Krista Burton

No one better talk to me about the “death” of lesbian bars.  

I mean it. We have the bars, babe. We have them! Some are old, some are brand-new, a bunch have closed, a bunch are opening, and somewhere—right now, I promise you—there’s a group of six queers gathered around a battered kitchen table in a falling-down communal house, having a fight meeting about whether they can rename the dyke bar that they’ve already announced on their GoFundMe page will be opening within the next year. 

There is a lesbian bar coming to you soon, is what I’m saying. If there isn’t one already. When the alert was sounded, in about 2020, that only a few dyke bars remained in the entire US, people panicked, and a surge of interest in sapphic spaces began. Rachel Karp’s The Lesbian Bar Chronicles: The Living History and Hopeful Future of America’s Dyke Dives and Sapphic Spaces is an ideal book to read if you have an interest in these spaces. I mean, do you like history? Personal stories? Hearing queer people explain what it was like to be alive when these bars were one of the only sure-fire ways to meet other queers? 

Of course you do!!! Lesbian bars have fascinating stories, and the people who have hung out in them and do hang out in them are the most fun people to talk to. With Lesbian Bar Chronicles, you get to do that, and it’s like you’re there. When I think of the zillions of hours of interviews that must have been completed to write this, the sheer number of transcriptions, the research!! My god. I know what it takes to get a single person in a different time zone to agree to (and show up for) a single scheduled Zoom interview, so I cannot imagine the work that went into collecting these stories.  

I’m glad we have this book—lesbian bars deserve to have their narratives preserved. Lesbian bars deserve to exist! And to be successful, and to be full of queers who want to meet each other and make friends there and make out there and make the bars part of their lives. Here’s to the past and future—may that crowd-funded dyke bar open up in your neighborhood soon, and may it be so popular that its owners spend their Friday and Saturday nights carefully letting two people in as two people walk out, while the line snakes around the block and queers in ripped black mesh tops grumble and text and flirt with each other as they wait to get in.   

Ashley Green

Having come into my own queerness in the rural South, most of my early connections with other queer folks took place online. The sense of community I felt the first time I walked into a queer women’s space (San Diego’s Gossip Grill, to which a chapter in The Lesbian Bar Chronicles is dedicated) was life changing. Over a decade after leaving San Diego, I have yet to find a physical place that compares, and that lack of ability to make in-person connections has driven much of my own research on queer women’s experiences of place. Recognizing the significance of these spaces to so many, Rachel Karp’s The Lesbian Bar Chronicles joins a cohort of other work that seeks to document the history and disappearance of lesbian and sapphic spaces, from the Lesbian Bar Project docuseries to books like Krista Burton’s Moby Dyke and June Thomas’s A Place of Our Own. 

Beginning with Eve’s Hangout in New York and Mona’s many bars in San Francisco, Karp’s book interweaves historical narratives that often go untold with the contemporary stories of those for whom the women who owned these early bars paved the way. I remain haunted by the story of Charlene, who narrowly escaped the 1973 fire at the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans, the deadliest mass killing of queer folks until the Pulse Orlando shooting in 2016, because of a pair of new shoes. As a result, the bar she went on to open became a deeply political space, and she helped to secure “the first legal protections in the Deep South prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in employment, housing, commercial spaces, and more.” If anything, I found myself craving more from this book, with many chapters offering only the briefest glimpse into the lives of either the bar owners or one of the patrons. While it is impossible for any one author to tell every story, there were many times whilst reading that I felt as if something was missing from the larger narrative. 

Nevertheless, Karp excels in highlighting the ways in which sapphics seek to create spaces that honor intersecting identities, highlighting the events hosted by Executive Sweet in Chicago that center Black women’s experiences, the ASL interpretation for events with spoken elements at Washington, DC’s As You Are, the response to rape culture by The Back Door in Bloomington, IN, and the many bars and spaces changing their slogans and culture to be more welcoming of gender diversity. Despite a desire to bring attention to the importance of these spaces, Karp does not shy away from exposing the racism and transphobia that is perpetuated by many lesbian bars. Notably, she shares the stories of the former employees at Denver’s Blush & Blu who brought a lawsuit against the bar’s owner for mistreatment and underpayment, including Jordan, whose transness was regularly invalidated, and Ashley, who was subjected to racist comments. 

