Nearly two decades have passed since that night. Bounce closed in 2017, and hundreds of other gay bars have shut down, too. Just 21 lesbian bars remain open nationwide, according to the Lesbian Bar Project. Still, Pike hasn’t forgotten what it felt like to be safe and attractive for the first time. The number of queer bars may be dwindling, but for many LGBTQ people, Pike knows, those spaces are still needed.
Early next year, Pike and partner Jo McDaniel plan to open As You Are Bar on Barracks Row in Southeast Washington. It’s one of a handful of queer spaces set to open in coming months. A group is planning a lesbian and queer “clubhouse” in Los Angeles, and an “old-school gay girl” in Norfolk plans to reopen the lesbian bar she founded four decades ago. A nonbinary performer is also raising money to open a lesbian bar in Queens. Pike and McDaniel know opening a bar during a pandemic may be risky, but they say they’ve learned one thing from years of visiting and working in other queer establishments: If they want to survive, they first have to build a better and more inclusive bar.
The gay bar was long the main, and sometimes only, space where queer people could gather. A few opened quietly in the early 1930s, then after World War II, hundreds more began serving gay men and women. By the 1980s, more than a thousand existed across the United States, according to Greggor Mattson, an Oberlin College professor who spent two years creating a database using listings from the Damron travel guide of LGBTQ-friendly spots. About 200 of those catered to lesbians.
Some, like Hershee Bar in Norfolk, opened when their states had laws that prohibited bar owners from employing gay people or creating gathering spots for them. Annette Stone, who opened Hershee as a lesbian bar in 1983, said the law emboldened police and other law enforcement agents to raid her business. One year, officers came 60 times in 90 days, Stone said. Still, Stone found a way to hold on. A judge deemed the law unconstitutional in 1991, and for years afterward, Stone hosted weddings and the occasional funeral. She mentored foster children whose parents had kicked them out, and every Thanksgiving, she threw a dinner for people whose families didn’t accept them.
By 1987, Norfolk had four or five gay bars, and the number nationwide peaked at more than 1,700. Many stayed open through the 1990s, but in the early 2000s, hundreds of gay bars started to close. Those serving lesbians and people of color were hit hardest.
A host of reasons led to their demise, Mattson said. Gentrification pushed some out of big cities, while depopulation and deindustrialization left bar owners in the Midwest unable to stay open. Still, Mattson has found two prevailing factors — the rise of dating apps and a growing acceptance of gay people.
“Gay bars were never just hookup places, but they were places to meet other LGBTQ+ people, and now that you can meet them from your bedroom or while you’re waiting for the bus, that has taken away some of gay bars’ monopoly on being the place where you find other LGBTQ+ folks,” he said.
Gay bars are also no longer the only place some queer people, especially White and cisgender men, feel safe. “I think this is highly uneven,” Mattson said, “but for gay, White, middle-class people like myself, any bar feels like a gay bar if you show up with six friends.”
Mattson has interviewed 120 bar owners in 35 states for a forthcoming book called “Who Needs Gay Bars?” and found that many endured by becoming more inclusive of the most marginalized groups. Lesbian bars, for instance, began to welcome nonbinary and trans patrons — people who may not feel as safe as cis White men do in straight bars. For some bar owners, Mattson found, that’s just economics, but for a new generation, “lesbian” and “gay” don’t capture their full and fluid identities.
Drawing on their years of bar experience — and Pike’s master’s in business administration — the couple broke ground in November on a 4,000-square-foot Capitol Hill space a few blocks from where the iconic lesbian bar Phase 1 operated for more than 40 years. (McDaniel also worked at Phase 1 before it closed in 2016.) Their bar, which they call As You Are, will be more than a nighttime party spot. They’ll have a dance floor, but they’re soundproofing it, and they’re retaining the downstairs for a cafe where people can co-work during the day or meet a date in the evening. They’re also building a room upstairs where people can play video games or watch football on Sundays.
“Our goal with that is to be family oriented,” McDaniel said. “I think people age out of the dance floor. We’ll have brunches where you can bring your kids. We might have book club meetups. Whatever your queer looks like, it belongs here.”
Pike and McDaniel know that some people think the gay bar era is over, that spaces like theirs are no longer needed, but people who say that tend to have more privilege, McDaniel said. Many trans people, for instance, have IDs with pictures and names that don’t accurately reflect them. A bouncer at a straight bar might turn them away, but the security managers at As You Are won’t.
“The people who say that are saying they don’t need them,” McDaniel said. “They feel safe going anywhere. And that’s not everybody’s experience.”
Stone, the owner of Hershee Bar in Norfolk, considers herself an “old-school gay girl,” but she’s rooting for the next generation of queer bar owners. She kept Hershee open for more than 35 years, and when Phase 1 closed in D.C., Hershee was, for a time, the oldest lesbian bar in the country. Some years were tough, Stone said. Norfolk is a Navy town, and when the Gulf War began and sailors shipped out, Stone’s bar emptied overnight. She lost customers to dating apps and breweries, but she noticed long before many others that trans patrons needed a place, too. Hershee remained a lesbian spot, but Stone put the word out, and soon the bar stools were filled with trans and nonbinary people, along with many straight cross-dressers.
“They felt safe there with us,” Stone said. “We wanted them to feel safe. We wanted to wrap our arms around them. We held on all those years, but you can’t be in it for the money. You have to be in it for the love of community.”
In nearly four decades of serving people, Stone met thousands of people who felt the way Pike did when she first stepped into Bounce all those years ago. Many still write to Stone saying they have nowhere to go, so this summer, Stone decided to reopen. She’ll have to find a new location — the city broke ground two months ago on a civic plaza at the old location — but Stone has hired an architect, and she hopes to open the new Hershee next year.
“I don’t care if I have to go there in my walker, I want us to have a safe space that we can call our own,” Stone said. “My family still needs a place to be together. And we’ll still be called a lesbian bar. I’m claiming it forever.”
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