“I think we have an inherent human need to gather and form connections with people that are like us, particularly as a non-majority group,” says Rachel Karp. “As long as queer people are not the majority, I think there will be a desire and a need for in-person queer spaces.”

Karp, co-producer of the podcast Cruising, is the author of the forthcoming The Lesbian Bar Chronicles, which profiles many of the approximately thirty or so remaining lesbian bars in the United States. The 30-year-old recalls how the podcast and book were both inspired by news reports during the COVID pandemic about the closure of bars and restaurants that were unable to keep operating due to government-mandated lockdowns.

She had been talking about starting a podcast with her childhood friend, Sarah Gabrielli, and her then-girlfriend (now wife) Jen McGinity. “On New Year’s Eve going into 2021, I had been reading a couple of articles about how few lesbian bars there were [left in the United States],” Karp recalls. “I turned to Sarah and Jen and was like, ‘Oh my god, guys, what if that’s our podcast? We could go to all the bars and we could interview people. We know how amazing our own local lesbian bars are. We know the wild stories that we’ve heard in our own local lesbian bars from regulars and bartenders and owners. What if we capture that across the country?'”

The project seemed like a pipe dream at first, but as lockdowns ended, vaccination rates rose, and businesses began operating full-time again, the Brooklyn-based trio set out on a cross-country quest to visit all the known lesbian bars and nightclubs in America. From the interviews they collected with staff, owners, and community members in each city they visited, they created the Cruising podcast, which chronicles the history and stories of the few remaining lesbian-centric nightlife spaces. The success of the podcast then prompted Karp to write a book about the people they met and the bars that she, McGinity, and Gabrielli visited during their road trip, with each chapter focusing on a different venue.

Throughout much of her life, Karp has found herself in LGBTQ-friendly or accepting spaces. She grew up in Acton, Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage had been legalized a decade prior to her high school graduation, which occurred a year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act. Although she was closeted in high school, she and Gabrielli came out to one another privately and bonded in the suburbs of Boston. Her family has been extremely accepting — in fact, she has a transgender brother and a queer younger sister.

Karp attended Skidmore College, a small liberal arts school in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where she studied English and theater, and encountered other LGBTQ students. Her freshman-year resident assistant was the first person to introduce her to a lesbian bar. After graduating, Karp moved to Brooklyn, settling in LGBTQ-friendly East Williamsburg, where she met McGinity, 16 years her senior, on her first night in the city.

“I feel like any bar that I go to in Brooklyn is a little bit queer,” Karp says. “I can get a little culture shock in really straight spaces.”

One recent instance of culture shock occurred when Karp spent a weekend in Pompano Beach, Florida, visiting McGinity’s grandparents. Despite its proximity to Fort Lauderdale, the couple found themselves surrounded by heterosexuals and far away from explicitly LGBTQ surroundings.

“It felt very different from what I’m used to,” Karp says. “It makes you crave queer space a little bit. Coming back to Brooklyn, I was like, ‘We’ve got to go to Ginger’s. I miss the lesbians.'”

The experience of returning to predominantly straight spaces, even temporarily, made Karp reflect on her luck and privilege living in one of the country’s major cities, where there are a variety of lesbian-targeted “pop-up” parties or venues that serve as community gathering spaces. It makes her appreciate her situation, especially at a time when the sheer number of lesbian bars is low and sapphic watering holes often teeter on the edge of closure. But even if brick-and-mortar venues continue to decline, Karp is largely confident that lesbian-centric gatherings will not completely disappear.

“Bars in general are closing right now, but there’s always an ebb and flow to it,” she says. “We definitely have these moments of highs and lows in terms of the number of spaces. Sometimes it feels like, ‘Oh, my god, they’re all disappearing.’ But I personally don’t think they ever will.”

METRO WEEKLY: Let’s talk about your coming out process and what it was like.

RACHEL KARP: I think that, on some level, I have always known that I am queer, that I’m a lesbian. And as is a common experience for a lot of young people figuring out their sexuality, I first came out as bi and was able to recognize my attraction for women, but was still in denial. I had boyfriends in high school — I was trying it out. I think that having a boyfriend gave me some social safety, some security to acknowledge my attraction for women as well, because it was like, “Oh, yeah. I’m into women, but I have a boyfriend, so don’t worry, I’m not into you.”

I don’t remember exactly when Sarah and I first acknowledged that we were both bi, that we were both attracted to women. I think it was probably somewhere around sophomore year of high school.

The first time that Sarah and I both came out to our circle of friends in high school, at the same time, was at a sleepover party where we were playing a game we called “The Question Game,” which was like somebody put a question in a hat and then everyone went around and answered it. And I think the question was, “What’s your sexual orientation?” I think one of us put it in the hat to prompt the conversation. And so when it got around the circle, we both were like, “I’m bi.” So that was my first “coming out” to friends. And then, by my senior year, I was like, “I actually am not interested in men. I’m going to stop dating them.” I don’t know if I was using the term “lesbian” yet. When I got to college, I was more open about being gay and owning that from the jump. I think I told my parents the summer before my freshman year of college, and they were like, “Okay, cool.” So it was kind of a non-moment.

