The big dyke takeover

It’s Friday night and I’m walking into The Grafton Arms. On stepping inside, I’m confronted by psychedelically patterned carpet and a waft of sour Diamond lager. On one side is a familiar Joseph Holt’s scene: a small group of men, still in paint-stained cargos and boots, hunched over their pints by the TV, unenthusiastically watching the game. On the other is a sea of leather vests, skinheads, platform boots, chains, shagcuts and kinkwear; a swarm of dykes gathered around a table discussing the pressing issues of the day (everyone’s take on MILFS). Having just moved back to Manchester from London, I’m relieved to see this. The London dyke scene was a lot to leave but I’m glad to find that Manchester has come a long way in the six years I’ve been gone.

Walking into this room of butch dykes, femmes, non-binary folk and transfemmes, I feel at home. The smoking area is rammed wall-to-wall with lesbians, and the first brave few are already thrashing on the dancefloor. This is the Diesel Dyke Club — a monthly pub takeover at the Grafton Arms, hosted by a trio of best friends: Rowan, Mars and Julia. What started as a DIY gathering has become a mainstay for the dyke-identified — including but not limited to, masculine (butch), feminine presenting (femme), non-binary and transfemmes dykes. 

A brief aside for the uninitiated: When I use the word dyke, I’m not just reclaiming a slur, I’m signalling who I’m referring to. Historically, dyke was a term reserved for masculine-presenting women. These days, the term is used to extend the term ‘lesbian’ beyond a cis woman who’s attracted to other cis women. Dyke implies a whole spectrum of gender (non binary and trans dykes as well as their cis counterparts) and gender presentation — so I’m also referring to femme lesbians when I use it. The whole dizzying spectrum of dykehood is in attendance at Diesel.

It’s a version of lesbian community that’s been a while coming. Dr Jess Mancuso, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Manchester, relocated here back in 2015 to do her masters — one which focused on how lesbians’ sexuality was understood by other people and how they gained acceptance on the scene. She recalls being struck by how few permanent lesbian venues there were in the city — two when she arrived, with one of the two, Coyotes, closing a year later. This isn’t a problem unique to the city — it’s an issue in most places, nationally and internationally — but the concentration of venues that make up the Gay Village meant it was immediately obvious to her. Ten years later, no developments have been made on this front, with Vanilla still standing as the only lesbian bar in Manchester.

For one of Diesel Dyke’s organisers, Rowan, 25, this same problem felt more personal. They had imagined Manchester would be this fantastic queer city — after all, it had the Gay Village. “But whilst it is a city with a great queer scene, there was literally no dyke scene, no regular dyke space at all,” they told me. After they relocated here from London to do a masters degree, they found their first year here — back in 2022 — a frustrating experience. Despite their best efforts, they failed to connect with any other lesbians in their first year here, which left them feeling isolated. This posed a stark contrast to London, their home city, where groups such as Big Dyke Energy were celebrating their sixth birthday and Butch, Please their tenth, with plenty of other similar events and spaces. Being a dyke was so important to them that they felt lonely — like they were missing something. Instead of packing it all in, Rowan decided to create their own solution. “I needed a place where I could meet dykes — for friendship and to fuck. No one else is doing it, so I’m gonna do it,” they resolved. 

Rowan met Mars, 27, on a queer housing Facebook group. With a background in events management (now their day job), Mars had the perfect skill set to help Rowan bring Diesel to life. On realising a two-person team wouldn’t be enough to pull their dream night together, they began a search for a third member: a call out elicited over 30 responses. They found the missing part of the puzzle in Julia, 27, a gardener based in Lytham, St Anne’s. Julia brought her eye for graphics to the team but more importantly felt like someone Mars and Rowan could trust to commit to the project. 

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Above all, the trio wanted to set up a night that celebrated dyke culture in all its gritty, silly, chaotic glory: leather, boots, chains, DIY aesthetics, boisterous camaraderie and intimate friendships with exes make for a good night. Whilst Diesel is not specifically for butches, the team found that leaning into butch culture and its stereotypes made for a lot of fun. “There is so much stigma around what butchness is and what butchness means,” Rowan explains. “It’s hated — it’s seen as a toxic masculinity, very stoic and serious”. The butch dyke stereotypes have inspired the night’s signature competitions, which playfully caricature such tropes. The arm-wrestling tournaments always invite a rowdy crowd, eager to cheer on the muscly dykes. Another particularly popular event is the “Muscle Dykes: C*m and Flex For Us”, a campy contest that saw participants opening jars of pickles, lifting their host off the floor and stripping off their leather vests for the muscle-flex showdown, predictably, throwing the room into a frenzy. 

But interactions there aren’t always quite this sultry. Diesel partygoer Giulia, 32, recalls her first time there. She was wearing Loop earplugs to protect her ears as she does on noisy nights out. At Diesel, a stranger stopped her, pulled her earplugs out of her ear and instructed her on how to plug them in right. “I was grateful and they were wearing a cool blazer. Now I know how to put my Loops in correctly.” I laugh when I hear this and she points out that while it wasn’t the horniest of interactions, it was still: “Very friendly, mildly flirty and typical for the queer community. The whole queer community is a neurodivergent fest. It's not a Venn diagram, it's a circle.” (Sensory overload can be a common feature of conditions like ADHD and autism — anecdotally, many with these conditions report being helped by earplugs like these.)

