet anyone clubbing but the Bristol branch of the Awkward Army is well-supplied and holds meet ups! https://www.facebook.com/groups/217618058381508/?…
It will help if you can take people knitting sweaters for goats in your stride!
Hey! This is an old post I suppose, but NZ rep here, just moved to Bristol a month ago. Great article, I never found a scene like the one in Melbourne back home, so when you find one here in Bristol let a girl know!
Hiya! I’m yet to find one but if I’m good at finding pubs – hit me up on Twitter @mikclements if you’re looking for someone to show you around 🙂
Hiya! I'm yet to find one but if I'm good at finding pubs – hit me up on Twitter @mikclements if you're looking for someone to show you around 🙂