Willa Bennett, editor-in-chief of the uber-trendy fashion site Highsnobiety, will never forget the first time she went to a lesbian bar. Cubbyhole, a lively corner spot in New York’s West Village, is beloved for its kitschy decor, booming jukebox, and $2 margaritas. But she went for a different reason. She wanted to find her people.
Bennett was in college just outside of New York, and it took about an hour on the Metro North train to reach “Cubby”. She’d go into the city alone, find a seat at the bar, and sit there for hours, flipping through a magazine or writing in her notebook.
Even though she made the trip solo, she would always meet someone at Cubby. It was a room full of people she knew would accept her, no questions asked. Cubby, she says, was the “place I discovered the beauty of my queerness”.
Bennett moved to New York after graduation, and took her first role in journalism, launching the queer vertical at Seventeen. She became even more of a regular at Cubby. There is no place like it, she says, and for a sad reason: too many lesbian bars have closed. When Cubby opened in 1987, it was one of 207 lesbian bars in New York. By the time she was going there in the 2010s, there were barely two dozen of those spaces left.
Like Bennett, Krista Burton grew into herself at lesbian bars. After she came out in her early 20s and left the Mormon faith, Burton found her chosen family there. She spent her 20s making friends at lesbian bars, gossiping about hookups and dancing to Britney Spears songs.
But by 2017, Burton, a queer writer and creator of the popular blog Effing Dykes, noticed that lesbian bars were vanishing in front of her eyes. She wrote about the phenomenon for the New York Times in 2017. Things only got worse when the pandemic forced more spaces to close. A 2021 documentary, The Lesbian Bar Project, chronicled the decline of a once thriving subculture.
Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America, Burton’s first book, is a love letter to lesbian bars, and a travelogue of the 19 spots still open in the US when she wrote it. The Guardian brought Bennett and Burton together to discuss what’s lost when these spots close.
Bennett: Why did you decide to write about lesbian bars?
Burton: I wrote a piece for the New York Times in 2017 called “I want my lesbian bars back”. I just really, really missed those spaces. My agent and I talked over an idea for a book about road-tripping to each one, but we decided not to do it. Then during the pandemic, there was more media attention on it. Erica Rose and Elina Street created The Lesbian Bar project, which became a documentary produced by Lea DeLaria, and I was kicking myself. I wished I’d written the book. But then an editor at Simon & Schuster contacted my agent saying we should do it, finally. I jumped at the chance.
Whenever I travel, I try to find a lesbian bar to visit. But unless you’re in a big city, it’s pretty difficult to do that – and even the cities have few options. There are only four lesbian-specific bars in New York City, for instance. Why have so many lesbian bars closed?
There is gentrification. There is the fact that lesbians make way less money than cis men, so they don’t have as much money to go out. There are dating apps now, so you don’t need to go out to meet people. Sometimes bars are owned by a couple and the couple breaks up, and they don’t know what to do with the bar, so it just shuts down. There are succession issues; someone dies and now we don’t know who owns the bar. But I would say the main issue is gentrification. If you don’t own the building your bar is in, the landlord can say: “You know what would look cute here? Condos.”
Do you remember the first lesbian bar you went to?
The Lexington Club in San Francisco, which was an iconic bar that’s closed now. I was obsessed with it. I went to college at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, so I’d been to gay bars before, but never lesbian bars. I was 21 or 22, and my jaw was on the floor. I couldn’t believe that every person in that room also liked girls.
I went with my girlfriend at the time, and every weekend night it would be mobbed with queers. Even before I went inside, I knew it was different and special: the line into the Lexington Club was a social space in itself, where queers would be smoking, or making out, or fighting with their girlfriends. I never lived in San Francisco, but I’d visit for work a lot, and I would be so jealous of the gays who got to go there whenever they wanted.
After you started going to lesbian bars, what did you look for in one?
I love bars that are very small, have tchotchkes everywhere, and look really lived in – like Cubbyhole, in New York City. But I also love the clubs. I went to Sue Ellen’s in Dallas, which was like a lesbian Studio 54. I’d never seen a lesbian nightclub before; this place had two stories and multiple bars. It was packed both nights that I went there. When you walk in to Sue Ellen’s, you are greeted by four massive TV screens above the bar, each one playing a different Guy Fieri show. I never found out why, because I was too distracted by the dance floor: people of all ages really getting down, from young kids to old couples.
Generally, the bars I visited were so much busier than I expected them to be. You hear about the death of lesbian bars, and you might think the places would be totally empty. But it’s the complete opposite: in so many of the bars, you just could not move because there were so many people.
Cubby is such an important place for me. So that might be my favorite bar in your book. What was your favorite?
