Looking for GCish lesbian groups

[JoanOgden]

Have namechanged for obvious reasons but have been on this board on and off for years.

After 20 years of being a crap, intermittent heterosexual, I have come to the realisation that I really do want to explore the possibility of shagging other women. Internet dating feels too full on, so really I would much prefer to get to know more lesbians and see if anything happens. However, from other recent threads it sounds like the whole scene has become very divided given the whole trans debate. I don't want to join any groups which are bound up in TWAW-type rhetoric.

Any views/experiences would be really welcome. I live in London and do have a couple of lesbian friends, but they are pretty settled and not really part of a wider scene. Thank you!

@thighsin

All my lesbian friends are supportive of trans women. They see the parallels of how they were treated in the 80s.

So you, like most trans people, actively oppose self-ID thighsin, yeah? Can you give us some pointers on how you have spoken out against it, to help others newer to the cause?

LGB Alliance may have events soon.

Also, I'm told, the new Lesbian and Gay News has a subscription-only forum.

Oh and this is just a tad far off, but FiLiA should run its annual feminist conference this year.

A lot of the lesbian bars disappeared quite a long time before the influx of lesbians with penises. I moved away from London and the scene so I'm not sure why. We were probably much more political in the 80s and 90s, there was section 28, we couldn't get married, it was more common to be disowned by our parents, and lesbians if they had kids (and very few did IME) often lost custody. Plus there was much more of a thriving women's movement, which I think collapsed in much the same way as we have now, a lot of infighting about who was most oppressed and pressure to behave perfectly (lesbian separatism was quite a big thing amongst my friends).

Then there was the general movement toward being more consumerist in society. Candy Bar opened in Soho in 1996 and with that the rise of the "lipstick lesbian". Pride became more commercial. It may be that as areas gentrified and property got expensive that lesbians with less earning power than men found it impossible to run viable businesses.

I wonder whether this will come back though with greater politicisation. There clearly are a lot of lesbians around the place - anywhere you find radical feminists you'll find lesbians.

I recommend looking on the 'meetup' app op. There are lots of London based lesbian groups on there which are very friendly and welcoming.

I was also going to suggest meet-up lesbian groups. I met friends on those. You can’t guarantee a GC outlook or an absence of men, sadly, but my best tip is to choose an activity that’s really unglamorous like hiking or dog walking or something and there’s a higher chance it will actually be women only. Even if there’s a man present with activities that involve spreading out into smaller groups they can be avoided.

Thanks everyone, I really appreciate your thoughts. Meet-up groups, LGB alliance events and feminist activism (which I used to do more of but have got a bit lax in recent years) all sound like good ideas.

I agree it is sad. In the early 2000s I had a couple of fun nights out in the (woman-only) Glass Bar at Euston with lesbian friends - IIRC it did lots of events, book clubs etc as well as just drinks. But then I guess the founders sold out or it became unprofitable, and it turned into a pub selling American ales to men with goatees.

I might have met you in the Glass Bar in the early 2000s! Very happy memories there, especially if Thursday night being singles night. Agree it’s a very sad loss.

*of Thursday night

@justawoman

I was also going to suggest meet-up lesbian groups. I met friends on those. You can’t guarantee a GC outlook or an absence of men, sadly, but my best tip is to choose an activity that’s really unglamorous like hiking or dog walking or something and there’s a higher chance it will actually be women only. Even if there’s a man present with activities that involve spreading out into smaller groups they can be avoided.

Good suggestion, thanks @justawoman

@justawoman

I might have met you in the Glass Bar in the early 2000s! Very happy memories there, especially if Thursday night being singles night. Agree it’s a very sad loss.

I was a Glass Bar regular back then too. I miss it.

It’s really sad that we’re back to the days when lesbian groups have to worry about being infiltrated by men.

Do you speak German, OP?!

lesbianandgaynews.com/2021/03/lesbian-spring-gathering-2021-in-bremen-from-21-24-may/

OP, you might like to consider the fact that this:
I have come to the realisation that I really do want to explore the possibility of shagging other women
is unlikely to get you very far with any of the lesbians I know.

I think that’s a little bit harsh, shedbuilder, though I understand where you’re coming from. We all had to start somewhere. In the good old days I’d have suggested the OP join a coming out group like Changes at London Friends, that’s been going for donkey’s years, but nowadays I doubt that’s a safe space. Without that, I think trying to join some lesbian social groups if such can be found, and make some friends, is probably a good and ethical way to start exploring.

Perhaps I'm harsh but lesbians have always known the perils of straight women wanting to experiment with them and these days we have the extra complication of transbians infiltrating every group. You actually need to like the company of women-focussed women, OP, and be sensitive to what is now a beleaguered and underground community. Do you have any lesbian contacts/ acquaintances? Talk to them. Ask them about groups, events and so on. Get to know them socially, build a network. It's how most of us start. Lots of GC groups around but they are usually by recommendation only and deep underground.

It's how most of us start. Lots of GC groups around but they are usually by recommendation only and deep underground.

Yes - most GC groups now are likely to want recommendation by at least one person who knows you in real life and / or a visible & verifiable history of GC posts on social media. It’s a shame. But it’s necessary.

