With LICK, we finally have a second London venue for queer women – now, we need more

1/9
Zoe Paskett12 July 2019

A queue winds down the street outside Miranda in Shoreditch. It’s so long that the nightclub’s bouncers have had to split it in two, but still, the mood is excitable. Groups have made friends with those in front and behind them. But it’s also jittery – there’s a high chance of being turned away.

The queues are for Aphrodyki, a club night for queer women, non-binary and trans folk. The vibe is the goddesses of R&B and pop, playing music from Destiny’s Child to Avril Lavigne. It packs out within the hour, and many are unable to get in.

“We always thought it would just be 50 of our mates dancing in a basement,” says co-founder Flo Perry, delighted but surprised at its popularity. “It’s somewhere you can pull and dance to Rihanna without feeling like you’re in the minority.”

It’s one of a number of club nights that have emerged in the past few years to fill the vacuum of options for queer women, alongside Pxssy Palace, BBZ, Goldsnap, Butch, Please and more.

Each, and many others beside, offer something brilliant, and something needed. But while most are regular, they’re hardly frequent: Aphrodyki happens once every six weeks. If you made them all, you could likely just about manage a different party most nights of the week, but bouncing between venues doesn’t give the feeling of “home” that a physical space does. And that’s where the problem is: London’s choice of venues for queer women are critically limited.

There’s a permanent bar in London for queer women, SHE in Soho. A new nightclub, LICK, opens this weekend in Vauxhall’s Fire and Lightbox, and will be London’s only club for queer women, run by queer women. It’s an important addition to the scene, doubling the number of venues explicitly for queer women to a grand total of... two.

“It’s as though queer women in London either don’t exist or don’t deserve their own space,” says Sophie Alexander, a producer for ITV news. “Just give us a bar, a seating area, decent music and we’ll come flocking.”

“Space is political,” says Liz Laurence, a policy advisor who goes out to one-off queer women’s events when she can find them. Like many others, she’s hungry for something open for more than a few hours a month. “You only need to look at the Stonewall riots to understand that LGBT liberation is founded on having physical space to be who you are. When you feel truly safe, truly part of a community, only then are you able to fully express yourself.”

LICK, which has been running as a monthly club night across the city for the past three years, was set up out of this desperation.

“I was sick of settling with what we had,” says founder Teddy Edwardes, "which was not a lot."

Now, it will have a permanent home with a capacity of 350, resident DJs, live music, performances and an outside garden. It will be open three nights a week – for now – with more added as attendance grows.

With very little space in the world for queer women, non-binary and trans folk to embrace their sexuality, and the double whammy of misogyny and homophobia to beware of, safety is paramount.

Keenly aware of this, DJ Nadine Artois (whose pronouns are they/them) set up Pxssy Palace with co-founder Skye Barr, initially in their own home. It was somewhere they could listen to the music they wanted to and dress how they wanted without having to worry. The party soon expanded into what it is today: a hugely popular night for queer women and trans people of colour.

“A lot of the people who go to our party can’t go anywhere else. Even just leaving their house is a resistance because the world doesn’t accept them,” says Artois.

And so the night is about more than just dancing: it’s a release of the tension that builds up from having to hide who you are or tone it down to suit other peoples’ prejudices. For many queer people, clubs and bars are the first places they’re able to engage with their sexuality in a meaningful way.

“It’s pretty intense,” Artois says. “The community isn’t supported in other ways, so what you see is people with all their emotions coming out on the dance floor. Sometimes it’s a lot of emotional labour on us, because we’re not just providing a party, it’s a form of therapy. People are upset because it’s one of the only releases they can have.

“I always found it really hard coming out,” Artois adds. “I identify as feminine but for me, queerness is boundless, so to be boundless you have to allow room for growth and movement and to explore safely.”

To do that, you need more than a dance floor. “We need sober spaces, a chill space, a bar, somewhere to go out on a date.”

The news of LICK’s new club is an exciting step in this direction, and as the celebratory reaction that spread across Queer Twitter made clear, long overdue.

“The crowd I get coming to LICK support me endlessly and I just wanted to be able to do the same for them,” says Edwardes. “It’s not fair to just have one event a month to look forward to.

“I wanted to give people somewhere they could go every night of the week and feel safe.”

LICK's launch party takes place this Saturday, July 13 at Fire and Lightbox. You can find out more about LICK here, Aphrodyki here and Pxssy Palace here.

London's LGBTQ+ leaders on the queer people who inspire them

1/10

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in

MORE ABOUT