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- From left: Dyke Night organizers Joules Garcia, Zoo Holmström and Teppi Zuppo
Despite being home to the seventh-highest percentage of LGBTQ+ people in the country, according to UCLA's Williams Institute, Vermont has just one gay bar — Fox Market and Bar in East Montpelier — and not a single lesbian bar.
Enter Dyke Night, a monthly pop-up event for sapphics. Since its inception in 2022, Dyke Night has become an institution among Burlington's queer community, filling a lesbian bar-size hole.
The DIY-style mixers, usually held on the second Monday of the month at Wallflower Collective, sometimes draw such long lines that staff have to turn people away at the door. Back in October, a special Halloween pop-up hosted by Dyke Night organizers booked up online in a matter of minutes. A Valentine's Day-themed Dyke Night this Monday, February 12, is likely to draw a similar crowd.
"The reason I know that we've embedded ourselves into the community is the fact that we have so many regulars," said Joules Garcia, one of the organizers.
Dyke Night is the brainchild of Zoo Holmström, who worked as a bartender in Burlington and saw an unmet need for queer-friendly establishments. The need is not unique to Burlington: Back in the 1980s and '90s, there were upwards of 200 bars that catered to lesbians across the United States. Now, due to factors such as increased social acceptance of queer couples, there are fewer than two dozen, according to research by Boston University.
Holmström — who kept a blog about visiting all the remaining lesbian bars in the country on a road trip last winter — pitched their idea for a pop-up lesbian bar to the owners of Wallflower Collective, a downtown bar just east of City Market, Onion River Co-op. Lauren McKenzie, co-owner of Wallflower, decided to give it a shot. The two set a night in July 2022 and lightly advertised the event. The turnout amazed them both.
"It was a wild success," McKenzie remembered. Event-goers waited in line for hours before getting into Wallflower, which has a 120-person capacity in the summer. Some traveled from outside Chittenden County — including Montpelier and Randolph — to attend. "It was way busier than anybody could have imagined," McKenzie added.
Holmström moved to Los Angeles in fall 2022 but first passed the baton to Garcia and Teppi Zuppo, two Burlington-based Dyke Night regulars. After a few experimental evenings at Burlington Beer, a larger venue located on Flynn Avenue, organizers decided to keep the event at Wallflower, where McKenzie, unlike Burlington Beer, offers her space free of charge. The arrangement is mutually beneficial: The pop-up attracts customers to Wallflower on otherwise slow Monday evenings, and Dyke Night retains a reliable home base.
Garcia and Zuppo also kept the original name of the event series, which is intentionally provocative.
"It's part of slur reclamation," Garcia explained, referring to the process of marginalized groups wresting back power over pejoratives once used against them. But organizers keep the definition of "dyke" vague — on purpose. On the event's Instagram page, posts advertise: "open to dykes of all genders and experience." Transgender women, transgender men, lesbians, nonbinary and bisexual people, and anyone else who might identify as a dyke are welcome.
Organizers have implemented a color-coded sticker system to allow attendees to signal their interests. A green sticker means: "Flirt away!" Yellow signals: "Just looking for friends." And participants who don't identify as a dyke or are just hanging out for the vibes wear red.
On a typical Dyke Night, Wallflower is packed to the gills with customers, some dressed to impress and others in Vermont-casual (aka flannel).
At the bar, green sticker-wearing attendees flirt over cocktails. Clusters of people lounge by the pool table or on vintage couches at the center of the room. The cacophony of laughter and chatter make it sometimes hard to hear what the person next to you is saying.
"The regulars always come at around 8:30 p.m.," Garcia said with a laugh. "You know someone is new if they show up right at 7 p.m."
While organizers have kept the event inclusive, they recognize the importance of defining the space as specifically for sapphic people. "Every single leaf of the LGBTQ+ community deserves their own place to be centered," Garcia said.
Dyke Night regular Isa DeMarco, who lives in Burlington, appreciates that intention. "I feel like the demographic of people who identify as dykes kind of get the scraps of queer spaces, historically," they said. "It's nice to know that you're in a space with somebody who identifies with a label that you also identify with."
The disappearance of lesbian-oriented gathering places is a well-documented phenomenon, fueled by gender-based discrimination and complicated by the sometimes purposeful exclusion of trans women and nonbinary people from femme-oriented spaces. The bars available to gay men far exceed those aimed at queer women. For example, in New York City, there are over 48 gay bars, according to a 2023 report by WNYC. But only three of them cater to lesbians.
In the future, Zuppo and Garcia hope to offer Burlington's queer community a greater variety of mixers, including picnics, night markets and other events that cater to nondrinkers. But Garcia wants to keep Dyke Night's scrappy feel.
"We're a very DIY event," they explained. "We operate on almost nothing."
The biggest challenge Dyke Night faces: becoming too popular. "Our capacity is lower than the amount of people who show up," McKenzie explained.
McKenzie hopes that the response to Dyke Night inspires the creation of a permanent queer bar in Burlington. "Clearly, there's a demand in this town to do things like this," she said.