Welcome back to the Leatherdykes newsletter! If you haven’t seen, we’ve got a bunch of new policy documents, so please check those out!

The GM was also pretty happy with us at the last bar night! Thank god. Let’s keep not getting kicked out.

Anyway, onto the usual stuff.

Upcoming Events

Bootblack Social / Kit Development Workshop

Our next bootblack social is on Wednesday 20th May, at Adrian’s on Victoria Road (G42 8RW) from 7pm till late. The focus for this one will be on developing your bootblacking kit. We will have a small range of brands for you to try to help with figuring out your preferences.

Glasgow Zine Fair

We will be tabling on both Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th May at the Glasgow Zine Fair. We’ll be there from 11am to 5pm. It’s held at The Briggait (G1 5HZ). We will have a reasonable amount of zines!

June Bar Night

Our June bar night will be on Wednesday 3rd of June, at Game Over on Drury Street (G2 5AA) from 7pm till 11:30pm(ish). Same deal as usual! Remember to bring cash for bootblacking tips but I can also take card payments now! (£5 for the basic stuff; £10 for more involved care.)

Dyke Just Do It

This is a performance art piece by Sweatmother reckoning with capitalist (mis)representations of dykes. It’s going on Friday 5th and Saturday 6th of June, at SWG3, G3 8QG. Free tickets here.

Leatherdykes Recommend…

Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy & Madeline Davis (Yvette)

I am going to be real, I have not finished this. But! Holy shit, if you want to ground what we’re doing here in some actual history about the development of lesbian bar culture and butch-fem identities, this is the book for you.

Building the Team, by Raven Kaldera & Joshua Tenpenny (Bootblack Rowan)

“This is essentially a foundational text for lifestyle power exchange and authority transfer. Kaldera and Tenpenny have their quirks (and the chapter at the end on sleeping with trans men is, uh, probably not relevant for most of our attendees, who if they're sleeping with dykey tboys seem to be doing pretty well at that already) but the book puts forward a collaborative method of power exchange that can be a really useful way of looking at relationships in general and lifestyle power exchange in particular.”

Blog

Zines! The zine fair is coming up! We’ve got zines! We’ll be stocking our own leatherdyke zine, the hit new zine BLOOD WORK (which is what it sounds like), yr girl’s own Leathersex Triptych as well as Twenty Eyelets (which is twenty different single-page erotic stories around bootblacking), and hopefully some issues of Pain Party (as well as other fun stuff, maybe). So come along and get the good stuff!

Hopefully those of y’all who took it enjoyed Excerpts on Leathersex. This will probably be a feature of dyke nights going forward, so get hype for next month’s zine of essays reprinted without permission. I’ll put excerpts up for download for anyone who missed it by the next newsletter, so, digital distro available for all these on a one month delay.

Fletch and I went to the Leathermen social (second Sundays of the month from 3pm at The Gallery Bar, Brunswick St, G1 1TB) to do some bootblacking and hang with the boys! That was great fun, older crowd, lots of experience in leather if anyone was aching for a different vibe of event (not as hot and heavy as we are, but everyone was fully leathered up). Thanks to them for hosting us and we’ll be there again in June and beyond.

As it ever was, love y’all, and I’m excited to spend this summer dyking out together.

With not-quite-enough paracetamol in my system,
yr girl, yvette, for Glasgow Leatherdykes