Profile: Emily Moore
New York resident Emily Moore is a contributor of poetry to Ploughshares, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and other literary magazines and journals.

Photo provided by: Cubby Hole

Last year Emily Moore contributed Lesbiennes de Paris, a report on the lesbian scene in Paris, to the pages of Tokyo Wrestling. Here she brings us some of New York's hottest dyke hangouts.

Having been to lesbian bars in both Tokyo and New York, I can say with certainty that if Shinjuku’s Kinswomyn is a pair of high heels, Manhattan’s Cubby Hole is a pile of sneakers. Two Junes ago, I was amazed by Kinswomyn’s sleek, sophisticated ambiance. A discrete circle of high femmes chatted quietly as I sipped my peach-flavored drink and realized once again how far from New York I was.

Two years ago, when I was in Japan, the heart of the New York lesbian scene had moved to Brooklyn, where double-decker clubs like Cattyshack seemed to have replaced smaller, neighborhood haunts like Greenwich Village’s Cubby Hole. This winter, Cattyshack closed (replaced by a series of moving parties under the same name), and the longtime West Village staple Rubyfruit is due to reopen as the RF Lounge this spring, moving the center of the lesbian scene back to Manhattan. It was time to revisit the Cubby Hole.

My former roommate and I stopped by on a Monday night. Shabby, chaotic, and filled with zany locals, the Cubby Hole was just as we remembered it. As usual, the bar’s ceiling was festooned with pinwheels, Chinese lanterns, fake grapes, paper fish, and plastic cows with wings. Inexplicably, the TVs were set to CNN.

●The Cubby Hole
281 West 12th Street　
(on the corner of West 4th Street)
℡: +1 (212) 243-9041

Website: www.cubbyholebar.com

●Cattyshack's MySpace page: www.myspace.com/cattyshack249

●RF Lounge
531 W. Hudson St.
NY, NY 10014
℡: +1 (212) 206-8112