MW: You’ve used the words queer, lesbian, and gay interchangeably. What terms do you personally use to identify yourself?

KARP: All the words. All the words I’m good with are lesbian, gay, queer. I’m a cis woman.

MW: Is there a pushback in the lesbian community over the word queer the way there is among older members of the gay community?

KARP: I love the word queer. I think my generation really has reclaimed and is embracing that term. I love that it’s inclusive — and I love that it’s somewhat political as well. Particularly in meeting and talking with older folks for the book and the podcast, I have met a lot of people who are uncomfortable with the term. So I am definitely very careful about labeling other people as queer, particularly older folks, without hearing from them that they self-identify with that word.

Some older folks are like, “Yeah. Queer, I love it. Reclaim it.” I definitely find myself code-switching a little bit, depending on who I’m talking to, with queer. And then we’ve noticed some interesting trends around the word lesbian. I think that when we first started the podcast in 2021, lesbian had a little bit more of an association with TERFiness and radical feminism and trans-exclusion. And over the course of the last five years, there have been a lot more gender-nonconforming people, trans women claiming the word lesbian strongly, which I think is amazing.

I think some people see it now as a more gender-expansive and gender-inclusive term, which I think is great. And then another word we’ve seen really rise in popularity is dyke, which feels like an even more gender-expansive version of lesbian and more political version of lesbian. So I like dyke, too. I self-identify with dyke as well. And then sapphic, which feels like more of an umbrella term, which I’m also cool with.

MW: You mentioned some of these identity labels as being political. They’re often used as wedge issues in political campaigns. How do you feel about the relationship between queer identity and politics?

KARP: I think that being queer is political. I think being anything outside of the status quo is inherently political. You could say that we live in an age where you can be gay and separate yourself from politics, I guess, in theory. But if you spend any time with queer history, you kind of see that, until extremely, extremely recently, being queer was extremely political. So yeah, I don’t know. Being queer to me feels political, in addition to just who I am.

MW: How do you think the current political climate affects the viability of not only lesbian spaces, but queer spaces more broadly?

KARP: I think that in more conservative political eras, like the one we’re in right now, the community feels a stronger need for the queer spaces, and that increases support for queer spaces. But at the same time, there’s more barriers for queer spaces, especially in the South and states that are introducing drag bans and anti-drag legislation. That’s really affecting bars. I think it’s affecting the legal logistics for bar owners. I can’t say this for certain, but anecdotally, we have not heard that it is affecting patronage.

We talked to the owner of Frankie’s in Oklahoma City — Oklahoma has some of the worst anti-drag laws — and she was saying that they’re very concerned about these anti-drag laws that criminalize drag basically in any space where minors might be present. So it’s not necessarily an issue for the 21-plus bar, but very concerning in terms of thinking about the safety of patrons coming to the bar in drag and maybe stopping to get a soda at a gas station. And maybe there’s a kid there. And is that a “drag performance”? It gets messy in terms of how the law is enforced.

But [the owner of Frankie’s] said that they have not seen a downtick in patronage at the bar and that, if anything, there is this new, younger generation that is coming out in droves and wanting to participate in drag and perform and come watch the shows. So that gives me a little bit of hope.

MW: Do you feel there’s a little more anonymity or secretiveness when it comes to lesbian spaces compared to gay spaces? Because gay spaces certainly started out covertly, as more underground spaces, or down the unlit alleyways, and now have moved to the main street and are highly visible, especially in bigger cities.

KARP: I think, at least in more progressive areas like blue states and cities, lesbian bars have followed a very similar trend. And in a number of interviews, we’ve heard the older generation of bar-owners, who opened their lesbian bars in the ’80s and ’90s, talk about wanting windows, wanting rainbow flags, wanting to be on the main street because the bars they grew up in were, like you said, in dark alleyways and underground and largely invisible. In more conservative areas, some of the bars we went to in Oklahoma, in Alabama, are still not necessarily underground or in the back alley, but they’re not flying rainbow flags outside, necessarily.

MW: Do you have a favorite bar of the ones that you profiled in the book?

KARP: It’s such a hard question. I love them all. I love them all equally. Ginger’s is my home bar. It’s right up the street, so I spend the most time there and I love it. It’s very near and dear to my heart. And then I always say Wild Side West in San Francisco. It’s just aesthetically such a cool space with such a cool history. It’s really kind of an eclectic neighborhood bar these days, and it’s a lot of fun.

MW: Was there any place where the business model, or what the management team was doing, stood out to you as unique or made you say oh my god, that’s a genius idea?

KARP: The Sports Bra in Portland, Oregon. It’s the first women’s sports bar in the world, and there’s just been a huge rise in women’s sports bars since they opened. Jenny, the founder, is a business lady. She’s got the business model down and she’s franchising. I think what she’s doing is amazing.

MW: Was there a place where the experience was negative for you?

KARP: We didn’t personally have any bad experiences at the bars, but I will say that I think Blush & Blu in Denver, not to name names, is an example of what can go wrong with a bar’s business model. And I’ll leave it at that for now.

