At Le Pulp, the girls lead the dance of Parisian nights

The scene could take place any Thursday evening in the early 2000s. At 25, boulevard Poissonnière, on the Grands Boulevards, in Paris, two red doors topped with a rectangular panel open onto the street. Word “Pulp” spread out in uppercase pink letters. On busy evenings, the queue stretches to the Rex Club, another temple of techno, a metro station away. The night is just beginning and the colorful, tattooed, sometimes disguised crowd waits patiently before entering the most popular club in the capital.

Once you have passed the entrance, where a physiognomist gives priority to girls (boys are only allowed if they are accompanied), a single-storey corridor, carpeted in red and flanked by a bar where often closed-looking waitresses leads to a small dance floor. Some 275 people for the official gauge, and up to 500 on big nights, will dance there until dawn. Admission is free, the glasses are not very expensive, substances circulate, ecstasy or cocaine, but the atmosphere is not stoned. Here, trendy Parisians rub shoulders with underground stars who have come incognito and provincials attracted by this place designed by and for lesbians.

Since its closure in 2007, the Pulp, “girls club where boys like to come too”, as the slogan printed on homemade matchboxes proudly proclaimed, has become a myth. Those who have been there keep funny and festive memories of it, those under 30 who have not known it speak of it as a paradise lost which contributed to reinventing Parisian lesbian culture.

A beautiful book of photos on the legendary nightclub is also in preparation and should open the catalog of La Légende, the publishing house launched by the writer Virginie Despentes and the chief film designer Axelle Le Dauphin, who intend promoting queer and feminist culture.

“It was screwed up. An endless carnival, in a moldy theatrical setting. Axelle Le Dauphin, ex-DJ at Pulp

In the mid-1990s, Axelle Le Dauphin (who then worked under the name of DJ Tampax), Sophie Lesné and Delphine Palatsi (alias DJ Sextoy) formed a group of friends. Lesbians, music lovers, party girls, they roam Paris in search of a place of their own. “The lesbian night was frozen in a frightening musical torpor and in the codes of what a dyke is supposed to do in a club: get drunk and flirt with her best friend’s girlfriend”, summarizes Axelle Le Dauphin. Kathmandu, rue du Vieux-Colombier, in the 6^eclosed in 1990. There is Le Privilège or Le Rive Gauche and a few night bars, in Pigalle, in the 2^e or 8^e borough, but nothing like them.

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