Poignant as these stories are, I cannot help but question our continued focus on bar culture. Karp herself includes interviews with multiple people who have struggled with alcoholism and addiction, highlighting the harmful impact these increased rates of substance abuse have within LGBTQ+ communities. Why then do we continue to hyperfocus on the disappearance of lesbian bars and sapphic nightlife spaces as if they are the ultimate place for us to find queer community? This is not a critique of Karp’s work, nor those who frequent bar spaces (I love a lesbian bar as much as anyone). Rather, it is a call for us to continue to explore and give attention to the many other ways that sapphics build community beyond the bar scene, particularly as a desire to move away from this culture is possibly one of the many reasons we’ve seen a decline in these spaces in recent decades. To their credit, Karp and her cohosts on the Cruising podcast seem to be doing just that, with their latest season focusing on different kinds of queer spaces, “from bookstores to farms to peace encampments.” If we want to continue telling the stories of those who are often left out of the larger narrative, we must look beyond the bars. 

Mairead Sullivan

I was surprised to find myself crying as I read Rachel Karp’s The Lesbian Bar Chronicles. But there I was, crunched in the middle seat of a cross-country flight, tearing up at the tales of the advent of Portland’s The Sports Bra. I felt the familiar welling at the story of owner Jenny Nguyen’s immigrant parents moving from their own fear and skepticism to becoming the bar’s resident mom and dad, jumping in to fix the leaks and cash out the register. But really, it was the image of the fathers overjoyed to share that space with their middle-school-aged daughters. As a child who relished a trip to the local sports bar with my dad but railed against the idea that the highest aspiration of my sports career was college-level play, I was undone by the thought of girls entering a space where women’s athleticism was not a consolation prize, not a lesser version of the real thing, but the thing itself. Maybe now is when I should also confess that I didn’t even make the high-school basketball team, but I digress.  

It was only ten years ago that pop culture, for the umpteenth time, declared the death of the lesbian. The closing of San Francisco’s eminent lesbian bar The Lex and the end of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, within a year of each other, germinated a seemingly endless stream of eulogies for a purportedly long-lost lesbian life. The cultural story of lesbian bars often borrows from this grammar of lesbian death. We are told how many there were, how few remain, how much has been lost. Indeed, what are lesbians if not a people always lamenting the loss of their bars? But lament is not enough. Karp’s book reminds us that lesbian bars are not only lost objects or endangered species of queer nightlife. They are institutions: fragile, dramatic, underfunded, labor-intensive, sometimes exclusionary, sometimes astonishingly capacious. 

The book is an outgrowth of Karp’s popular podcast Cruising, a chronicle of a thirty-day road trip and concomitant attempt to crawl every dyke bar in the United States. Karp’s chapters show that lesbian bars are sites of boundary making as much as belonging. This, too, is part of their importance. Each short chapter lingers with a single bar. Some have long since closed. Some have recently opened. Some have endured for decades. Others flicker into view through stories of fights, flirtations, ownership changes, community betrayals, labor disputes, generational conflict, and the ordinary drama of trying to keep a small business alive when your customers need it to be so much more. The result resists a single story of decline. It is a chronicle of uneven lesbian public life: closed and opening, beloved and impossible, sustaining and exhausting, mythic and stubbornly logistical. 

One of the pleasures of Karp’s structure is that it keeps puncturing romance with operations. The bar is a dream, yes, but it is also a workplace. Its dramas are not incidental to lesbian world-making; they are part of it. For that reason, I do not read the conflicts in The Lesbian Bar Chronicles as failures. They are signs that lesbian community is not an essence but a practice. It must be organized. It must be resourced. It must be argued over. It must be continuously revised. Lesbian bars are not beloved because they are pure, but because they are one of the few places where these questions become concrete. The politics of lesbian public life happen at the door, behind the bar, on the schedule, in the bathroom line, in the decision about what goes on the TV, and in the argument over whether this place still feels like “ours.” 

