On a freakishly warm Wednesday this past March, Dyke Lily and I went to the weekly dyke night at a DC bar called Showtime. Two years earlier, it was a scene staple, packed wall to wall. At that same communal booth, I have traded gossip and made friends who are still saved in my phone under the last name “Dykenight.” This time, we counted maybe ten people, none older than twenty-two, all looking confused. They clocked us from across the bar and hated our vibe. (I think they’d had a Zoom that afternoon and decided that if Hayden and Lily showed up, they would goad us into oncoming traffic.) After half an hour of trying to look for the bright side, we reached the awful conclusion that this mid-ass event was still the single best thing on offer for a dyke in the entire city that night. No better parties, no screenings, no culture.
A few months earlier, as a tourist in Montreal, I typed “lesbian bar” into my phone and went where it sent me: Champs, which has a neon sign inside that says, with no further explanation, ‘lesbians’. Right, I thought. Everyone inside was a McGill undergrad. If you don’t already know where to go, you can only find the place that is advertising itself to you, and that is almost never where your friends, or your would-be friends, actually are. So the bars with lesbian-themed marketing are patronized by three kinds of people: children, tourists, and losers. (I say that with love, having been all three.)
A lesbian bar used to mean a bar that dykes go to. Now it invokes a business category with a target demographic and a brand voice, and if you listen to the owners talk, you’ll hear some bullshit. In 2021, I saw a screening of The Lesbian Bar Project at the Library of Congress, a documentary made in partnership with Jägermeister, a liquor company that paid for a film about how heartbreaking it is that bars keep closing. On the panel afterward, Lisa Cannistraci, owner of Henrietta Hudson, the oldest surviving lesbian bar in the country, said some crazy shit. She had personally felt that gay marriage would be bad for her business but sat on marriage equality advocacy boards because it was the morally correct stance despite her conflicting business interests. She thought Trump would help her business because Dykes would need a place to rally when things got hard.
‘Dykes these days were kissing at Applebee’s’,
which was somehow a problem because it meant they didn’t need to go to her bar. I respected the honesty. She was describing a business that does better when we’re scared and worse when we’re free.
When so-called community institutions are doing well, it’s their business and their profits. When things aren’t doing as well, it’s our bar and our space. Here in DC, a queer bar called As You Are ran three GoFundMes in under three years, and the big one cleared $150,000; most of it went towards back rent and back taxes, that is, a Bethesda real estate firm and the DC tax office. Every dollar we raised to save a community space bought a few more months on a lease no one in the community will ever hold. We feel the downside of a place closing; we have no say over the space’s operations, and if it does well, that just means they extract our resources more sustainably.
Lesbian nightlife has always been full of lunatics. The lunatics were never the problem. The problem is that we keep asking a privately owned business to be a community center, a terrain of struggle for accessibility advocacy, a site of fully realized justice, and the place you go for a cheap beer, all at once, and then we act shocked when it can’t.
Then a little birdie (and by birdie I mean the Boston Globe Magazine) told the entire internet about a little basement lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Wink. You know the story, or listened to a podcast host tell it to you. Last Ditch required a KN95 “or better” at all times, went mask-optional on Saturdays to make rent, and our comrades in the comment section promptly told us it was now complicit in a mass-disabling event.¹ The last founder standing had spent six months living in her truck; one co-founder had decamped to clown school, yada yada.
Here’s the thing. I laughed. I love a good riff. I love a good gag. I’m going to be brave and say it: yes, I think this is very funny. But many of us didn’t need our friends at the Globe to introduce us to these characters.²
If one of the Instagram cartoonists doing Dykes to Watch Out For in this era had drawn the Last Ditch saga, it would have been a gift from God. But for some dialectical reason, we cannot yet have nice things. Within days, dudes on podcasts and Fox News had a field day, and Ted Cruz posted. The Globe sent a second reporter to karaoke night at the Last Ditch for a more sympathetic follow-up (the Boston Globe’s equivalent of an apology post with no alt text). Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds. The Globe Magazine’s average reader is the most comfortable LL Bean piece of shit in America, a woman in her fifties who looks like she could be a butch lesbian if not for her husband, and the magazine served her permission to laugh at annoying dykes.³
We have to babyproof the house, because we care if our babies die. The right leaves the bleach under the sink and the gun in the nightstand, and when one of its own goes down, it shrugs and calls it freedom. The COVID-conscious are in our coalition. They won’t be on the front lines of any revolution soon; most won’t make a Saturday DSA canvass (and interpersonal skills are, let’s say, not their tendency’s strength). They are still our people, disabled and immunocompromised people and the friends who stuck with them, and they watched the US government declare the emergency over and tell them, in effect, to stay home forever. They were abandoned, and they’re right to be furious. Disability justice is an obligation, and it means we don’t get to laugh at people anywhere Ted Cruz can hear us.
