Queer Fun is Political: An Interview with the Glasgow Leatherdykes

Even if 2025 has been a dreadful year for Scotland’s transgender community, there have still been a number of hopeful developments for us on the organisational front. While we are so far yet to see the rise of a mass, nationally constituted, trans peoples’ political movement, there has recently been a new dawn for what could be called “community infrastructure projects”. Many of these groups are mutual aid collectives, focusing on providing access to blood testing, electrolysis, or crisis services for trans abuse survivors, and projects for all of these have begun in Glasgow this year.

In a time when our ability to access crucial medical and social services are constantly being hindered, withdrawn and segregated, the importance of these mutual aid initiatives suggests itself plainly.

But there is another broad category of queer activist project that is also worthy of attention: social infrastructure. By this I mean everything from trans-led club nights and picnics to socials, sports clubs, lesbian newsletters, reading groups and kink events. It may seem frivolous at first glance to compare these to something as vital as blood testing, but the social life of the queer scene is a kind of political lifeblood too – we need our own spaces to be together in person, to let off steam, to dance, to create, to grieve, to love, to explore our gender identities and sexualities, and to develop new relationships with each other and with ourselves. Without this, we are left alone and atomised, unable to conceive of ourselves as part of a living, fighting, community of siblings.

The Glasgow Leatherdykes are one of a crop of new groups in Scotland dedicated to fostering just such a community social life. Since August, they’ve been organising social nights for dykes who are into or just curious about leather and leather culture, held on the first Wednesday of each month in Glasgow’s Game Over Bar. Having attended a few of these nights and thoroughly enjoyed myself at them, I wanted to get in touch and get a better idea of the group’s aims and ideas. To that end, I sent over some interview questions, which the Leatherdykes were kind enough to answer for Heckle.

Who are you and what do you do?

Milo: We are a group of dykes who decided we wanted a leather night so we started running one. Most of us are trans but we do have a cis organiser as a diversity hire. We try not to be particularly official about anything, we disagree with each other pretty regularly, and we misuse the event organising chat for stupid jokes and random bullshit constantly. We run a main bar night and a smaller bootblacking circle/similar social. We’ve tried to answer these questions together while highlighting our different thoughts because we’re just a group of people who wanted to do a thing, and we mostly agree on the stuff that matters.

Yvette: I would also add that we all variously co-run other queer events/organisations. The admin team started with a couple of us and grew as we included people we knew we liked organising with already. In my mind, this is the fun organising I do to break up the more exhausting stuff.

Isla: Yep, at the core we’re just a group of friends that wanted the space to exist, so we made it happen. 

What does leather mean to you? What does it mean to build community around it?

Photographer Rowan: Succinctly, I think leather is a powerful subcultural symbol of perversity and sexuality. It is a material grounded in care and maintenance, the practice of which questions normal boundaries of the self and of sex. It is also a communal heritage of knowledge and practices which move beyond the normal constraints of family, state and heterosexuality.

Milo: Nothing I can add that Rowan hasn’t put better.

Archer: In addition to the above points made by Rowan, to me leather also has an environmental dimension to it: learning to care for leather gear across a community and across generations emphasises sustainability and longevity both of well-treated gear and of an interconnected community.

A lot of discussions about queer politics focus on protests and mutual aid, but community fun is also political, and just as crucial to the infrastructure of our communities, especially now. What thoughts do you have about the political character of events like the ones you organise?

Milo: We run these events because we want to have a space for people to be perverts and leatherfreaks. Providing spaces where communities can form is essential for the seeds of mutual aid, protest and direct action. If connections made at our events lead to those things then to me that’s a sign we’re creating something good. But making leather and kink spaces also has its own specific politics. Queerness has become so desexualised in the last couple of decades as part of an appeal to respectability and inclusion in normative sexuality and relationship structures. And actually, we don’t want a piece of the patriarchy or capitalism or empire, because those are what kill and subjugate people and they must be destroyed. Creating spaces for perverts and deviant queers pushes back against sexual conservatism. The norms of relationships of all kinds (romantic, friendship, familial, etc.) in our societies run cover for abuse and consent violations. So I think it is absolutely necessary to make spaces that prioritise sexual deviancy and move us away from that.

Photographer Rowan: I would agree with the gist of the above response (that we need a queerness that explicitly rejects hegemonic mappings and impositions of sexuality and power). I would also suggest that these aren’t, in fact, different things. Mutual aid is grounded in community and trust, not just in principles, and sites of radically-oriented community making are the sites that make participation in mutual aid work possible. To have a community that can come to its own defence and create its own thriving requires that that community has built up care and connection between its members.