For my part, at the last Diesel, I was greeted by a French girl with the familiarity and warmth of an old friend — I might not have recognised her, had it not been for the huge leopard print tattoo covering her shoulder. We’d met for the first time the week before at Riot, a sex-worker-led party and kink space, where we’d traded Instagram profiles. She’d arrived from Paris only the week before but by the looks of it was settling nicely into the scene — she seemed to be on nodding terms with half of the smoking area. She explained she was only here for a month and wanted to make good use of her time. A week later, I was scrolling through the Butch Revival Instagram account and came across a photo of her grinding up against another dyke. Clearly, she’d kept her promise to herself. That night, she told me Diesel had warmed her heart — it was completely different from Paris’s scene, but she’d had fun anyway.

All of this would have been hard to imagine on the club’s opening night in December 2023. Back then, the team weren’t sure what to expect, but when 70 butches, femmes and thems showed up, it was clear that Rowan hadn’t been the only person feeling solitary and missing a sense of community. (Similar evidence was at play in the two club nights they hosted at Islington Mill in 2024, with 250+ tickets selling out each time.)

It felt like there was something in the air at the time — like Manchester was playing catch up, and finally giving dykes what they wanted. In the same month as the first Diesel event, Butch Revival (“In a city full of gay men's spaces, we are home for Lesbians of The North!”) also launched at Withington Public Hall — it’s now the biggest dyke club in town, with tickets consistently selling out in under 60 seconds flat. The crowds at the two events are reasonably similar, though Butch Revival tends to draw in an older audience, with dykes in their thirties and north of this making up a good portion of the ticket sales (perhaps due the majority of their nights taking place in Withington rather than the city centre). 

By contrast, the audience at Diesel is mostly made up of twenty-somethings — a drawback of their location just off Oxford Road, the team tells me. They’re eager to see older people at their event, with Rowan pointing out that intergenerational dyke relationships and friendships are a core part of dyke history and community. While the team stresses that their night is for everyone across the spectrum, they’ve won a reputation for being a butch night (perhaps the danger of setting up an event with ‘dyke’ in the title — the old implications of the word cling on). As such, another aspect of the audience they’re eager to address is balancing this out: “We love femmes, more femmes!” Julia exclaims. 

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Before Diesel Dyke, there were no genuinely inclusive spaces for dykes in the city — the same is true of Butch Revival. But necessity, as always, prompted invention — perhaps the lack of permanent venues boosted DIY innovation. Ro, 25, had been following Diesel Dyke a year before their move to Manchester from Brighton in preparation for their search for community. “When I think of dyke events, I think of Diesel Dyke and Butch Revival and I think that might be it,” they explain. Except this isn’t quite “it” — taking inspiration from these events, Ro adopted a DIY mentality and went on to found the Manchester Dyke Collective, which runs craft-based workshops. For so many dykes, this night has opened avenues for friendships, romance, creative exchange, self-expression and above all, community.

One way the night is particularly vital is that it’s the only free dyke nightlife event in this city (though it’s worth acknowledging that higher production costs of nights like GASH and Butch Revival mean making their events free isn’t really feasible). The fact it’s free is significant — while large-scale research on LGBTQ+ poverty in the UK remains relatively limited, existing stats indicate that the community weather more financial hardship than their heterosexual counterparts and are significantly more likely to face housing insecurity. Stonewall Research found that one in five LGBT people have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives while Crisis research shows the rates to be even higher amongst trans people, with one in four having experienced homelessness.

But arguably one of the most distinctive aspects of the event is that it’s public. Most venues and events here tend to draw clear lines between straight and queer groups — and that makes a certain degree of sense. After all, it is frustrating to chat up a straight girl camouflaged in dyke-dress (think: jorts, tatts, cap and carabiner) who’s just here for the vibes, rather than encounters with hot dykes. But there’s something that feels important about mixing with different groups. On one level, it’s just fun to bring together a group of dykes with the regular punters at a Joseph Holt pub — there’s the visual dissonance of it and it’s often clearly a surprise to the usual patrons, with the odd person staring over at the dykes with a mix of curiosity and confusion. But in a world in which dykehood can sometimes be invisible to those outside of the community, it feels exciting to be taking up space in the heterosexual world. This is a core part of the Diesel mentality: Julia explains “Diesel Dykes is about being unapologetically public. It’s not a secret, it’s about us taking over this space.”

As the years go by, the community is taking over more and more space. With nights like GASH at the Derby Brewery Arms and the Stretford Wives Club, as well as collectives and clubs outside of nightlife — Manchester Dyke Collective and Butchcrafts — the community is on the rise. The scene is a work in progress and more than a touch precarious. Without permanent venues, these nights will often have to hop from affordable space to different affordable spaces as venues are sold and rents rocket. But it’s a rowdy, sexy and unapologetically dykey start.