It doesn’t mean pretending they’re right about everything. If every unmasked room were a mass disabling event, all of us would have been disabled several times over since 2020. Nobody lives as if that were true, including the people demanding it, and that is the tell. Vaccines work. Masks work. A dyke bar where some people want to cruise on a Saturday is not a genocide.
Put a pin in the eugenics accusations and look at what that comment section was actually demanding: clean air and somewhere to be together. Those are public goods, and we have outsourced both to whoever is sweet enough, or dumb enough, to sign a lease.
We figured this out for water more than a century ago. After cholera, cities stopped expecting every tavern keeper to purify their own well, and we built municipal water systems, because only the public can guarantee clean water to everyone. Indoor air is the same problem. In 2023, ASHRAE, the body that writes ventilation standards, published Standard 241 on controlling infectious aerosols indoors. No one is required to meet it, and no one is paying anyone to do so. New York elected a socialist mayor on free buses and city-owned grocery stores. City-owned air is not a reach. Retrofit the schools, the clinics, the subway, and yes, the bars, and you’ve got a decade of work for sheet metal workers and electricians, and far fewer people getting sick. Until then, the immunocompromised negotiate clean air, one room and one owner at a time, which is how a demand that belongs on the floor of a statehouse ended up in the Instagram comments of a basement bar.
Marx would call bar owners something called ‘petty proprietors’.⁴ Basically: people who own one little thing, a bar or a shop, and work it themselves, wedged between big capital above them and the workers below. But a woman sleeping in her truck to pay off a small business loan, taking advice from the LGBT Chamber of Commerce, isn’t exactly living the petty-bourgeois dream. A whole host of people have taken the owner of the Last Ditch for a ride, and I am sure it’s not much fun for her right now. The answer isn’t to find better, competener ownership. The answer is no owner.
In the nineties, the Lesbian Herstory Archives bought a brownstone in Park Slope outright, and it hasn’t become Herstory itself. Nobody owns it, so nobody can fuck it up. The community should democratically own its spaces, and we should win clean air where we win every other public good: in the streets, on the doors, in union contracts, in budget hearings and in building codes, in rooms so boring nobody will ever write a viral magazine feature about them.
None of that happens unless some of us give up evenings and weekends to the dull work of building a thing and keeping it alive (bad news, considering nobody wants to work anymore). Most of us would rather not be the dyke with the spreadsheet. We want some other, more patient dyke to build the commons so we can enjoy its fruits, and that shared wish is why the commons isn’t there in most places.
My own lesbian heaven on earth is a dive where they give you a dirty look for ordering a mixed drink. No GoFundMe, no documentary, no neon sign that says lesbians, and on enough nights, enough of us are inside to make it a lesbian bar by the only definition I’ve ever accepted. It doesn’t need saving. And nobody should be asking one exhausted woman with a liquor license to be the department of public health. We have to babyproof the house. First, we have to own it.
Notes
¹ Sidebar: does anyone want to come over to my house for a mask-optional hang? It’s probably going to be a mass disabling event.
² For a Costco sample of my interior life: on this most recent September 11th, two different lesbians sent me homemade copypastas about how they want me back. One of them read:
“seeing all the commemorations today made me think about how we crashed and burned this summer 💔🔥🚒 people have their conspiracy theories about what happened 25 years ago, but i still want answers as to why you stopped talking to me. i guess it’s like those hijackers and the CIA: you just slipped through my fingers. maybe one day, you’ll reveal your reasons, the way zohran released nyc’s post-9/11 air quality records. 🫶🏼🕯️ #neverforget (me) 🕯️🫶🏼”
“Did you read the story about the COVID-conscious lesbian bar?” My sibling in communism, people on these streets are sending me “you up” texts about air quality.
³ Eddington (2025) was a documentary.
⁴ Unfortunately, Comrade Karl M. is not yet on Substack, so I’ll have to explain what that means.