Why Are There So Many Articles Called Why Are There So Few Lesbian Bars?

A conversation with my girlfriend

Greetings, jocks and nerds! I’m really excited to share this newsletter with you. This one is a collaboration with my girlfriend Clover - a Dyke Domesticity first! Clover is a beautiful genius who is shockingly knowledgeable and eternally curious about lesbian history, and I hounded her into writing this with me even though she was nervous. If you enjoy it, show her some love in the comments! Our conversation here is about our thoughts and feelings on the STATE OF THE LESBIAN BAR, so I’m also going to plug that if you or someone you know is sitting on some cash that you might like to invest in a lesbian bar, go ahead and respond to this email for…reasons.

Us outside the bar that was used as the set of Dana’s on the L Word Gen Q lol

Julia: Clover, I’m so excited to have you as my first guest on this here newsletter. As well as being my wife girlfriend, you are my favorite person to talk and think about lesbian culture with. We’re both super interested in lesbian history, trans history, and the overlaps between them (although I’m more of a 1970s girl, while you are most interested in the 1990s – opposites attract!!). So I really wanted to get you in here to discuss a topic that’s consistently top-of-mind for both of us: lesbian bars! We’ve been to four very different lesbian bars in four different states (thank you road trip) in the last two months, and I know we both have thoughts about what makes for a great lesbian bar, as well as the general state of lesbian bars in the US today AND the way that lesbian bars are talked/written about. So let me ask, what was your biggest takeaway from our mini lesbian bar tour? And (I actually don’t know the answer to this) had you ever been to a lesbian bar before that?

Clover: I’m excited and so nervous to be here! This is my first time being a guest on a newsletter or anything of the sort as well as my first time writing any of my real thoughts on the real word on the internet, outside of well-forgotten tweets that are hopefully dust. Glad to be in the company of my wife girlfriend lover Cindy, and big fan of the newsletter.

I had never been to an official lesbian bar before this road trip. I knew of some nearby to me, like Cubbyhole and Henrietta Hudson’s in New York (I was living in Massachusetts from college until I was 25) but had never given much thought to going, maybe because for a long period of my life up until relatively recently lesbian identity was more something to be analyzed and teased out through rigorous historical study than actually experienced or lived. I had a lot of figuring out to do as a young trans lesbian and in retrospect I was absolutely terrified to do it any way other than at a safe intellectual remove, poring over old newsletters and new historical analyses. But had there been a lesbian bar in Worcester at the time (and there is one now, Femme!) I would certainly have checked it out, and maybe would have become a more reasonable person quicker.

All that preamble is to say that of course my biggest takeaway from the tour was on the concept of history. Of the four bars we visited, in LA, Tulsa, and Denver, I think maybe all of them were opened after 2000. Some of the others we looked into since (like Lipstick Lounge in Tennessee and Ginger’s) also opened up after 2000. Yet when you look any of these bars up you’ll see a statement like “one of the last remaining lesbian bars in the United States”. It’s obviously true that compared to the late 70s through the 90s, there are literally hundreds less lesbian bars now, but it’s also true that very few of the “remaining” bars are actually “remaining” from that time period. People are starting new ones. 

Julia: Yes, totally! I’ve written a bit on here about the uses and mis-uses of gay history, and I think part of what you’re pointing to is the vagueness that can be baked into some of that nostalgia. Like, when people think about the dying lesbian bar, they’re sort of collapsing 1950s butch/femme spaces, 1970s/80s lesbian feminist spaces, and maybe 2000s spaces together in their minds. As you said, a lot of the older remaining lesbian bars were opened in the early 2000s. We don’t necessarily think of that as an era of lesbian cultural flourishing, but it totally was in this weird, fun, trashy way that I love. I said that I’m a 70s lesbian history head and you’re a freak for the 90s, but it’s worth mentioning that we are also currently having a shared moment of aughts lesbian culture fascination, in part because we are working our way through The Real L Word, which I MUST write about here at some point. That show starts in 2010, so it’s a little later, but you see all these girls in LA just like mobbing these lesbian nights at clubs and doing terrible go-go dancing in cages and whatnot. And they’re wearing one long feather earring and a pageboy cap and stilettos, and their jeans are so low they’re showing crack. It’s (and I don’t use this word lightly) iconic.

Real L Word royalty. I shan't apologize for the blurriness of the second image.