Isla: Yeah, not much to add to what everyone else has said. In my mind, you can’t have one without the other. Give people a space to connect, and the community and interconnected support arises naturally if you do it right.

Archer: I don’t think there’s anything in particular for me to add to the above that hasn’t been said better already. It is impossible to host events like ours without a political dimension to them, but it is also unrealistic to concentrate only on the “fun” part of things – to me, it must have a function to be political.

Yvette: There’s a great quote about this from Casey Plett’s On Community:

“I heard a line about activism once, whose origins I can’t track down: ‘For it to work, people need to be getting laid.’ This idea works both literally and metaphorically. Literally because, well . . . bitches got needs, and bitches with needs met can Do Shit. Metaphorically because people coming together to do a Thing have to want to be there. If it’s cool, if it’s fun, if it’s a good time, you’ll have more people and more Things will get done.”

This kinda gets at the heart of what my investment in this project is: creating a space that’s cool and fun and a good time. It’s necessary for us to get our blood tested and have safe access to hormones, for sure, and it’s a great emergent property of spaces like this that mutual aid networks and radical connections between people can form – but to me, this is an event that makes the hard work of just staying alive worth it, and through making it worth it, makes that hard work possible at all.

Your group is firmly committed to trans inclusion, and trans people are heavily involved. What are the best ways for the dyke scene to include and support trans people in the current political climate? Do you foresee any battles to keep the leatherdyke nights open to trans people in the future?

Milo: We’ve not had any issues so far and I don’t particularly foresee any honestly, which is probably because most of our organisers are trans. Not saying it prevents all problems, but it helps. I also think the types of dykes we are catering to make that easier because we are a subculture, rather than a more general lesbian social event.

I think most dyke events are welcoming to trans people in theory, but in practice that doesn’t always work out, even with good intentions. And that’s been true basically as long as we’ve had events for dykes. You can’t solve it with wording because that depends so much on people’s previous experiences (e.g. I feel more likely to be welcome at an event aimed at dykes than at sapphics as someone who’s pretty fucking butch, but that’s not universal), and because words alone don’t make people feel welcome, actions do. I know a lot of butches (especially butch trans women) who have been pretty excluded and ignored or ostracised at trans-inclusive lesbian events. So I’d say dykes who want to include trans people need to actually stand up for trans people who do show up to your space, pick accessible venues, and make sure the bar staff are chill. 

Photographer Rowan: The best way to include trans people is, as always, by having a genuine commitment to radical politics. Dyke scenes (and leatherdyke scenes in particular) have always been sites where the boundaries of conventional sexuality and gender have been exceeded, for as much as that perversity has always been contested by those in and adjacent to those scenes who support hegemonic, heterosexist and patriarchal structures. This commitment, of course, has to be realised by actual practice: not just ensuring that reactionaries (whether or not they call themselves lesbian or feminist) do not drive a wedge into our spaces, but ensuring that our shared dyke history of resistance and deviance is celebrated and carried on. Yes, making spaces for lesbians that include trans women, sharing knowledge of hormone regimes, raising funds and of course having kinky and deviant sex (and all the other activities we have to participate in as a community) will put us at odds with the state, just as these activities always have. But dykes are organised.

Yvette: Definitely agree with everything above, though I also think there are things to do on an event by event practical level. Firstly, just having trans people at the door if you’re running a bar night or anything like that makes a difference. I know that we, as an event, have been offered by the bar to have a bouncer out so we don’t have to stand by the door ourselves to tell cis tourists they’re in the wrong place, but – as a butch t-girl – I’ve been misgendered enough by even the most well meaning cis people to know that would immediately harsh the vibes. Plus, I think other trans people being able to spot a gaggle of dykes like them from across the street has an immediately empowering effect.

Secondly, pick your favourite bar and make friends with the staff. So much of whether an event is accessible to trans people, and whether a leatherdyke night can run at all, is at the whims of the establishment hosting it. We operate out of a bar that – while it isn’t queer per se – is where we’ve been going for a few years. A lot of what we get away with during the bar nights (e.g. licking boots, heavy petting, getting my face stepped on) is enabled by a degree of rapport we’ve developed with the venue staff. And there’s certainly going to be a lot of legislative bullshit coming, especially regarding bathroom access, but if you’re an organisation that the venue actually enjoys working with, this could be the difference between taking complaints from cissies about a trans woman in the ladies’ room seriously, and them being told to fuck off.

How can readers of Heckle keep up to date with you?

Yvette: The best way is our mailing list – https://buttondown.com/glasgowleatherdykes – for our bi-monthly newsletter. It’s got events, recommendations from the admin team, and blog-like updates on how it’s all going behind the scenes. If all you care about is knowing when the events are though, we’ve got Insta: @glasgowleatherdykes.