Lesbian Bars Are Back From the Brink

Photo: Jesse S

Lately the media has been paying extensive attention to the precipitous decline of lesbian bars—you’d certainly be forgiven for thinking all is lost, given the headlines. Just four years ago, when New York City–based filmmakers Erica Rose and Elina Street started the Lesbian Bar Project to document these establishments, they could count only 16 across the US—down from a peak of about 200 in the 1980s, by their count.

So what happened? “It kind of comes down to gentrification, assimilation, the wealth gap, the move to online culture, and frankly just misogyny,” Rose says. “Queer women also never occupied or held public space in the same way that gay men did. We don’t really have a gayborhood.”

But a new crop of options is taking root, and a new generation that prioritizes the inclusion of trans and nonbinary people is discovering long-standing businesses. Rose and Street’s list of lesbian bars has grown to 33 since they started counting in 2020—still a small number, but more than double their first reckoning. While places have been more likely to open in coastal cities and metropolises like Chicago, communities in Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, and other places in the South and West have supported bars for decades. The owners of Nashville’s Lipstick Lounge recently broke ground on a women’s sports bar called Chapstick. Similar spots are planned for Austin and Denver on the heels of Portland, Oregon’s successful Sports Bra.

This revival can be partially attributed to pent-up demand from the pandemic. “I think that we were all exposed to a reality that most of us did not want to live in, which was being forced indoors and being forced to not have nightlife,” Rose explains. “I think after that experience of isolating and being apart from one another, we came together as a community and as a society and said no. The new bars opening up are a result of that resounding no.”

Early lesbian bars

Whatever their tribulations, lesbian bars have come a long way. Into the 1980s, historians note, they were often controlled by the Mafia. It used to be illegal in many states to serve alcohol to homosexuals in commercial establishments, so gay and lesbian bars needed to buy protection from the mob or face getting their liquor license revoked if they were raided by the cops. In 1971, protesters confronted the blond-beehived proprietor and thug bouncers at Kooky’s (pronounced “cookies”), a mobbed-up lesbian bar in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. In the heated atmosphere after the 1969 uprising at the nearby Stonewall Inn, the LGBTQ+ community started refusing to tolerate exploitative practices like high cover charges and being intimidated into paying for overpriced, watered-down drinks.

Things changed as lesbian and gay visibility swept the country and antidiscrimination reforms let women get credit and financing to start businesses. In New York, a breakthrough came in 1976, when four women in their 20s opened Sahara on the city’s swinging Upper East Side. The nightclub on Second Avenue was elegantly appointed with floor plants, peacock chairs, and an upstairs dance floor. It charged a relatively hefty $5 minimum.

Brooklyn artist Gwen Shockey, who has interviewed community elders to create the Addresses Project, an interactive historical map of lesbian hot spots, says there was more than pride in appearances for Sahara’s co-owners. “Their descriptions of it are just so visual, like their emphasis on wanting art to be on the walls of the room," she says. "It was so unlike the bars that were Mafia-controlled. The women who described those places, it was like, ‘Yeah, there was no fire exit, it felt dangerous. You were kind of yelled at at the door, you had to pay up the ass for shitty drinks,’ versus these spaces that women started or that lesbians or queer people started, which were so much more about love and generosity.”

After hosting celebrities and staging fashion shows, Sahara was padlocked suddenly in 1979 to make room for high-rise condos, devastating its owners. But the desire for carefully thought-out places to mingle, dance, and find a new flame never died. In the 1990s, promoter and bar owner Wanda Acosta’s Sunday-afternoon party at East Ninth Street’s Café Tabac brought glamor, models, and sometimes Madonna to the scene and was the East Coast’s leading edge of what became known as lesbian chic.

An inclusive revival

Many of the new spaces today follow in these same footsteps but with an emphasis on age, racial, and especially gender diversity—a reflection of the changing desires of the LGBTQ community. The Ruby Fruit, opened in Silver Lake in 2023, ended a yearslong lesbian-bar drought in LA. Co-owners Mara Herbkersman and Emily Bielagus raised eyebrows by calling their airy restaurant and wine bar a “sapphic” establishment, after the ancient Greek poet Sappho, who wrote love poems to women.

“In the past, the word ‘lesbian’ has had some cisgender associations, and we wanted to move away from necessarily ascribing any kind of gender to what we were doing while preserving the culture and intention behind the lesbian community and lesbianism in general,” Bielagus says. “But at this point, we use the words ‘lesbian’ and ‘sapphic’ pretty interchangeably.”

The duo has made minimal adjustments to their space, formerly a restaurant, with the exception of replacing some high-backed chairs with stools that work more flexibly with crowd flow. A patio with a bar reflects the Ruby Fruit’s openness to different sectors of the community. “Our crowd is very age-diverse,” Herbkersman says, noting that they’re open for breakfast and lunch and don’t stay open past 10 or 11 p.m. “We've got little kids [at the restaurant], we've got babies, we have families, we have 20-somethings grabbing a drink before going out to other parties.” They also attract what Bielagus affectionately describes as “heritage lesbians.” “They post up at the biggest, most prominent table in the room,” Herbkersman says. “It's very much the power seat, and they always find their way there.”

Queer women in command

In addition to a few new options in San Francisco, the Scarlet Fox wine bar courts a sophisticated crowd from the LGBTQ+ community and beyond. Co-owner Kaela Miller, a sommelier with 20 years of experience in the wine industry, wanted something different from what she was used to seeing. “Being a queer woman, my experience was a lot more dive-bar situations, if you will, especially lesbian bars,” she says. “Everyone was welcome and it was very open,” but “they were always dark, with loud music. So it was not necessarily the scene that I wanted to go out in.”

Miller and her spouse, Kate Maeder, opened the Scarlet Fox in a former laundromat in the North of the Panhandle neighborhood about a year ago. “The space was just really a beautiful blank slate to work with already,” says architect MiKaela Leo, with “concrete floors, white walls, lots of natural light, tons of windows. It’s in a nice little neighborhood location with trees out front, and we just wanted to create something that would be light and bright, but also kind of cozy.” The bar has room for about 50 patrons, with a “wine wall” that puts the focus squarely on what Miller calls her “passion”: elevating women winemakers and vineyard owners.

“The queer community has come out in full force in support of our wine bar,” Miller says. “It's lovely. Last night it was women on a date, some queer friends meeting up and having a bottle of wine and talking about what’s going on in their work, and I actually had a book club in here last night of all women.”

Shockey notes that community is key. “If you go into the bathroom at Ginger’s [a Park Slope, Brooklyn, fixture since 2000], it's like a collage of love for lesbian history,” she says. “The walls are literally plastered with images that have been torn out of magazines of—you know, Anna Kournikova, Queen Latifah, paintings of lesbians from China, like all these different images. It’s not particularly aesthetically pleasing per se, but it’s like you can feel the love for the space in the community.”

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest

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