To bring it back to the road trip, I feel like Blush and Blu, the bar we visited in Denver, was VERY aligned with that vibe - and it was opened in the early 2000s. We happened to accidentally be there on Denver pride, and we found out there was a lesbian bar in town from our friends, and it was daytime and everyone was getting drunk and dancing to pop hits in this space that was very gayborhood-feeling. You know, like sponsored liquor banners and pride flags everywhere and the look of it feels more layered over time than intentionally designed. It felt kind of retro to me, in such a fun way. And there was a really diverse crowd, with lesbians of all ages, and trans dykes, and it was pretty racially diverse considering it was Denver. I was like, wow, this is a bar that really brings people together in a manner that the Ruby Fruit in L.A., for example, can’t do. Which is also interesting because the Ruby Fruit is harkening back quite explicitly, through its name (taken from Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown), to second-wave lesbian feminism, but dykes who lived through that time and built that culture probably wouldn’t feel comfortable going there. And a lot of them really couldn’t afford to. 

Clover at Blush n Blu. Elite butch behind her, we loved this crowd

Clover: Exactly where and who was at these bars brings me to the second big thought I had during the trip, which was that not only are these bars opening in eras we might not expect, they’re also opening in places we might not expect. I’ve seen a fluff article and more than one opinion, on the internet or otherwise, basically saying “How are there only three lesbian bars in New York?!”, and you know what we learned on this trip? That’s how many there are in Oklahoma.

When you look on the Lesbian Bar Project’s website (which catalogs the number of U.S. lesbian bars at 29, although different outdated sources will put the number at 15, 20, 24, or other such calculations, and arguably the number is higher when you include de-facto lesbian bars like Sports Bra in Portland, OR), you see a lot of bars west of the Appalachians and east of California. To be fair, 5 are in California alone, but we also got one in Bloomington, Indiana, and until this year there was a bar in Mobile, Alabama. There’s two in Texas, one in Arizona, and one in Wisconsin. If you’re trying to do a full tour of every lesbian bar in the country, you’re actually spending a good amount of time in the South and, generally, off the coasts.

And the bars are all so different! I mean look at the difference between The Ruby Fruit, which was such an LA bar, populated by Instagrammers (?) and sparkly shining actor-hopefuls, and Tulsa’s Yellow Brick Road Bar (YBR), which was much older (90s) and a true dive. The current manager literally said in an interview, “We kind of just pick up the stragglers.” With some of these bars, it’s like, “what makes this survive and something else fold?” and I’m not sure if there’s any uniform answer. 

Pool at YBR. It was pretty quiet there that night, but we chatted with some sweet Oklahoma dykes who had so much pride in their bar

And this isn’t to say that a bar like YBR is more “pure” than The Ruby Fruit, just because it’s dingier or cheaper. There are other bars from the 90s we didn’t get to visit that have that same gayborhood feel as Blush n Blu, which was itself that owner’s third lesbian bar attempt (her other two were incredibly named tHERe and HER Place). Those bars are in Texas and Atlanta and stuff. When you see these repeated eulogies and autopsies about the Lesbian Bar, there’s always this question of why they’re all gone, and it’s always harkening to these people from the 70s and 80s talking about how everyone went to the bar every goddamn day because they couldn’t even exist as themselves anywhere else, and that basically the one thing keeping lesbian bars operational was outside homophobia. That it’s this weird give-and-take of acceptance and assimilation, meaning that there’s no strong drive to go the specifically lesbian place. But that just seems like bullshit because there are these bars from the 90s and 2000s going strong, and there’s plenty of reasons to be a lesbian wanting to go to the lesbian bar besides homophobia! I mean it’s completely ahistorical to think of lesbian gatherings as a pure reaction to outside pressure rather than being positively generated from within. And I think you see that in all of these Real L Word-style party bars where everyone’s just trying to have a good time surrounded by hot dykes, and you can’t find that just anywhere.

Julia: In terms of cultural production, it’s actually a very interesting number of lesbian bars that we have at the moment, because it’s few enough that one person CAN visit them all, but many enough that it’s difficult to do so, and those conditions are coaxing multiple lesbians to take up that exact challenge. A book called Moby Dyke came out this year and a podcast called Cruising came out last year, both about road trips to visit all the remaining lesbian bars in America (there I go, using the language of “remaining!”). We listened to an episode of the podcast about Yellow Brick Road after visiting, and it was pretty good. The book also looks pretty good, and I would like to read it! But there is something about these projects (or really the larger cultural conversation that they represent) that makes me feel ornery.

When you Google “lesbian bars,” more than half of the results are about how few lesbian bars there are left!

