Greggor Mattson

I’ve been reading the blog Lost Womyn’s Space for a while now, but it’s proving invaluable to track what the author ruefully calls “the Great Lesbian Bar Die Off.” You can read about my interest in lesbian bars here. It’s impossible to contact the author: the blog is anonymous, there’s no “About” section, and comments are disabled. If you’re the author, I’d love to correspond with you, even anonymously. I respect your work tremendously.

If you’re not yet a reader, here’s my tabulation of lesbian bar closures since 2006 based almost completely on information from Lost Womyn’s Space. Please send corrections/additions!

Sometimes the exact year of closure is difficult to determine; listed years are probably correct +-1. As Lost Womyn’s Space is at great pains to point out, many of these bars may have started as lesbian bars but become mixed over time, so these dates when the bar physically closed may be years later than the time when the patronage was majority women. When a rebranding of a bar indicated it was mixed, or mixed gay and straight, I marked it as the end of a lesbian bar. As I’ve described in one of my academic articles, the only way to really know is by regularly going to a bar, and even then, a bar can simultaneously be a lesbian bar on Friday and Saturday but be mostly men the rest of the week (bars that hold a ladies’ night once a week aren’t counted as lesbian bars unless LWS notes that they also supported lesbian institutions through fundraisers).

Autostraddle profiled the creativity of the names of these bars; these are only the bars that disappeared in the last decade. Multiple names indicate that another lesbian bar took the place of an old one. I’ve tried to indicate bars with majority POC patronage. In the city category, I’m ambivalent about designating them as located in metropolitan areas or in their specific city; any comments welcome. And lastly, for many entries I haven’t yet determined how many other lesbian bars existed in the city at the time of closure. The same number entered multiple times for the same city indicates that another bar opened in a different location as one closed.

Again, I welcome all corrections, comments, critiques, and any contact from the amazing author of Lost Womyn’s Space.