And now, a new documentary short of the same name further examines the issue. To assist those bars still operating, whose needs only deepened during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Lesbian Bar Project began a fundraising campaign in 2020 to offer financial assistance. Pre-pandemic that number dwindled to 21, and at the moment there are just 15 known lesbian bars open in America, with six others still closed since the beginning of the pandemic. According to the Lesbian Bar Project, an organization and movement founded to “celebrate, support, and preserve” lesbian bars, in 1980 the United States had an estimated 200 bars for gay women. And the issue is particularly acute with lesbian bars. Over the past decade, conversation within the LGBTQ+ community has shifted to concern that too many of these queer spaces are being lost as gay bars are closing. You could even say that, to some degree, these bars aren’t just safe spaces, but sacred ones. Ask any queer person what the first “gay bar” they ever went to was and chances are you’ll get an answer quite quickly, as no one forgets that experience of entering a safe space where you can fully exhale. But aside from major historical events and depictions in media, bars for LGBTQ+ people are intensely personal places for the community, even if upon a surface level inspection they seem like any other bar, just with a queer clientele. National Monument with President Barack Obama’s signature in 2016. After all, the Stonewall Riots, the event that gave birth to the modern LGBTQ+ right movement in 1969, happened at a Greenwich Village gay bar, with said bar becoming a U.S.
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Within LGBTQ+ culture, bars are an integral part of not just fun and recreation, but also politics, community, and even art. TOP IMAGE: Owner of New York City’s the Cubbyhole Lisa Meninchino