The economy is killing the lesbian bar, again
Have we witnessed the end of another golden age?
Lesbian bars have been closing across the country for the past decade or so, a devastating loss for a generation of women who counted on them as an entree into gay life and a sustaining source of community.
In many big cities, there are simply none left.
These spaces were once a rite of passage, a welcoming refuge from the harassment, violence and unwelcome attention that too often follows women who love other women. Today, they are a dying subculture, a loss blamed in part on the ease of meeting people online, but also on the rising rents that are changing demographics in American cities.
When San Francisco’s Lexington Club closed, a gay mecca lost its only lesbian bar. The Lex, a beloved dive, opened in 1997 and was the last bar standing by 2014. In a Facebook post announcing the closure, owner Lila Thirkield blamed San Francisco’s changing economy for the bar’s demise, noting that increasing rent put too much pressure on her business, and her customers, who were driven out of the city by the cost of living. “It will forever live on in my heart,” Thirkield wrote, “as I’m sure it will for many of you.”
Far from the first lesbian bar to be pushed out of business, the Lexington Club joined Sisters in Philadelphia, Meow Mix in New York, and a host of other bars across the country in calling it quits. New Orleans no longer has a lesbian bar, and neither does Washington DC. Though there is no formal tally, there seem to be fewer than a dozen nationwide.
It’s quite a turnaround from the heyday of our modern lesbian bars, which peaked in the 1990s, when many of these bars opened. Yet it wasn’t the first time changing economic conditions have driven lesbian bars out of existence en masse.
Nearly a century ago, a wave of lesbian bars opened during Prohibition. Lesbian bars were part of a cultural shift towards acknowledging same-sex love. The medical literature of the early 20th century, which branded homosexuality an illness and a perversion, had the unintended consequence of also increasing awareness of same-sex attraction. A lesbian bar scene already existed in Paris, and prominent lesbians, including Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, ran intellectual salons from their home. The Well of Loneliness, the first explicitly lesbian love novel, attracted international attention as the subject of a sensational obscenity trial.
The 1230 Club and Roselle Inn in Chicago, and Mona’s 440 Club in San Francisco, all of which opened in the early 1930s, are among the earliest documented lesbian bars in the United States. But they were actually catching the end of a trend. These early bars were part of what historians call the pansy craze, which flourished in the 1920s, when gay men and women opened their own speakeasies. Some had performance spaces featuring acts that openly broke with gender norms. Openly queer performers cross-dressed, sang, and danced as beloved headliners in these clubs, and some of those artists (think Moms Mabley and Ma Rainey) remain famous today.
The pansy craze emerged from the same curiosity — and free flowing bathtub gin — that drove well-off white people to Harlem’s jazz clubs. Early lesbian bar culture flourished in speakeasies of the period. One of the more popular was Eve’s Hangout, a speakeasy and tea house in Greenwich Village, which opened in 1925. Eve Adams, the Polish Jew who ran the underground bar, greeted partygoers with this sign on the front door: “Men are admitted but not welcome.” The ladies had a free pass. Enough women flocked to these clubs, gay and straight, to spark concerns in the press about the dangers of pseudo-lesbianism, when straight women pretended to be lesbian for a thrill (the risk of becoming an actual lesbian was high on the list).
The party was short-lived. “Depression drives ladies of lesbos to normalcy!,” blared a headline from the November 16, 1931 issue of Brevities, a tabloid that covered the downtown social scene. An elegy follows. “How many of you remember the late Dolly Judge, who first banded together the Third Sex at her notorious ‘Flower Apartment’ that was situated at the corner of Gay and Christopher Streets in the Village?” asks writer Connie Lingle. It was, as she dreamily remembers, “a seraglio of specialized sex.”
Most of these bars were short-lived, as were the 1230 Club and Roselle Inn in Chicago, which lasted only until 1935. San Francisco’s first lesbian bar, though, had staying power. Mona’s 440 Club opened after the peak of the Great Depression, in 1936, and remained open for 26 years. Part of the bar’s success, however, depended on drawing in straight voyeurs, who were largely despised by the queer clientele, but nevertheless plunked down cash to watch gay people be gay at a time when homosexuality was forbidden. Another lesbian bar called Ann’s 440 Club took over Mona’s after it closed, and was soon joined by another bar that became an institution, Maud’s Study, which lasted 23 years — at the time a record run for a lesbian bar.
Lesbian bar culture never died, of course. Bars remained open in smaller cities like Buffalo throughout the Depression, with women-only establishments opening throughout the 1940s and 1950s, part of a national larger resurgence of lesbian bars in American cities. Women flooded urban areas throughout the country to work in factories, joined World War II as nurses, and generally found a new freedom because of the war.
Still, lesbian bars were a hiding place from persecution as much they were a place where gay women could meet. And they played a crucial role in lesbian culture as place to form community. A new openness and the invention of a virtual community means that lesbians have many more options today, but despite changing mores, the demand for lesbian bars continues. As the deep sadness that follows each closure suggests, we may be ripe for a resurgence of lesbian bars.
