Yelling at them to leave because they were women
For some completely mystifying unfathomable reason, there are not many lesbian bars any more.
Rachel and Sheila Smallman spent the summer of 2016 traveling the Gulf Coast, trying to find the best place to open a lesbian bar.
There were queer bars along the coast, but they largely catered to cisgender gay men. The Smallmans visited at least five cities in four states.
Why does PBS say “cisgender”? Can we not just take that as read now? Wouldn’t “gay men” have done the job perfectly well? Would any reader be wondering if they meant trans men too?
On one night, the Smallmans met a friend at a New Orleans gay bar. They were there for about three minutes before some of the patrons and employees started yelling at them to leave because they were women. The couple and their friend hadn’t even had a chance to order a drink.
There you go. No women allowed in gay bars, and there are no lesbian bars, so hahaha wims sucks to be you.
That night strengthened Rachel and Sheila’s resolve to open their own lesbian bar. On Oct. 4, 2019, the Smallmans opened Herz in Mobile, Alabama, turning a straight dive bar into the only women-centered queer bar in the city. The only lesbian bar in Alabama. And one of four lesbian bars in the South.
But when you say “women-centered” do you mean cis women? Well DO you?
he number of lesbian bars has decreased in the past few decades to just 21, according to the Lesbian Bar Project, a collective launched by filmmakers Erica Rose and Elina Street to raise awareness and help the remaining bars survive the COVID-19 pandemic. That number is a drop from the more than 200 lesbian bars in the late 1980s, according to a 2019 report from Greggor Mattson, an associate sociology professor at Oberlin College.
See, back in the late 80s, people still thought women were acceptable. Now everybody knows they’re all terfs or Karens or both.
When the “dramatic decline” in lesbian bars began, the fastest-growing type of LGBTQ bar were those where men and women socialized together. The reasons behind that shift need more research, Mattson said.
Later, “as transgender issues became more prominent, and we began to recognize genderqueer and gender nonbinary folks, bars that seemed to be open to all genders became the dominant kind of LGBTQ+ space,” Mattson said.
That way lesbians get the golden opportunity to be called cis scum by men who identify as women.
It sounds to me like vetting patrons is a bad business strategy. Of course no one wants a bar full of belligerent troublemakers, but other than that, why turn away paying customers? The in-grouping seems narrow minded. Even if a bar catered to a specific category of people, why would they not let the customers decide according to their own comfort levels whether to go there or not? If people are so insecure about their own identities that they need to be surrounded by only people of their own persuasion, skin color, sexual preference, or whatever, then maybe they shouldn’t go to bars at all until they are adequately socialized and can cope with otherness.
One of the main problems with the trans cult is that they are highly discriminatory, though they would have everyone believe the opposite. Inclusive either works both ways or it doesn’t work at all.
“bars that seem open to all genders”, so, like, most bars?
But are these bars open to otters? Even otters that were assigned human at birth?
Service transotters only…
@1 I think you might be missing why lesbian bars are a valuable community resource. First, women can and should feel like they can go to lesbian bars with approaching 100% certainty that they will not be hit on by men, with all the attendant stress, unpleasantness and risk that that might entail. Second, lesbians can and should feel like they can go to lesbian bars and feel comfortable approaching women who can, of course, decline to connect if they choose to but won’t be horrified or upset about being approached by a woman.
‘why would they not let the customers decide according to their own comfort levels whether to go there or not?’ Plenty of men would be very comfortable in a mostly-female environment. They might even find it enjoyable to make lesbians uncomfortable by trying to pick them up, or consider it a challenge to ‘pull’ a lesbian. A lesbian bar that accepted men as part of their clientele would quickly lose their ‘target market’.
The documentary ‘Last Call at Maud’s’ told of an historic Lesbian bar in San Francisco, one old enough that it had to have male bartenders for several years because it was still illegal for women to work behind the bar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Call_at_Maud%27s
A subtext in the story of the patrons was the tension between the huge importance of the bar as a center of community, and the devastation of alcoholism in the same community. Maud’s’ patronage (‘matronage’) dried up because so many members did.