This is why the familiar story of lesbian bar decline, however true, is not enough. The danger of that story is that it can make lesbian life appear most coherent at the moment of its disappearance. We count the bars when they are gone. We love the scene after the lease has been lost. We praise it in elegy despite critiques in the everyday. But what would it mean to love lesbian bars while they are still living, which is to say while they are still messy, expensive, undercapitalized, exclusionary, reparative, disappointing, thrilling, and in need? Karp’s book is joyful because it refuses to leave lesbian life in the past tense. Bar by bar, scene by scene, it reminds us that the point is not only to mourn what has vanished, but to keep making rooms where lesbian life can be loud, conflicted, ordinary, and real. 

June Thomas (photo: Rachel Hein)

Given how many newspaper stories, video projects, and podcasts have appeared in recent years bemoaning the sad state of the lesbian bar, I sometimes imagine the crowd in the average dyke bar must be evenly divided between folks holding drinks and those clutching notebooks, cameras, and microphones.  

I confess I’m a tad conflicted about this. Yes, bars are still the place most of us go when we realize we’re queer, when we’re looking to find community and want to socialize in a place where we know we are welcome. I promise, I’m not a hater. I enjoy a drink, especially in good company, and I believe the dancefloor is queerkind’s most easily accessible portal to transcendence. But isn’t it odd that the bar is still our default meeting place? Isn’t it fundamentally farkakte that the spaces our community has designated as locations of refuge, sanctuary, and safety stay in business by selling booze? 

Rachel Karp’s The Lesbian Bar Chronicles doesn’t exactly wrestle with those questions. It accepts the premise that bars are our natural habitat and that bar owners and bar staff are the den mothers and zaddies our birth families failed to provide.  In tone, it is closer to the prose you find in the scene mags distributed in queer bars—vaguely promotional, rarely pushing owners and managers beyond their scripted talking points—than what you’d expect in a mainstream publication, where a good editor would ask the writer to probe a little deeper. It’s still fascinating to see how those talking points have evolved—it’s heartening to hear the contemporary focus on consent and such a strong commitment to inclusion, given the long history of our bars being less than fully welcoming of Black, brown, and older customers. 

That faint odour of the puff piece is perhaps inevitable given the way the book came together. Over the space of thirty days, Karp, her wife Jen McGinity, and best friend Sarah Gabrielli visited twenty bars across the country, talking to owners, staffers, and patrons for their podcast, Cruising. (I wish Karp had said more about how they managed that road trip; one of my favorite parts of Krista Burton’s hilarious book Moby Dyke, which chronicles her attempt to visit all of America’s extant lesbian bars, was her discussion of the logistical challenges of getting to them all without destroying her life.) Such fleeting visits wouldn’t allow Karp and co. to pursue deep reporting. When they were able to follow up—as when exploitation of staff at Denver’s Blush & Blu became a legal issue—the additional information allowed Karp to present a more nuanced picture of the city, its queer community, and the way that the concept of “vocational awe” plays out in the nightlife sector.  

Lest I seem too negative, I must note that there were several things I loved about this book. I appreciated the inclusion of historical locations like Eve’s Hangout, Mona’s, and Maud’s, not to mention Oklahoma City’s Wreck Room. Those places deserve to be commemorated alongside the bars of today—how better to see the great sweep of queer history? I was impressed by Karp’s ability to tell the story of more than 30 similar locations without the narrative seeming repetitive; and as someone who has undergone my own travails trying to talk to bar owners—heck, just tracking them down them can feel nigh-on impossible—I can tell that she’s an amazing producer. 

The thing that sets this book apart, though, is the way that Karp allows the people who have made these bars their home to tell their stories. Once again, I suspect this is a by-product of the project’s origins as a podcast and the interviews credited to Gabrielli. We rarely get to hear from people like Shirley J, the “mayor” of Chicago’s Nobody’s Darling; Barbara, who found love and what I suspect is a common but rarely described kind of straight-friends-to-sometimes-lovers relationship at Lost & Found, also in Chicago; or Lisa, a fully professed Sister of Perpetual Indulgence, who sees San Diego’s Gossip Grill as a literal spiritual home. I can’t imagine how long I’d have to hang out in a bar to meet women like that. 

