Cubbyhole

Cubbyhole is LIVELY for a Tuesday night. Packed into only 824 square feet, it took war-time strategy to angle up to the bar, and some aggressive loitering to grab a stool tucked into the back corner. As soon as someone vacates a stool, someone else swoops in to claim it. This is a Dyke eat Dyke world.

The bouncer caught my eye from across the street, a butch in a leather vest and printed pants with a calm, detached presence who could nonetheless toss you on your ass. Later, as we’re chatting outside the bar, they say that this is the best job ever. I’m smitten.

The ceiling of Cubby (as the regulars call it) is packed full of dangling lawn decor; whirligigs, pinwheels, pinatas, and paper umbrellas. Staples from decorations past crust the ceiling, a starry sky of aluminum. I spot a bright orange UHAUL beanie hanging above the bar. Instead of the strong, flirty butch bartender of Ginger’s, this bartender wears hard femme like armor, slinging drinks and sipping on green juice at a breakneck pace. At Cubby, a Bud Light will set you back $7, cash only. God, I miss Vermont, the land of $2 beers.

Magic in the air, literally

This crowd here is young and flirty, outfits are polished and ready to be admired. These Dykes also represent a far more diverse population, this is not the all-white New York Lesbian scene of TV. The jukebox is getting well used tonight, Panic! At The Disco, Dolly Parton, ABBA, and Taylor Swift are blasted all night long, and the teeming mass gleefully shouts along.

The lack of space encourages mingling: there is so little room to sit or even stand that you have to talk to people. I watch two queers scoping out for seats bump into another group doing the same, crack a joke about it, and then the two groups are one.

Sabrina, a 22-year-old Lesbian from New Orleans, taps me on the shoulder to compliment my jacket and says that she was journaling here yesterday too. She moved to the city six weeks ago and has been coming here weekly since she found the bar on TikTok.

Before I know it, we’re comparing CoStars and talking about our family traumas. She tells me the story of her coming out at 16.

“I was posting lots of pictures of my girlfriend and my aunt asked who she was. When I told her we were dating, she was surprised because I didn’t look like that. I’m more than just pretty, and why do you care who I sleep with? That’s weird.”

In true queer form, I meet a friend I’ve been talking to on Lex and rope them into Sabrina and I’s conversation. It’s Zyn’s second time at Cubby, the first was last night. They talk about how nice it is to not worry about being hit on by cis men. A few minutes later, a Dyke tells them how cute they are and I extract myself to leave them to flirt.

“If you know who you are, then be it,” Sabrina tells me. That’s been the theme of my coming out, and this trip. Embracing my identity as a queer person was easy once I had the language for it, getting everyone else to embrace it has been met with mixed results. But embracing my inner artist has been an ongoing battle of “I’m not good enough,” “I don’t create enough,” and even “you don’t deserve this.” But I’m working on it.

A study in Dyke bathrooms

I end up leaning by the bar and Sabrina’s friend Izzy asks me to watch their drink while they're in the bathroom. As they press the warm vodka cran into my hands, they proclaim their undying love for me. Two different couples are making out in the back corner, mere feet from one another. The energy is flirty and fluid, even at 1am on a Tuesday.

A hot Dyke with a bright platinum bob buys everyone in our circle a round, and jokes about how she’s already a millionaire wife, so she’s looking for her billionaire wife. She tells me “once you understand how to make money, you don’t even have to try.” I try and get her to buy me another $5 beer.

At one point, I end up in a 4 person dance train. Lips are dragging across necks, hands find the smalls of backs, everyone is touching everyone. I am the caboose of the train, grinding my hips into the rich Dyke’s silk pinafore and somehow holding hands with everyone at once. We are spinning each other, taking turns leading and following, moving to the beat of a song not meant for dancing.

Suddenly, two pizza boxes are produced from behind the bar. Hot, cheesy pizza is passed around. “Is this just like, pizza for the bar?” Apparently, the bartender orders pizza nearly every night for drunken Dykes to share in between make-out sessions. Nothing unites a crowd like free pizza.

Outside, I try and bum a smoke off of someone I traded glasses with earlier. They also had stolen theirs but offered me a drag. What pandemic?

Sabrina asks the hot bouncer about working at Cubby, what stories they have to share. After regaling us with tales of unclogging toilets and fishing drunk Dykes out of trash cans, they tell us they’ve been working here for about a year.

“I really don’t have anything to complain about. I tell people I work in a bar and they ask what bar, and when I say Cubby, they’re like ‘why the fuck wouldn’t you just say that! You don’t work at a bar, you work at the bar.”

My smoking friend asks how we all know each other, Sabrina, Zyn, the rich Dyke, and I all look at each other and laugh, “we met tonight.”

“You all met tonight? This is why I love Cubbyhole so fucking much! I really love to hear that Cubby is vibing in the same way that it always was.”

Cubbyhole is a bar for meeting people, it’s impossible to be a wallflower, simply because there isn’t space for it. The energy is electric and the music is loud, and you have to lean close to whisper in each other’s ears. This is the kind of bar that leads to corner makeout sessions, threesomes across town, lifelong friends forged over free pizza. The bar feels alive, imbued with spilled beer and the sweat of Dykes past, bringing forth a delicious cocktail of queer joy and sexuality.

I start heading for the train at 1:30, but the party is far from over. The music is still pumping, and the Dykes are drinking and pairing off and laughing louder than ever. There is electricity in the air, a current of queer that stretches back through the streets and through the decades, an undercurrent that says “we have always been here, and we always will be.”

Make Out Count: 6 couples

Drinks Spilled: 3 (mostly by Rich Dyke)

Manhattan, New York, New York