INTERVIEW WITH THE SPIT AND POLISH CREW:

Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo (Judy), Iz Hesketh (Zee), Gabriel Clark (Mikey) and Shakeel Kimotho  (Hannah) 

Describe Spit and Polish to me…

LULN: Spit and Polish is a queer bar on a queer strip, in this case Canal Street in Manchester. It’s your favourite watering hole. It’s charming and queer as heck: glitter balls, cheap drinks, fast speed bar, no cocktails where the community can come and gather and watch a lovely drag queen of an evening. Welcoming, warm and we, the team here, manage it. I play Judy. I’m punk rock, ready to go, will put you down in a fight if you’re ready to go.

SK: Hanna is a trans person who works in the Spit and Polish bar. She’s free, fun-loving, super smiley, little bit goofy and likes bending the rules a little bit. Calls in sick when she wants, that kind of vibe. But deep down she’s found a real sense of self, family and community within the bar staff and its loyal clientele. 

IH: Zee is an intelligent young transwoman with a really strong mind who always wears her heart on her sleeve and knows what she believes to be right. She’s very outspoken, sometimes for the bad, mostly for the best. She’s got a lot of love and a lot of time for everyone that needs it. 

GC: I play Mikey, he is very cheeky, he runs an Only Fans on the side. He’s very flirty. Likes to get into trouble and I don’t think is bothered about the consequences or retribution. 

What purpose does a bar like Spit and Polish have to queer communities in 2026, outside of being a social space to have fun in? 

IH: It reminds me a lot of my favourite bar in London, The Two Brewers. That place to me is like home. It gave me my first drag gigs, its given friends bar shifts when they need them, it’s helped people with their transitions. It’s very much a centre of the queer community. I feel like Spit and Polish is that for Manchester. I can imagine it’s the sort of place that rallies around its community. If someone needs a few shifts that month I’m sure Leo, the owner, would give people cash on the side. It’s that epicentre for our world.

LULN: Even in 2026, we need spaces like that, as queer people, because of so much of what is going on outside today. Even in London and Manchester, this is the first time in many years I’ve had to go, hang on a minute, I need to straighten myself up a bit. I’m polyamorous, I have two partners, one trans girlfriend and one queer, bisexual boy. When I’m with him I feel safe, because I pass, I can be in straight spaces. When I’m out with her or she’s out on her own, I am stressed. Text me when you get to where you’re going, when you get home, It’s not her and I don’t want to keep tabs on another human being but outside it is peak for people who are visibly queer and want to live their truth out loud. So a place like Spit and Polish is a reminder that those refuges exist. To get that message out on a media scale, so that people can hear it and express their gender identity or their sexuality, they know there’s somewhere to go, where you can step in and leave all that shit outside, listen to Diana Ross for a few hours and dance baby dance, while it all burns. It’s a refuge for a moving target. 

What do you think the staff and patrons of Spit and Polish think of the bar’s owner, Leo Struthers?

LULN: Leo is just doing the best with the information that is presented in front of him. Firstly, Leo has a bar to keep alive! In this economy! I think sometimes in the LGBTQ+ of it all we sometimes forget that yes, we are our acronyms but we are also just ourselves, trying to figure life out under late stage capitalism. We are surviving the same as everybody else. Eggs are expensive. Tequila is expensive. Glitter is expensive. Lube is expensive. We have so much more in common than we think, fundamentally. When it comes to Leo, yeah, he might fuck up, but if you check him, he’s willing to learn, and that is the main thing, the capacity to change your mind. As a CIS Black Lesbian, a dyke coming in with another community history, Judy understands that people are allowed to be wrong. You only know what you know when you know it, right? Everybody in their corners, on the defensive, gets us nowhere. Conflicts need resolve. That’s really difficult when your way of living feels constantly under threat. The point of Leo is, yeah, he makes mistakes but when someone pulls him up on it he doesn’t immediately fight back. He listens. He gives human beings respect, which is all anybody is asking for really. It’s just human decency and compassion.

What’s the difference between Canal St now and the Canal St of Nathan Maloney and Queer As Folk? 