Rachel Karp

Thank you to Signs for including The Lesbian Bar Chronicles in Short Takes, and to the incredible individuals who have offered their time, attention, and perspective. Moby Dyke and A Place of Our Own were two books which I hoped The Lesbian Bar Chronicles could exist in conversation with, so it’s an honor to be read and critiqued by their authors, Krista Burton and June Thomas, respectively. A significant part of the impetus for writing this book was learning that Cruising, the podcast on which the book is based, was appearing in gender studies and queer studies courses. So to read feedback from Ashley Greene and Mairead Sullivan, university professors of such courses themselves, is equally meaningful. 

With her distinct humor, Krista Burton perfectly encapsulates why I set out nearly five years ago, with my wife Jen and my friend Sarah, to visit every lesbian bar in the country. “These spaces have fascinating stories,” Burton points out, and the people within them are “the most fun people to talk to.” These were our guiding principles: uncover the stories of the spaces and talk to the fascinating people within them. 

We found ourselves surprised and delighted by just how much queer history was woven into these personal narratives. Which brings me to Ashley Green’s astute remark: that she found herself craving more from this book. In writing, I often found myself wanting to give more, particularly as I began to confront the depth of queer history that has unfolded within lesbian bars. But I also wanted to stay true to my commitment that this be a readable and accessible book, while also encompassing a broad survey of thirty-plus spaces across the country. 

I appreciate Green’s acknowledgement of the way I addressed intersectionality – and sometimes, the lack thereof – in these spaces. Getting this balance wrong was one of my greatest fears. It felt important to recognize the reality of racism and transphobia within some brick-and-mortar lesbian bars while also celebrating the multitude of radically inclusive bars of today.  

It is in large part due to this dissonance that I love Mairead Sullivan’s description of the book as “a chronicle of uneven lesbian public life.” Throughout all of lesbian history, it seems, we have been opening bars without enough business expertise, running them into the ground or turning them into longstanding establishments, arguing and making amends, wronging others and making attempts at repair. It is a great comfort to me to discover that this seeming instability is not a sign of a dying community but an enduring one.  

This is why, while the image June Thomas invokes of a lesbian bar half-filled with people holding microphones and notebooks is a funny one, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Regardless of the oft proclaimed narrative that these spaces are dying, I found them to be filled not with other reporters, but with community members who very much rely on these venues.  

Thomas’s primary critique is that perhaps the bar, a place that revolves around the sale of alcohol, should not be our community’s default meeting place. This is something that I personally grapple with, and it does come up throughout the book. One example: in the chapter on Maud’s, former regular Jeanne Clark tells us about the prevalence of alcoholism and addiction in lesbian bars. She also details her own journey to sobriety alongside a mass exodus of lesbians from the bars to gay AA groups in the 1970s, something which, in part, prompted Maud’s owner Rikki Streicher to not only close the bar but declare the era of the lesbian bar over.  

I do not feel positioned to pass a moral judgement on whether or not it is “farkakte,” as Thomas puts it, to designate such bar spaces as sanctuaries. The lesbian bar evolved as a refuge because throughout much of recent history, for many women – particularly working class folks who could not afford private homes in which to gather, or access to academic institutions – the bar was the only relatively safe space available. I would venture that for many, especially outside of large, liberal, coastal cities, this holds true today. While I personally would love for communities to have access to more queer spaces that do not revolve around booze, a blanket condemnation of spaces that do rely on the sale of alcohol to keep their doors open did not fall within the scope of what I wanted this book to be.  

I am heartened by Thomas’s closing remarks that The Lesbian Bar Chronicles allows the people in these bars to share their stories in their own words. The weight and responsibility of filtering peoples’ oral histories onto the page was not lost on me, and doing this with integrity was above all else, my singular most important objective. Thomas says she cannot imagine how long she’d have to hang out in a bar to meet women like these, but the truth is, it takes very little time at all. So many of the people in this book we met purely by accident, or by kindly asking the bartender to point out the most interesting person in the room. Listening to the conversations that followed were by far the most joyful part of working on this book. These chance encounters are also a testament, I think, as to why bars – with all their flaws – were and continue to be a worthy lens through which to examine lesbian life and lesbian history in the US.