'Our Playground':
A love letter to lesbian bars
Photo: Courtesy of Doc Marie's
Photo: Tracy Conoboy
Photo: Courtesy of Doc Marie's
Christa Suppan was just looking for a place to dance. But wherever she and her girlfriend went, they were met with the same stares from a man assuming their presence, or their relationship, was somehow for his benefit.
“We’re not welcome here” became an ever-present thought during nights out.
There were plenty of bars in town, but none where queer women like Suppan felt fully comfortable. Nowhere to dance without being watched. Nowhere to flirt, kiss or simply exist without being acutely aware of their surroundings.
Eventually, Suppan stopped looking for the right place and decided to build it herself.
In 2002, she and Jonda Valentine opened The Lipstick Lounge in Nashville, Tennessee imagining it as a haven not just for themselves, but for anyone trying to carve out space in rooms never built for them. A place where queer women and nonbinary and trans people could show up fully, without compromise. A place where, as Suppan puts it, “we get to call the shots.”
On opening night, the line stretched around the block.
What started as a “selfish endeavor” quickly grew into something much larger — a sanctuary in a city and a culture that often still centers nightlife around men.
“The boys have their bars, and the straight people have theirs,” Suppan said. “This is our playground.”
The impact has traveled far beyond Nashville.
Suppan’s family always jokes that no matter where they go, someone will know her. At a Mexican resort, she spotted two Italian tourists wearing matching Lipstick Lounge hats. On a Disney Cruise, a man noticed her Lipstick Lounge shirt and told her, unaware she was the owner, that his wife and daughter described it as “the best place they’d ever been.”
While she appreciates the thanks, it’s not why she keeps going.
“The truth is, there aren’t a whole lot of places in this world where I feel 100% comfortable,” she said. “To have that one sacred space? That’s everything.”
Lesbian bars are more than just places to drink or dance. The joy, community and liberation felt in lesbian bars offer a reprieve from a world where queer women specifically are still underrepresented and fetishized, intrinsically making them spaces of resistance.
“The thing about coming out is that, inherently, it's a loss of privilege,” Olga Bichko shared. “We trade a certain amount of privilege for the ability to live authentically; that's kind of the deal.”
When Bichko turned 21, just a year after coming out, she celebrated at Cubbyhole, a lesbian bar in New York City.
“It was as if that loss of privilege didn't happen. It was as if it was still just normal and the world was, it's like an alternate reality, where the world reflects our lived existence,” Bichko said.
Bichko hopes to recreate that feeling at Doc Marie’s, Portland, Oregon’s first lesbian bar in more than a decade, which she opened in 2022.
Snapshots from Doc Marie’s in Portland.
Lesbian bars reached their peak in the 1980s, with approximately 200 across the United States, the Lesbian Bar Project reported. At the time of the project’s 2021 documentary, only 21 remained.
Bichko appreciated that the documentary brought lesbian bars mainstream attention, but noticed something missing from the wider conversation: “nuance, history and actual reality.”
Modern conversation about lesbian bars centers around safe spaces. While these bars have always offered queer people a place to “feel not abnormal,” as Kira Deshler, author of the Paging Dr. Lesbian newsletter described it, the reality of the 20th century was far from safe.
Author and activist Joan Nestle called Greenwich Village’s the Sea Colony her home in the mid-20th century. The bar stood beside the Women’s House of Detention, where women arrested during police raids of LGBTQ bars would be sent.
Like many lesbian bars of the time, The Sea Colony was mafia-run. A red light would flash as a warning: stop touching. A cop was coming in for his payoff. A huge wad of cash would unashamedly change hands — a sum for safety that was never guaranteed.
Even if police raids were avoided, every part of life in the bar was policed. There was not only a bouncer at the front door, but also at the bathroom door. Only one patron could enter at a time and each was given an allotted amount of toilet paper. The patrons were not even free in their most basic bodily functions.
Still, to Nestle, the community found in the bar kept her there.
“It was the juxtaposition of the state hatred of us, the state humiliation of us and the glory we gave each other in touch,” she said.
For others, the indignities of the bar were harder to bear.
“[Lesbian bars] were oppressive. No matter how you tried to carve a place for yourself, you were always surveilled,” said Flavia Rando, activist and an art historian who has taught lesbian, women’s and queer studies for over 30 years. “You had to be very strong … to withstand that kind of treatment and still think well of yourself.”
Rando’s first attempt to enter a lesbian bar ended before it began. Wearing slacks, the bouncer turned her away at the door. She was informed that the bar was the subject of a police raid the previous night, so the bar was only allowing in women wearing skirts. At the time, the "three-article rule" legally required women to wear at least three pieces of “female” clothing.
Instead, Rando found her place at women’s dances hosted by the Gay Liberation Front and Radicalesbians.
Even when their venue had a gaping hole in the floor, even when they were threatened by armed gangsters, they still danced.
Whether in mafia-run bars or activist-run dances, the modern dialogue lamenting the loss of lesbian bars and safe spaces could not occur without the lesbians and queer folks who paved the way.
“The modern bar, which I understand, is a place of refuge for many, would not exist in that form,” Rando said. “We fought every step. Every incremental step had to be fought for.”
Listen to learn more about Nestle, the Sea Colony and what modern queer folks can learn from the past.
“If somebody tells you that they weren't scared when they opened up their own business, they're one of two things,” Suppan jokes. “They're either a liar or they're ignorant.”
Bichko is often asked why there are so few lesbian bars in the U.S. To her, the answer could not be clearer: “This country hates women.”
