DIVA heads to this new rave to find out how it’s building community
BY TIGER ROSE, IMAGES BY @LIXIPHOTO3 AND @TIGERROSEINNNES
Red light floods the room in waves. Across the floor, sapphics catch each other’s eye mid-mix, a glance held a second too long, before throwing themselves back into the crowd, limbs loose to the beat. There’s an ecstasy-like euphoria, something between anticipation and excitement, the kind of tension that can only be found in a room of sexy sapphic safety.
This is Crave Her, a Bristol techno night built solely for sapphics, and it has been sold out since the night it launched. Bristol has never lacked for good nightlife. The city has built its name on sound systems and genres that spill into each other until sunrise. But a space built specifically for sapphics, somewhere to rave without the low hum of being watched, was, until recently, missing. Crave Her is filling that gap, one sold-out night at a time.
It started, as these things often do, with a repetitive conversation of frustration between two people who wanted something that didn’t yet exist. Phoebe (she/her) and Lydia (she/they), partners both on and off the dance floor, had spent many a night out feeling the absence of spaces focused on the sapphic community. This idea became hard for them to ignore.
“We wanted more spaces where we could feel safe in a rave, as a queer couple,” Phoebe says. For Lydia, that feeling quickly sharpened into something more specific: “We decided we wanted an event solely focused towards WLW and non-binary people,” they add.
What began as a conversation turned into a brand by January, and by June, Crave Her had its first night. Six months, start to finish, long enough to build something, short enough that neither of them quite expected what came next: a sold-out room, twice over.
Building Crave Her from nothing meant learning fast and funding it themselves. “We took a stab in the dark,” Phoebe tells me. “We have no experience in events and no experience in marketing. So, it was learning on the job.”
There was no outside funding; every event has been entirely self-financed. “We just used our money to progress, because we believed in it,” Lydia explains. What carried them through wasn’t investment, but community. “The support we’ve received from the community has been amazing.”
Phoebe adds, “Everyone has come together and helped in their own way. We couldn’t have done it without that support.”
Some of that support came from unexpected places. Lydia had recently completed a female DJ course with Pirate Studios, and the connections she made there fed directly into the lineup – including DJS who played their first-ever set at Crave Her’s Launch. It’s the kind of detail that makes the whole project feel less like a business plan and more like a community pulling together.
I ask Phoebe and Lydia what they want people to feel at Crave Her, and the answer comes without hesitation: euphoria. Freedom. “In a rave, the way you can express yourself to music is beautiful, “ Lydia says. “It’s therapeutic in itself. Being able to feel so free in space where it feels safe and comfortable, you can actually fully immerse yourself in the experience.”
For Phoebe, that freedom is inseparable from who’s around you. “Everyone in that space is people like yourself,” she says. “That’s important. We’re cautious about keeping that space safe, and specific to our community.”
The proof isn’t just the event selling out back-to-back. It’s in the small things like a mother and daughter who came together, tagging the founders on TikTok afterwards to say it had been the daughter’s first rave. It’s in the strangers who leave as friends, exchanging numbers on the dancefloor and meeting up for pub trips the next day. For a community that Phoebe and Lydia admit they once struggled to find themselves – both say they’d counted more gay male friends than queer women before Crave Her – the beauty of this isn’t just lost on them. They built the space they were missing, and it built them a community in return.
Two sold-out nights in, Phoebe and Lydia are already thinking beyond Bristol. Their next event moves to a club within a club where no phones are allowed, with much higher capacity. They have also talked about long-term goals, with their sights set on large-scale events like Teletech, which has inspired them. There’s talk of collaboration with other queer creatives, a residency-led radio show, even a dream of taking over a festival stage or Pride sets. And the requests keep landing in their inbox from further afield: Manchester, Newcastle, cities with established queer scenes still asking Crave Her to come to them.
But scale was never really the point. Asked to sum up Crave Her in a single sentence, Lydia returns to something simpler than growth charts and venue capacity. “It’s a safe space for women and non-binary people to fully feel free, to express themselves in a way that feels comfortable,” they say. “With raves, you’re very present in the moment; it’s sensory. That’s what we want people to feel: present and comfortable in who they are and where they are.”
You can find out more about Crave Her here.
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