[quote PurgatoryOfPotholes]Do you speak German, OP?!

lesbianandgaynews.com/2021/03/lesbian-spring-gathering-2021-in-bremen-from-21-24-may/[/quote]
Thanks @PurgatoryOfPotholes, I do speak some German and this is a great find! I will try to watch some of the sessions.

@Shedbuilder

Perhaps I'm harsh but lesbians have always known the perils of straight women wanting to experiment with them and these days we have the extra complication of transbians infiltrating every group. You actually need to like the company of women-focussed women, OP, and be sensitive to what is now a beleaguered and underground community. Do you have any lesbian contacts/ acquaintances? Talk to them. Ask them about groups, events and so on. Get to know them socially, build a network. It's how most of us start. Lots of GC groups around but they are usually by recommendation only and deep underground.

I do get this @Shedbuilder and really don't want to be some sort of insensitive intrusive idiot. In fact I have a few lesbian friends, but as I said in an earlier post they are not particularly involved with any sort of lesbian scene any more. (And yes I do generally very much enjoy lesbian company.)

I also have acquaintances who are relatively prominent in the GC campaigning world, and could vouch that I am not an undercover TRA, but it would be a bit weird of me to ask them for a letter of recommendation in the hope of an invite into a top-secret GC lesbian group, so I won't do that.

Anyway this has been a really useful thread and has reinforced that I need to be a bit braver and actually get out there (in a non-annoying way), as opposed to re-reading my Sarah Waters collection for the 90th time, so thank you, everyone! Just need to wait for this fecking pandemic to end now

www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-56866034
'We do like a rave!' Inside the UK's last lesbian bars

There are only a handful of fixed lesbian venues operating in the UK, and some have had to rebrand to stay viable.

Alternative nights are also popping up, offering variety and flexibility without the overheads of a permanent space.

On Lesbian Visibility Week, those who run these nights - and the people who enjoy them - talk about how things are evolving.

The elephant in the room is definitely there. Particularly with the lesbian who can't say the word lesbian.

The BBC almost get to the point with the question about LGBT being dominated by men, but not quite. Its almost as if sexism can be seen but not discussed.

Thanks for that Red. It's interesting, what has changed? Is it that they are no longer women only spaces or something else? I lived in Hackney in the 90s and we had Due South and the Clarence (just over the border in Islington) that were entirely women only, then the backroom of the Duke of Wellington, now nothing?

What’s changed is that women, & lesbians in particular, are no longer allowed to have single-sex spaces.

Stonewall, Diva magazine & Pride are now all about centring transwomen & ‘same-gender’ attraction & it’s unacceptable to say that lesbians don’t have penises.

Is that just what it was? It feels like some of those closures happened quite a while ago rather than in the last few years when gender ideology became more prominent - or has it been a thing for longer? (I'm back out in the sticks now where we didn't have anything in the first place!) I wondered whether it was part of the general depoliticisation of everything since the 90s, the whole "lipstick lesbian" was taking off as I left London.

I think it was partly depoliticisation, partly increased acceptance of homosexuality (two lesbians wanting to go in a date could now more easily just meet in a restaurant or pub), partly the ever-rising rents for commercial property pricing out the more specialist venues. I miss them too.

I can remember going to a couple of so-called lesbian bars in Manchester and even back in 2008 there were always transwomen there, all too often glowering at the dykes from the sidelines. It put a dampener on things and I think women just stopped going to them.

A lot of venues have become very nervous about hosting single-sex events. Over the years I've organised many women's nights and lesbian nights — live music, club nights, cabarets, charity events — wherever I've lived. It was around 2008 that Student Unions, which had previously been very supportive of women-only events, started to say no, I couldn't book a bar or venue at the university for a women-only fundraiser for the local Women's Aid (or whatever), because it was discriminatory to hold a woman-only event. It had to be inclusive. The local FE college, which had a wonderful bar, started saying the same thing.

That source of safe, accessible venues with car parking and lighting and good staff became unavailable to us. After that lots of other clubs, social clubs and even pubs started querying whether they'd be prosecuted for hosting an event publicised as women-only. For years we'd booked a field at a campsite in Devon each June and held a women's camp but around 2014 they started getting twitchy and saying they'd had complaints (from TRAs) and 2015 was the last year they allowed us to go. It just takes one TRA to phone a venue and tell them that it's illegal of them to let their premises to a single-sex group and wham, years of goodwill down the drain.

The good news is that village halls and church halls are still readily available to us, even if the atmosphere and facilities can be a bit lacking. I've begun to really love the UK parish hall network, which has enabled us to keep holding women's events under the radar of the TRAs.

Many venues now seem to think that any women-only event is illegal unless it's held as a private event by invitation only. In 2018 I booked a local club for my birthday bash, invited all my lesbian and women friends and had a fab night with a live women's band and two female DJs. A couple of the local transwomen heard about it and tried to get in but I was able to say they hadn't been invited and the door staff refused them entry. It was a great event and the club loved the band and DJs so much they booked them for future dates. But afterwards the bar manager received complaints about discrimination and even though it was a private event he contacted me to say he'd prefer it if I didn't try to book the place again.

This is what we're up against and why for lesbians, at least, it's really important to have the right to hold women-only and lesbian-only events strengthened.

Shed .

I can remember being invited along to women's [lesbian] events as a young woman in the 80s and they were very special and I felt very privileged.

I am so sorry that this is now being made hard for you.