“Any time a woman does something, she is unbelievably highly scrutinized for every step of it,” Bichko said. “If she succeeds, she's a witch. If she fails, then, of course, she failed. She's stupid.”
Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor shows that only half of small businesses will survive more than five years. Banks will not be swayed by a “cool concept,” Suppan said. Historically, women could not get a bank loan without a male co-signer, a legal barrier that wasn’t lifted until 1988 with the Women’s Business Ownership Act.
For lesbian bar owners, the obstacles multiply. Many represent intersecting marginalized identities: queer, women, people of color, transgender.
“You sit down in front of a cis white man, no matter how you appear differently from them, and they're going to question whether or not you deserve this,” said Whitney LaMora, co-owner of Dorothy in Chicago.
Opening Dorothy required more than just money and a good idea. It was about finding a space, fixing plumbing, hiring staff and acquiring all the right licenses. LaMora credits her wife and co-owner, Zoe Schor, with providing the necessary skills for bar ownership. Without that knowledge, the possibility of opening a bar would have been next to impossible.
In 2023, the couple held their wedding reception at Dorothy, LaMora’s favorite memory at their shared space.
Malia Spanyol opened Mother two years ago in San Francisco’s Mission District. Before opening, Spanyol asked herself if a lesbian-centric space was still needed in a world where “people are out” and representation is “everywhere.”
“We were getting beaten up in the street,” she, now 55, recalls of her youth. Her lesbian spaces were about safety as much as they were about community. She frequented the Lexington Club, a lesbian dive bar in the Mission District; it’s where she “grew up.” The iconic spot closed its doors in 2015, citing unsustainable rent increases.
It was her time at “The Lex” that inspired Spanyol to fill the gap of her former home. Even if representation has grown in the past decades, queer people remain “hypervigilant.” She hopes Mother stands as a place where peace of mind is possible.
Spanyol jokes that “the old dykes don’t go out.” Many of the queer haunts she once frequented are gone. For her, Mother acts as “a love letter to the queer youth, ” a chance to rebuild the spaces of her past.
Dorothy was not originally going to be a lesbian bar. First opening in February 2020, the 1970s-inspired cocktail lounge always carried queer roots with its name, drawing on the popular gay code “Friend of Dorothy.” The bar planned to have “lesbian nights” on weekends — unusual compared to straight bars which, LaMora noticed, typically schedule lesbian events on slower weeknights.
But during the 2020 lockdown, LaMora and Schor noticed a surge of people exploring their queer identities. They wanted Dorothy to be a place where people could continue to find themselves.
For Val Binkley, that kind of space was exactly what she needed. Working at Tulsa’s Yellow Brick Road gave her the strength to confront years of uncertainty. Her first relationship with a woman was abusive, and growing up “smack dab” in the middle of the Bible Belt left her with religious trauma to work through.
At Yellow Brick Road, Binkley finally found the community — and language — to call herself a lesbian.
A collection of bathroom stall graffiti inside Yellow Brick Road.
“I'd spent 35 years not knowing who I was,” Binkley said. “At Yellow Brick Road, I'm around queer women, all day, every day.”
It was the acceptance she got from the community that ultimately helped her accept herself.
On a packed Friday night at Mother, a DJ blasts Bad Bunny. A green meadow with running hoses takes over the screen on the bar’s back wall, proclaiming “Trans Dykes Belong Here.” While the crowd, of course, has lesbians, people of all genders and sexualities mingle on the couches and crowd the bar.
A number of self-proclaimed queer bars have opened, and while they may be lesbian-focused, they avoid that label for purposes of inclusivity, Deshler said.
“I take issue with the idea that the word lesbian, or the identity of lesbian, is inherently exclusive,” Deshler said.
She notes that lesbianism has always included trans and nonbinary individuals, regardless of whether they were able to identify that way at the time.
Nestle remembers Esther, a person with whom she had an affair at the Sea Colony in the ’60s and the muse of her essay "Esther’s Story." At the time of publication in 1987, Nestle wrote about Esther with she/her pronouns. Looking back, Nestle wonders whether Esther would have identified otherwise, given the opportunity.
Esther worked as a taxi driver and needed clients to perceive the person behind the wheel as a man. Even if they did not have the same language as today, Nestle understands that there were trans individuals present in the bar.
“For so long, we were the same community,” Nestle said of lesbians and transgender people. “We suffered the same fates, we were put in the same prisons.”
Nestle co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1974 to document lesbian history at risk of disappearing. It was imperative to Nestle that the Archives always included trans people, queer people and sex workers — the people that “stood with me,” she says, at the Sea Colony. Her life’s politics and identity were formed by the people who occupied the small Greenwich Village space night after night.
To her, the best way for modern bars to pay homage to the people who fought before them is to “create inclusive spaces where love is honored.”
Binkley is the first lesbian manager of Yellow Brick Road in more than a decade, and the role has brought a renewed focus on creating community to the space.
“If you're not leading a queer life, you don't understand some of the things that need to be taken on,” Binkley said. “Being a queer person, our entire lives are, unfortunately, political.”
There is no one way forward for lesbian bars because much as queer women themselves, the bars are not a monolith. As Bichko explains, lesbian bars cannot be treated as one entity just because they are queer women-focused spaces. Her bar in Portland serves a different purpose than Yellow Brick Road in Tulsa, for example.
Of course, people want to see more lesbian-centric spaces open. But Binkley is not going to wait and hope; all she can do is focus on making Yellow Brick Road the safest space for all. She can only control so much in a world filled with uncertainty. But she can turn up Chappell Roan and hope that quiets the outside noise, even just for a night.
Explore America's last lesbian bars. Based on the Lesbian Bar Project's list.