GC: That for me was one of the biggest things about the project. It felt a little bit like a loose trilogy from Queer as Folk to Banana/Cucumber/Tofu to now, with Tip Toe. It’s over those three shows that you can trace the history of the street. Part of the show is asking the question, what has happened to this street? Why are we not seeing it as the refuge that it is? It’s created an interesting dialogue that we were having quite often on set. Back in the 90s when Queer as Folk came out, that street was starting to die a little bit. Queer as Folk revitalised it in a way, or made it a tourist attraction. When we become tourist attractions we risk becoming appropriated and those spaces not being exclusive to us in a time when we really need them. But we also need our straight allies. What’s interesting about these shows is that in those moments when this insidious homophobia and transphobia is sneaking in to these spaces – and we see with the young cast, that they may be more comfortable in the Northern Quarter – in 2026 it really feels like you do have to start straightening yourself up in them. Going on Canal St now I feel a mix of feeling safe but also being slightly at risk. The week before we started filming, I went out to watch a drag show with someone from the show, we were just walking down the street and these guys pulled up in a car, jumped out, screamed faggots at us, got back in and drove off. This was the week before we started filming.

IH: This is so crazy because Manchester was always supposed to be the place that felt like your safe haven. 

GC: Having had that and then going into filming a scene in the bar where all the straight boys start a fight, oh, this is all a bit familiar. 

SK: These microcosms exist everywhere. I grew up in Bradford and we had this queer bar. People working there would take you in, and say “no, you’re not drinking around straight people”. “You’re our babies, you have to be safe to be you”. They would let us into the club. Those spaces are so important, where just the presence of a drag queen makes you feel protected. Even now, with this hyper visibility that we all have – especially trans people have – this type of visibility with no infrastructure or security or basic rights, it just leaves us so vulnerable. With the steady erosion of our rights we enter these spaces with a different underlying energy. There is a kind of melancholy, or fear, an off frequency. That, in adjacent to these spaces opening up to maybe more heterosexual audiences, it leaves us in this weird place where we don’t really have anything that feels our own. No code switching needed. Then sometimes, on the odd night, it will feel so weird and wonderful to have it all to ourselves again. I feel like Tip Toe touches on all of that and picks it apart. It shows that we’re all complex and layered and we all have good and bad in us. It goes deeper than archetypes. We see this showcased through Spit and Polish in really humorous ways. The show is so fun, despite the dark times that it addresses.

How do you feel having somebody, Leo’s great friend Stephanie, who is definitely somewhere unspecified on the TERF spectrum in the story? How did you feel that was handled?

IH: I’ll only speak on this because our characters have a lot to do with one another, especially toward the end. It is done excellently. I believe that Stephanie fully believes those things until she is faced with having to love and protect someone she knows needs protection. I feel like that is often the case for people. When it comes down to it, her character really ends up defending my character. I guess protecting her. She is on that TERF spectrum, but when she meets someone she sees the humanity in her and I do think that’s the case for a lot of people. It’s a shame but it means you have to show up as the best version of yourself sometimes. I was saying to Shakeel, we’re very often the only doll in the place that we’re working. So to have two of us, and for those two to be friends, and to love each other and for one of them to be a trans woman of colour, that felt so important to me. 

SK: It felt real. We were coming together as actors. Also, this bar would have more than one trans person in it. Of course it would. Russell loves bringing people in who he embraces as family. This is the way these bars work. Back to your point about Stephanie’s complex journey in the show, I think she has her own things to face about her womanhood and the underlying layered misogyny that Leo’s homosexuality activates within her. I think it all accumulates to become a crack in her perception of what transness is. Even though we are working to remain a beautiful strong unified community, gayness and transness often get fused together even though they’re so inherently different, like day and night in our lived experience. So many of these layers get picked up on in Tip Toe. Russell is a wizard in that respect. He’s knocked it out of the part again.

IH: There is a section in the show where my character choses to take a character to the Northern Quarter instead of Canal St. OK, this place that was once the epicentre of our community is dying but it’s also because we’re a lot more integrated into the right parts of society that are open minded.

Who would you most like to see Tip Toe?

GC: I want Nigel Farage to watch it. He needs to. 

IH: I would like anyone who is on the fence about queer issues, on the issue of toxic masculinity, I would like any of them to watch the show. To crack the fence open, to be with us. I think that’s all we need, just a little bit of weight on the other side of the scales.