At 11:00 p.m. on a recent Saturday, nearly 200 people were lined up outside a brick warehouse in SoDo. A cab pulled up, and three young men tumbled out. "Is it 21 and up?" one of the guys asked, trying to determine if they could get in. A girl near the end of the line giggled, and gestured to the people ahead of her. "It's women only," she said with a smile. Her girlfriend stepped forward to put her arm around her, and the boys hopped back in their cab to find another place to party.

The ladies were in line for the February 19 Girl4GIRL event, a monthly party for women. After five years at various venues, most recently Pioneer Square's Catwalk, Girl4GIRL owner Chris Chappon decided to take the show to a bigger space--the monthly crowds were topping 400 women.

Chappon blew away that record last month at Girl4GIRL's debut at the Premier's First Avenue space. By midnight, Chappon--a 33- year-old former software sales manager, who lives on the Eastside with her dog--had jumped on stage, between DJ Ricki Leigh and a go-go dancer, to make an announcement to the hundreds of women dancing at her feet. Some of them wore purple glow-in-the dark bracelets, indicating their single status. Others sat up in the quieter bar, chatting over drinks. "One THOUSAND women," she yelled into the microphone. "It's the Girl4GIRL revolution!"

Chappon's event--which she's been running since early 2004, taking over for founder Michelle Waye, who'd originally plucked Chappon from the crowd to dance--isn't the only girls' night enjoying big success these days. On Pike Street at the Eagle, usually a gay men's bar, "dykes and their friends" take over the loud dark bar once a month on the third Tuesday for Vibrator. Lines are out the door for that event too, says organizer Lisa Orth-- who DJs as Amateur Youth, while cohort Hannah Blilie spins as Master Stan. Inside, lesbians take advantage of the lack of a cover charge, and pack the narrow, dive-y bar. Orth says the Eagle's usual role as a men's leather bar makes Vibrator unique: "The energy of what happens there the rest of the month makes Vibrator Vibrator," she says. "The lesbians are all acting like they're fucking fags. There's a lot of naughtiness going on."

And on March 10, a third monthly lesbian night will debut at Chop Suey on East Madison Street. Shannon Carroll, a gay guy who helps put on the popular Comeback night at Chop Suey, is starting up Lick--the answer to Comeback's largely male crowd. "We needed something that had more of a femme vibe or more of a tranny vibe," says Carroll, who plans to bring in lesbian and tranny DJs--the first event will feature DJ Sappho, from Portland, and Anna Oxygen--and decorate the club with posters of women. There'll be no cover charge before 10:00 p.m., and then it's three bucks. Carroll is excited to add another option to the recent resurgence of lesbian entertainment. "I was loving Vibrator, but it's too crowded," Carroll says. That crowd at Vibrator, however, helped pave the way for a new event, Orth points out. "The new nights that are springing up have to do with the ongoing success of the other nights."

Beyond those three events, lesbians have also taken over R Place lately--what used to be a male-dominated gay bar, has now balanced out, with lesbians swarming the dance floor on the weekends. "There are more women going there for sure," says Carla Schricker, AKA Queen Lucky, who DJs at R Place on Friday nights. "Women want to go out and feel sexy and naughty and pick up each other." Even Element, a new club near the Seattle Center, is becoming a lesbian hot spot, with girls dominating a back dance floor. Not long ago, the Wild Rose was just about the only lesbian social scene in town. Now, it looks like lesbians are taking over Seattle, one club at a time. "

One thousand fifty-one," women attended Girl4GIRL, says a smiling Chappon a few days later, over drinks at the Deluxe on Broadway Avenue. She was expecting four to six hundred, like past months. "I did not expect 1,000. I was on cloud nine. I'm still on cloud nine!" That many woman, she says, means "those are hundreds of new faces we'd never seen before." (Many of those faces wrote in after the party, to say thanks: "Who needs L.A. or N.Y.? The best party is in Seattle now!," wrote one woman.) The success of February's event has Chappon thinking bigger than that party--a night already sponsored by Showtime's lesbian drama The L Word, Curve magazine, and Tina Turner. She's aiming for 2,000 women by June's Pride event--Chappon's already booked DJ Shortee, known for lighting her records on fire--plus themed events like a sports night timed with the Seattle Storm's season opener, or drag king contests. Chappon is calling March's Girl4GIRL BOIGIRL. "It's going to be wild," she says, explaining her plans. Every once in a while during our conversation she stops to jot down new ideas (like a "bisexual couch," or bracelets for those not-so-single, but open to having fun with new people). "You have to give them what they want, fill that need, and truly bring it. Top performers, top DJs--and be willing to spend money to fund your passion."

At $10, Girl4GIRL is the priciest of the monthly events, though Chappon points out that the move to the Premier tripled her expenses, and she didn't raise the cover charge (when she first took over the event last year, she couldn't always afford to pay her rent, but kept the night going, she says). Chappon's been approached to host Girl4GIRL more than once a month, but so far she's refusing. "Women only commit to going once a month," and she doesn't want to dilute her crowd. Instead, she wants her third Saturday to be "the number one monthly event in the Northwest."

Monthly dyke nights at Seattle bars and clubs go way back, says Vibrator's Lisa Orth. She used to be a part of monthly "Makeout!" parties at the Baltic Room and Hot Box at ARO.space. Re-bar's long-running Pandora's Box, which takes place on the last Saturday of every month--as it has for over a decade--is another model for Seattle's currently thriving dyke party scene. "We have something like 700 people coming through," all night says Schricker. "A lot of these ladies, I don't even know where they come from!"

All the different events--Girl4GIRL has a crowd aged 21 to around 61, and features danceable pop hits mixed with some hiphop, whereas Vibrator caters to a younger Capitol Hill crowd, with everything from "old school dance/rock" to "modern indie shit," Orth says-- plus the surreptitious takeovers at places like R Place or Element, currently offer enough variety to keep local lesbians busy. "I'm glad there's all these different venues to go to," Orth says. Chappon agrees: "I welcome competition," she says with a grin.