Meet Lady Queer Collective LQC Dallas

Today we’d like to introduce you to LADY Queer Collective / LQC Dallas.

Run by Molly Sydnor, Joy Che, and Joseline Boamah plus a couple of volunteers and helping hands, LADY is a Dallas-based lesbian & queer group for women that like women and our allies. While our events are centered around queer women, we are inclusive to all spectra of the LGBTQIA+ community plus family and friends. LQC works to bring women together and create a space we can collectively share. LADY’s mission is to host all-inclusive events. We want to make space for queer and make spaces queer!

We have a dodgeball and kickball team, a reading group, articles coming out on our bulletin, reoccurring trivia, and a wide variety of events. We partner with local bars, restaurants, art galleries, and spaces who want to help us provide for the community.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Our biggest challenge to date is locations, spaces, and budget. We spend so much time on meetings, planning, preparing, managing our social media platforms, emailing, and marketing… not to mention trivia. Our time is all voluntary. We then face issues of how to get spaces donated without using all of our personal funds. A lot of time we end up spending our own money for everything. Some places have been super generous in hosting us, as a lot of times we just need a place to have an event and our community buys drinks and food from the venue. Other times we are sent fees and rental pricing and end up having to turn a location down or reschedule an event. We are hoping to get registered as a nonprofit soon so we can hopefully adjust some of our location space issues and get more help funding!

Our current biggest struggle is the funding for our website renewal. We also run into time issues a lot. We are all super busy! We all have full-time jobs, side hustles, friends and family, and then we come together for LADY. It’s hard to balance everything and then host events on top of it all. It’s so rewarding however when people see what we are doing and thank us for our hard work. We want to create more options for our community. More things for us to do! It’s tough work and takes up so much time and energy but it’s usually worth it!

We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
We host a lot of different events and have teams too. So far our most consistent event has been our Trivia at Sue Ellens. We ran 7 L Word Trivia nights and had a similar crowd with teams returning and new faces every month. We have finished the six seasons of the original L Word and are taking a break. People are already asking us what is next for trivia, that’s how popular it was! Because The L Word has rebooted, we had a lot of recommendations from our community to host a launch watching party. We couldn’t find a location in time but managed to find one to host a finale party. Anywhere between 60-100 people come through that event at The Grapevine Bar to watch The L Word Generation Q final episode and it was a blast! We pride ourselves in the variety we have. There is truly something for everyone!

Besides trivia and random watch parties, we also have “Date Night With LADY”. This event is an excuse to dress up and take a date somewhere non-traditional. Our last two events have surrounded Molly Sydnor’s art shows because the owners of the locations have been super generous in hosting us (Sunset Studios and 1900 Pacific Residencies). Both events had a turn out between 80-120 people! Sweat was another popular event where we host active meetups. Our first one was in collaboration with TruFusion and we had about 25-35 people enjoy a kick boxing class. Our second Sweat event was a hike at Cedar Ridge based on our community suggestion! Other events include Yappy Hour for folks passionate about dogs, Taco “Gayme” night in collaboration with Sarah Castillo at Taco Heads, an Art Talk at The Nasher thanks to Rachel Rushing and our Launch at Sundown at Granada! Our Teams include LADY Balls, the Dodgeball team and Uhaul The Ball, the Kickball team. Both Teams participate as the only all-female teams in the Gay Sports League!

When we are not hosting events, we like to get groups together to attend events through people, brands, or businesses we support. This would include things like Tough Talks and a zine workshop with Brandy over at WAAS Gallery, Chick Happy Hour, The Episcene Fashion show at The W Hotel, or anything thrown by De Colores Podcast, Niecee X, or Lezplay! The sports girls like to get together and hit the bars or a happy hour, and if we see something that looks fun, we are sure to post about it on our social media!

We are proud of our constant energy and drive. We are always evolving, curating, and adding to our list of growing ideas. We take feedback and ideas from the community. Our website has places you can write to us as well as sign up to volunteer. Our DMs are open for people to give us event ideas. People ask questions and interact with us daily. We are adding articles to our website bulletin soon and have just recently started a reading group! There is so much we have yet to do and we are super excited for all the new faces we see at each event!

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
There are different forms of success and ways to measure it! For us, everything we have done so far has been successful in that people are coming and interacting. LQC is doing what it has set out to do. We have a lot of folks willing to work with us and collaborate, and even more folks who want to be involved, help us out and bring their friends. People spread the word and are talking about LADY, it’s fantastic! Pretty early on we had a graphic designer reach out who is now a huge part of our team. Gina Lipschitz works really hard on creating some of our event promotion and graphics for our web presence. We also have three super fantastic volunteers who have recently helped us grow and keep up with some of our event responsibilities. We wouldn’t be successful without our community. However, we still have challenges some might consider not successful, like consistent lack of funding and the struggle for time! At the end of the day, we are doing what we set out to do and more. We are constantly striving for success!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lqcdallas.com/
• Email: lqcdallas@gmail.com
• Instagram: lqcdallas
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lqcdallas/

Image Credit:
Kayla and Allie Oudthone, Beau Kolba and Kaylen Kress, Angelica Sousa, Molly Sydnor

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