I have just wrapped up an emergency meeting with the International Office of Homosexual Affairs and would like to share a statement regarding the recent incident in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
Here we go: those shenanigans, reported in a viral story by the Boston Globe, don’t represent us all. #NotAllLesbians.
But, of course, I shouldn’t be centering myself here. Nor should I be assuming knowledge in a way which reinforces oppressive hegemonic structures. So let me hold space to share the details of everything that has transpired with all you folx reading who have not had the privilege of devouring every detail of the drama already.
The story begins at the Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue, which opened up last year as a place for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends”. One of the bar’s key selling points was that it required KN-95 masks (“or better”) at all times, to accommodate the immunocompromised and the Covid-conscious. Well I say “selling points”, but a big issue with Last Ditch is it didn’t do much selling. In keeping with its values, it had an open-door policy, stating that nobody would be turned away if they couldn’t pay the cover charge, including “unhoused people”. This was very generous of them, but also a formula for losing money.
In order to try to stop hemorrhaging cash so they could continue to pay rent, the venue eventually decided to move to a mask-optional policy. This caused an uproar. A sample comment on Instagram: “I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists [sic].”
And from there the story wades deeper and deeper into “surely this isn’t real, surely this is a psyop by rightwingers who want to make the queer community look unhinged” territory. An emergency Zoom meeting was declared and lasted over three hours. A performer called Soe Noire accused Jackie Matellian, the last remaining operator of the venue (the other founders left; one so they could enrol in clown school), of shedding “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS”.
The bar was not “a safe environment nor interested in revolutionary praxis”, Noire added. Matellian, who is working four different jobs in a desperate attempt to pay off the $50,000 loan for the business, was contrite. “There’s conflict, but we just hope that there’s more repair than conflict,” she told the Globe.
Alas, it’s the conflict (and the lesbians) which has made this story go so viral. It fits squarely into a genre I will call “moderately ridiculous lefty infighting”, which is beloved by sensible centrist authors and the rightwing press. Stories of progressives leaning into all the most extreme stereotypes are guaranteed to be turned into parables of why leftists are self-absorbed drama queens who can’t get anything done. Fox News is already all over the Last Ditch drama, and Bari Weiss’s Free Press jumped on it with glee. Meanwhile, Newsweek is drawing parallels with a story about a white Jewish Philadelphia teacher who spent years presenting herself as Black and Palestinian. “The stories are different but their respective absurdity rhymes,” Newsweek writes. And by “rhymes” they mean: they are both good opportunities to attack progressives.
But while there is a lot of absurdity in the Last Ditch saga, I think it’s worth stressing that it is still ultimately a story about a woman who tried to create an inclusive space where some of the most vulnerable people in society could feel accepted. It’s easy to laugh at all the shenanigans, but the world would be a lot better if it had more people like Jackie Matellian in it: kind, well-meaning people who try to live their values. Of course, the problem with people like Matellian is that, because they are kind and well-meaning, they can sometimes tolerate too much nonsense. Narcissists who use a marginalized identity as cover for bad behaviour can find themselves drawn to places like Last Ditch because it’s the only space in which they will be indulged.
I don’t know whether going viral is going to be a boon for Last Ditch, but it’s certainly been good for the Boston Globe. The (masterfully written) piece is responsible for a surge in subscriptions this week. According to its editor, it’s the best performing story of the year and is “on pace to shatter all sorts of Globe records”.
And I think that takes us to the real moral of this story. If you want to save local news you can forget all about adopting AI or pivoting to video, the secret is pivoting to lesbians.
