The Decline of Lesbian Bars in the US

According to the Lesbian Bar Project, there are only about 21 lesbian bars across the United States today, as shown in the image below, which is one-tenth of the number in 1980. To examine the reasons behind the rise and fall of lesbian bars in the US, this project will mainly explore the decline in lesbian-oriented bars and investigate the factors that affect the number and culture of lesbian bars in the US.

By looking at the history of lesbian bars in the US, it's found that the first lesbian bar in the US, Mona’s 440 Club, was open in San Francisco in 1936. It marketed itself as a space “where girls can be boys” and hire singing waitresses, including ones dressed in male drag or tuxedos, as shown in the image below. As Mona’s received high popularity with its diverse entertainment and prominent performers, it promoted the opening of other lesbian bars in the neighborhood as well as in the US. Since then, bars became one of the first “collective public environments” and “coherent sociophysical settings” for the lesbian community.

During World War II, the number of lesbian (and gay) bars significantly increased especially near military bases, as people tended to complete wartime work in a homosocial environment. This forged the ideal conditions for same-sex couples to pair up and largely expanded the lesbian community in urban and town areas in the 1950s. Since homosexual acts were not decriminalized until between 1962 and 2003, many lesbian bars were consistently under the threat of being raided by the police or forced to shut down the business.

In the civil rights movements, including LGBTQ+ activism and second-wave feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s, many members in the LGBTQ+ community worked to open LGBTQ+ friendly bars themselves. This trend continued for decades and helped give rise to “the lesbian heyday” in the 1990s.

The party-positive and sex-positive atmosphere was formed in the 1990s partly due to the phenomenon that many LGBTQ+ people seek for “more fun and uplifted spaces” after experiencing the seriousness of the height of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s. Thus, lesbian bars in the 1990s were typically characterized by a “hypersexual scene” with “neon lights, female go-go dancers, and sexy outfits.” At the same time, different from the previous decades where bars were largely racially and socioeconomically segregated, lesbian bars in the 1990s also tended to have a more diverse mix of the population and became less exclusive to queer people only as well.

Sadly, the “heyday” did not last long. Starting from the 2000s, the number of lesbian bars throughout the US sharply decreased. This can also be seen from the image below showing the number of closed lesbian bars between 2006 and 2016. Among the 21 lesbian bars that still exist in the US nowadays, most of them are located in urban areas, with few in the West and Midwest of the country. According to owners of some lesbian bars, the decrease of lesbian bars may be resulted from, for example, financial difficulties brought by the pandemic, the lower capital possessed by women due to the long-standing gender wage gap, and the rise of dating apps. Through analyzing archival materials, this project will specifically assess the shut down of two lesbian bars in the US in order to investigate the factors associated with the decline of lesbian bars in the US.

The archival object being analyzed in this project is a piece of news published on Workers World Newspaper in 1982 titled as “Community mobilizes to defend NYC lesbian bars,” as shown below. The news documented that two lesbian bars in Greenwich Village in New York City, Déjà Vu and the Duchess, “have had their liquor licenses revoked by the State Liquor Authority.”

As shown in the map below, Duchess was a lesbian bar at the ground floor of 70 Grove St in Manhattan from 1972 to 1982. According to the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, its clients were “racially and economically diverse” and included “movement women” and feminists. While many early lesbian bars (usually run by Mafia) would have staff monitoring the bathroom to prevent clients from having sexual activities inside, it’s not the case in Duchess, which had a relaxing atmosphere and where people can be “home free.” While the exact location of Déjà Vu is unclear, it’s documented that it was a bar frequented “predominantly by Black and Latin lesbian,” who had been increasingly affected by police harassment since a couple months before the incident.

As reported in the newspaper, on September 8, 1982, both Duchess and Déjà Vu were “invaded by New York’s Morals Squad,” because there were complaints reporting that the bars refused to serve men alcohol and thus had “reverse discrimination against men.” On that day at Duchess, both the bartender and the doorperson were immediately arrested when they sold alcohol to undercover policewomen. After being charged with “reverse discrimination” against men by the State Liquor Authority and losing their appeals to the court, both bars lost their licenses to operate. At the end of the news, it’s also documented that the community was “angry and mobilizing to fight back” using an organized demonstration.

By combining this archival object with other sources, it’s found that being unreasonably raided and harassed by the police is never new to lesbian bars and is also part of the reasons behind the decline of lesbian bars. According to the newspaper, the use of “reverse discrimination” and overt violence not only existed in the bar business, but also “served the interests of the banks and landlords who are gentrifying everyone but the filthy rich out of this city.” Such marginalization and oppression not only work on the axes of gender and sexuality, but also race, as mentioned in Johnson’s article on “Quare” studies that we discussed in our class. In other words, people of color were disproportionately affected by the multiple systems of oppression and “violence of all forms.” This can also be shown in the archival object, as both Duchess and Déjà Vu served a racially diverse, if not predominantly Black and Latinx, population. The harassment and brutality from the policy significantly and especially damaged the business of lesbian bars, because under the police raids and “law enforcement,” lesbian bars that could survive were largely owned by Mafia or heterosexual men, as they had the way to bribe the police. In order to profit from the lesbian bars, these Mafia-own or heterosexual-male-owned bars often excluded racial minorities, required clients to pay a “cover charge,” and had “overpriced drinks.” With the long-standing gender wage gap, lesbian bars in this period gradually became an inaccessible space solely for white, working-class women.

Thus, by assessing the archival object and analyzing the historical and social context behind, it’s found that factors that posted great challenges to lesbian bars, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, included police raids and brutality, the phenomenon that Mafia and heterosexual male owned most of the lesbian bars, the long-rooted gender wage gap, and the lack of policy and legislature support. 

“Duchess / Grove / Pandora's Box.” NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. Accessed December 4, 2021. https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/the-duchess-the-grove-pandoras-box/.

“How Prohibition Encouraged Women to Drink - Jstor Daily,” accessed December 4, 2021, https://daily.jstor.org/how-prohibition-made-womens-drinking-more-acceptable/.

Johnson, E. Patrick. “‘Quare’ studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 1-25.

Lewis, Mia. “Lesbian Bars in the U.S.” ArcGIS StoryMaps. Esri, March 4, 2021. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/f52e4eadf6f445238e39c198fef1ff5e.

“LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History - National Park Service.” Accessed December 4, 2021. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/lgbtqheritage/upload/lgbtqtheme-commerce.pdf.

Rotgard, Susan. Community Mobilizes to Defend NYC Lesbian Bars. Gay Bar Subject Files, 1900-2012, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, 1982. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C2794245.

Russo, Vito. “The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies.” New York: Harper & Row, 1987.

Stegall, Gwendolyn. “A Spatial History of Lesbian Bars in New York City.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2019.

The Lesbian Bar Project. Accessed November 8, 2021. https://www.lesbianbarproject.com/.

Wolfe, Maxine. "Invisible women in invisible places: Lesbians, lesbian bars, and the social production of people/environment relationships." Architecture and Behavior 8, no. 2 (1992): 137-158.