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For lesbians the idea of having a women’s bookstore or a women’s bar was to have a place to go where you wouldn’t have guys trying to hit on you, which was commonplace in social life elsewhere.
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I mean that you would be moved to be more than just a party animal by encountering people that were there.įor women it was particularly important, dealing with sexual harassment on the job and so forth, to have a women-only space. I don’t want to say the “r” word, recruit. You can do that online, but being able to hug and cry, jump up and down and party-in a lot of ways, those spaces, although they weren’t maybe meant as “you have to be a progressive activist to come here,” they serve to bring people into the larger meeting of advocacy. People could go to their gay bar or their gay bookstore and immediately start organizing. Let’s say the Supreme Court affirms the right to marry or there’s, say, the murder of Matthew Shepard. Having discussions with people across the country-artists, musicians, activists-we all feel that having a place to go to is very important, say, when there’s a negative event, like a hate crime or a loss, or a celebration. I’m actually writing a book right now, The Disappearing L, about the vanishing of lesbian spaces. If you are young and have this online community, though, is it really that important that there be bars or bookstores or other physical spaces? There’s so much getting together in cyberspace, you don’t really need a physical site, you don’t really need a particular place to get into that serves your population, your tribe.Īnd people are coming out earlier, while they’re still in school, often before they can drive, so they’re not really making it to spaces like these. What’s intriguing is two big changes that my college students talk about. It’s really hard to reconstitute what some of these places were like.
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CLOSED GAY BARS DC WET FULL
A lot of people’s formative memories might have been in any one of these bars, or-if they weren’t in a relationship or an activist-they might have seen the full range of DC’s population there.
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When I came out the drinking age was 19, so there was much more of a floating university population, and then everything changed really quickly. But you could essentially walk to multiple places from any Metro stop. Apex in Dupont Circle was really popular for women’s nights. The Hung Jury was really popular, beginning in the mid-’80s, and closed in the early years of the twentieth century. You didn’t go there to have a cultural conversation. That was really a good place to be kinetic. Tracks, the dancefloor, really brought everyone together-even my mom went dancing with me. Women primarily had Phase 1 on Capitol Hill, The Other Side, Lost and Found, and the Pier 9, near what’s now the Nationals baseball stadium. There were two very different communities then, with far more places for gay men to congregate, including some really wonderful bars, restaurants, and clubs. It’s very generational, specific to people who came out in the seventies and eighties when, although DC was better than most states, there weren’t very many protections for gay and lesbian people. You were in a panel discussion at the Library of Congress a few weeks ago, “Lost Lesbian Spaces.” Can you explain what that loss is, exactly? She’s also a board member at the Rainbow History Project, a group chronicling LGBT history in Washington. Morris, a part-time women’s studies professor at Georgetown and GW, grew up in Bethesda and went to college at American University in the early eighties. Ī slate of gay bars and spaces, including the Hung Jury, Apex, Omega, and Remington’s, have closed in DC in the last few years, but many of the city’s lesbian spaces-Lost and Found, The Other Side, Pier 9-had closed years earlier.Įarlier this week, we spoke with historian Bonnie Morris about what the loss of gay and lesbian spaces means for DC’s LGBT community, the “mainstreaming” of gay culture, and why lesbian bars have had a tougher time than bars catering to gay men.
CLOSED GAY BARS DC WET UPGRADE
The closure turned out to be only temporary, allowing the bar to upgrade its sound system and lighting, but until it finally reopened in late March the future of one of DC’s last lesbian spaces seemed murky at best. In January, Phase 1, a lesbian bar in Capitol Hill that’s been open since 1970, appeared to close for good.