I had a couple. One of them closed in the last few weeks, and I’m crushed about it – Herz, in Mobile, Alabama. When I walked into Herz for the first time, literally every single patron – and I’m not exaggerating – every single person, including the bartender, turned around on their stools and said hello. And none of them knew me; I was a complete stranger walking into their space. I felt incredibly welcomed, and I talked to everyone that night. Herz was owned by the only two Black lesbians who ran an inclusive bar in the country. They’re in their 60s, and they wanted everyone to feel at home at Herz, so the bar had two rules: no talking politics or religion.
I also have to say the Back Door in Bloomington, Indiana. I’d get in a car and drive there right now. I’ve been out and gay for 20 years, and I’ve seen a lot of drag. I thought I’d seen it all. But I saw one of the best drag shows of my life there – all the queens were working so hard. I’ve never seen a crowd tip more. There was an actual line at the ATM during the performance, because everyone wanted to get bills for tipping the queens. The drag queens were humping the floor, doing splits, grinding on people’s faces as they threw cash at them – who knew that’s what went on in Indiana? Everyone who was there seemed to be having the greatest night of their lives, and no one stole my purse when I left it on a table for 20 minutes, filled with cash. I especially appreciated that.
Oh, and there’s one fact I love about Wild Side West, a San Francisco lesbian bar I visited. Janis Joplin was allegedly a regular, and she would play shows there.
You mention feeling welcomed at these spaces, and I’m wondering if you think that lesbian bars are inclusive of all queer people?
In my experience, even if bars just identify as a straight-up lesbian bar, they have gone out of their way to make it known that everyone is welcome. It’s both a good sentiment and good business, because then more people can spend money inside the bar.
Sometimes people I met on on the trip would tell me that the bar didn’t use to be so welcoming to people who didn’t identify as a lesbian. But that has vanished. And how do you know how someone identifies when they walk in, anyway? You can’t know just by looking at them.
That’s definitely true. On the other hand, my whole career as a fashion editor has been based off of clothes being a reflection of who a person is. How did you dress at these bars, and what did you want that to communicate to other patrons?
I did half the book dressing how I would normally go out: a tight dress, large earrings, boots with heels, lipstick, makeup, the whole thing. Very femme. Sometimes, I really stuck out looking like that.
Midway through the trip, I decided to start dressing in what I called “queer cosplay”, which was very stereotypical: a ripped sweatshirt dress, no makeup, black leggings, and Blundstones. In that outfit, I was invisible, and I moved through the crowds a bit more undetected. When I came up to interview people for the book, they knew that I spoke their language, and that I was there for the same reason they were.
What did you learn from the lesbian bars you went to in smaller cities and towns?
If you turn a space into a lesbian bar, it becomes a destination. People will travel to go to these spaces. When I was at Alibi’s in Oklahoma City, I sat next to someone who drove 100 miles just to hang out that night. I was startled by that, but the bartender said they get that all the time.
I love that, because your book is not just about these spaces, but also the people who occupy these bars. Who were some of the characters you met during the trip?
The owner of the Back Door, Smoove. They tell the dirtiest jokes I’ve ever heard in my life, and they are phenomenal. They’re so dedicated to keeping the bar open and holding events for everyone. And they have a scale for how dirty their jokes get: dad jokes are on the tamer end, “step-dad” jokes are a bit spicier, and then the dirtiest are called “the guy your mom brought home from Taco Tuesday” jokes.
Then there was Jill, the security guard at My Sister’s Room in Atlanta. She had so many lesbian-adjacent jobs. Along with doing security at the bar, she was a gym teacher, and then she played in four separate semi-pro softball leagues. She’s incredible.
It’s Pride month, and that means some young queer people are going to lesbian bars for the first time. What advice would you give them?
Number one, no one is thinking about you as hard as you are thinking about you. You might be feeling incredibly self-conscious, which is totally fine. But whatever’s in your mind as the worst case scenario is not going to happen. Also, if you want to make friends, it’s incredibly effective to just go up and say hi to someone. Don’t be afraid to be the person who approaches.
Totally, and queer spaces are a safe place to do that. There’s this new lesbian bar that just opened up in Brooklyn called the Bush. It opened after you finished your book, as have a few new spots in Portland, Chicago, and Los Angeles. How does that make you feel?
I had this joke that I’d leave town, and a lesbian bar would open up right away. I missed so many. But that gives me hope for young queers now. I was actually at the opening for the Bush. It was packed – I waited at least an hour to get in. I’ve never seen a line for a bar like that; it went down multiple city blocks.
The line itself was really fun. I kept checking out people’s fashions and making new friends while we all waited. There’s another bar next door, a bar for gamers, and the owner kept coming out and taking drink orders for us to sip while we waited. There were so many queer people out and ready to party. I think that speaks to how these spaces are still so, so needed.
There’s just this feeling that you get when you’re surrounded by an entire room full of people who are not only OK with who you are, but they fling the doors wide open for you. It’s a place where I feel celebrated, and instantly comfortable.