BRB, furiously googling “WLW bars”

I guess it feels a bit stultifying to me. There have been a bunch of lesbian bar openings in recent years, and I think that can easily be framed as a flourishing. Moreover, the more interesting questions to me are where are we now, and how can we create institutions to serve that moment? To focus on that would be to really honor the tradition set by our foremxthers! This brings me back to your point, Clover - lesbian spaces can’t, shouldn’t, and don’t exist only in relation to the violence of the outside world. But what is the thing we need in this moment, and how do we tailor our endeavors toward it? It’s also interesting to think about new cultural institutions like Lex. We may find Lex annoying, but people (including us) are using it and it’s clearly filling some needs. And being annoyed at lesbian culture is also a grand lesbian tradition! As my dissertation advisor recently wrote to me in an email about the new radio production of Dykes to Watch Out For, “hey, grouchiness is a lesbian feminist affect, right? So I was faithfully participating in the drama…”

It’s also worth noting that the flourishing of new bars/interest in lesbian bars is probably at least partially a result of the outpouring of lesbian bar elegies. You could argue that, as a genre, they have worked! So this is really more a question of where to go next, rather than an indictment of this stuff.

PS: What you said about the clubs depicted on The Real L Word made me think of the descriptions of 1970s early women’s music spaces I’m reading for my dissertation, and how people were having their pussies electrified by being in an auditorium full of lesbians listening to bangers like this. And it’s making me laugh thinking of lesbians seeking basically these same sensations in two types of spaces that couldn’t be more different. Good times.

Clover: Well there’s the overlap - wanting to be in a space for the joy of being there! Maybe unsurprisingly for us, I think this leads back around to the tradition of lesbian feminist separatism(s) and economy. Probably a proper diagnosis of what lesbians are looking for writ large can only be arrived at from an analysis of what REALLY happened to all the bars in the 80s and early 90s, when the number dwindled from roughly 200 nationwide to around 30. I don’t really have that analysis, but some educated guesses would conclude that it wasn’t solely lesbian disinterest or complete assimilation into the sexual melting pot of the USA (gxddex KNOWS the vibes of a bar populated by majority straights are off). A solid starting point would be to look at the literal national economics of the time, and wonder if maybe trickling down didn’t really work for small businesses catering to a niche audience…

A 1974 lesbian bar picture that I love, taken by Bettye Lane, a late great photographer of the feminist movement

But then of course the question becomes, “well, why lesbian bars but not gay bars?”, and you can take that to “why lesbian bars and not toy and puzzle stores?” or something. That’s a tell that leads us to investigate the specific cultures of lesbianism in the US at that time, and that’s kind of where we butt up against one of the subjects of your dissertation: disruptive reactionary/conservative lesbian feminists. 

Eulogies of the lesbian bar in America will almost universally tack the demise to things like increasing acceptance of lesbians in straight spaces, legalization of gay marriage leading to less nights out and less income for bars, and of course, something we haven’t mentioned, the expansion of identities under the “queer” umbrella that make a “lesbian” bar seem outdated and exclusive (on this point, I would say that the expansion of queer identities is historically borne out of the lesbian and feminist milieu, and any lesbian bar worth its liquor understands that family tree). Some will mention economic conditions, but only in a cursory way, like “gentrification”, loosely, or stating that gay populations other than gay men historically have less money overall. And all of those factors are probably contributing! But the fact is that there was a heyday of lesbian bars in America that correlates pretty well to the rising power of lesbian feminist separatist politics and economics (mid-80s), and it started dwindling in correlation to the rising power of conservative elements in that movement and the fallout of the Sex Wars, which essentially tore apart lesbian feminist separatism as an ideology and left the intricate and fragile support structures in shambles. So ten years after all that you start to see bars declining, because of Reagonomics and then Bush of course, and on top of that the structures in place that made for this alternative, parallel economy kind of disintegrating. That form of separatism essentially existed as a series of interpersonal relationships, and the specific kind of destructive conflict that this conservative element brought forward made it hard to keep that effort alive. 

So is the real culprit of the “murder” of the lesbian bar just right-wing reactionaries? I dunno, I’m just kinda spitballing as an armchair historian, but…

The point is, the desire to be in a space surrounded by lesbians clearly never went away. What maybe did go away was the infrastructure and philosophy that makes those spaces centers of community possible. Did Maud’s have an all-lesbian softball league built out of customers because of oppression, or because that’s what lesbians wanted to do, and they were living within a structure that could support that? Maybe I’m spinning a little out of orbit here, but I see this analysis taking us in a generative direction rather than a nostalgic and grieving one. 

Julia: Baby, WHOA! Your third eye is wide open as always. I agree that this feels like a generative direction, because there’s room for us to think about how to reinvent those structures! After all, our lxbian anxestxrs did it, under conditions that were in some ways easier than ours (cheaper rents in cities) but in most ways just as difficult or more so. We probably should wrap this up, but before we do, do you have any last burning thoughts or messages for the gorgeous and glamorous readers of my newsletter?

Clover: Read old lesbian newsletters here! It’s super fun. And subscribe to Lesbian Connection, the only remaining lesbian newsletter in circulation in the U.S.! Or start your own new one! 

Julia: And if you do, tell us about it! Love you all!