MW: In the foreword of your book, you mention that there are myriad reasons why lesbian bars are on the decline. What specifically are the factors contributing to the dearth of lesbian bars, at least compared to the number of predominantly gay establishments?

KARP: There are a bunch of factors — it’s hard to pinpoint one thing. A couple of them are gentrification, which also affects gay male spaces. We see that across the board in queer spaces. And it’s a little bit more nuanced than just, like, “Oh, the neighborhood’s getting expensive and bars can’t keep up.” I think we see this pattern of queer spaces opening on the fringes of communities, in the dark alleyway or the empty warehouse. And then, as queer spaces become cool, those neighborhoods become cool.

And now you have neighborhoods like Seattle’s Capitol Hill, which, when The Wild Rose opened, was totally desolate. They were one of the first queer businesses in the neighborhood, and now it’s like the most expensive, sought-after neighborhood in the city. So that leads to a lot of queer spaces getting priced out and pushed out if they don’t either have really good, long leases or own the buildings.

There’s also — if we’re looking specifically at why there are fewer lesbian bars than gay male bars — some stereotypes that are somewhat rooted in truth. Not always true across the board, but there’s some truth to them, which is that, on average, women drink less than men, just physically. Lesbians are known for U-Hauling and settling down and not going out anymore. On average, they’re more likely to have kids and stop going out to the bars. And there’s a little bit less, I think, of a party and hookup culture. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. It totally exists — I’ve seen it, experienced it — but it’s a little bit less central to the experience, which all kind of leads to the bars having a harder time making what they need to stay open.

MW: There’s also a lot of red tape involved with opening and operating a bar, and with permitting. You also hear owners and managers say, “Grindr and Scruff and Sniffies have just ruined the gay bar scene.” What are the equivalent reasons for why lesbian bars have difficulty staying open?

KARP: That’s another thing that I should’ve mentioned: online space and community. Social media and apps like Lex, Tinder, and Bumble make the lesbian bar, the gay bar, the queer bar less essential than it used to be. People always used to say, for lesbians, you had to either go to the bar or the softball fields if you wanted to meet another lesbian. And that’s not true anymore. But I also think, particularly in the last couple of years, we’ve seen a real yearning for IRL [in real life] space again.

I do think that “The internet killed the queer bar” is a little bit of an excuse. It may have played a role. But I also think people still like to gather in person. And whether queer or not, opening a bar is so hard. It’s a business of such small margins. Even straight bars close all the time because it’s hard to stay in the green and keep it going, especially now. People are drinking a lot less, which is healthy and good. But I think we should also have non-bar spaces, third spaces, I think.

MW: There was recently a story about the closure of The Pearl, a lesbian bar in Denver. And I remember reading that it took over another bar’s space and initially started as a pop-up party. Are pop-ups serving as a kind of proving ground for bars becoming full-time brick-and-mortar places?

KARP: I don’t know. I’m sure for some people, some organizers, it potentially is. But I also think that there’s a lot of event organizers and groups out there that are just happy to run these pop-up parties. It is, in some ways, a more sustainable model. You don’t have the same overhead. You just get to pop into an existing venue, and bring them a bunch of business for one night, and maybe collect a cover charge. I think it’s also a good model for community-making.

There’s a big lesbian pop-up party scene in a lot of cities, like Los Angeles. L.A. has Honey’s, which is, I think, only open on weekends. It kind of is like a pseudo pop-up party space. L.A. doesn’t really have a dedicated brick-and-mortar, always-open lesbian bar, but they have a huge lesbian party scene. That’s also true a little bit in New York. We do have a handful of lesbian bars, but a big party scene, including takeovers of other bars and clubs on specific nights.

MW: Your book is divided into geographic sections, focusing on East Coast bars, Midwestern, and Western bars. And you sort of connect them to an overarching theme before delving into the individual stories or histories. As you traveled to various lesbian bars across the United States, what stood out to you in terms of differences between geographic regions?

KARP: I think a really big historic difference between the East Coast and the West Coast is that, once you start digging into the history, most of the lesbian bars and queer spaces on the East Coast were, in general, mafia-run. That is not the case on the West Coast, just because the presence of the mafia was different on the West Coast, and also because of the way that liquor laws developed and liquor licenses were granted.

On a related tangent, one thing I like to mention about lesbian bars, specifically, and why, throughout all of history, there have been fewer lesbian bars than gay male bars is related to the fact that women couldn’t get a line of credit without a man until the 1970s. So that made it hard to start a business. And pre-1970s, I think any lesbian bar that was run by a woman also had a man backing it financially. So there was definitely financial security with having a business relationship with straight men, or with the mafia, which was interested in profiting off of these spaces.

Another thing that surprised me from our trip was just how many lesbian bars there are in the South, in the Deep South. I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising because they feel more essential in red states and more conservative areas. But that was really cool to see and experience, because in a lot of these more conservative areas, and particularly in the Deep South, the bars are more clung to as the only sanctuary space or one of the few sanctuary spaces available.

MW: Do you find that in the South, the bars serve as hubs for a community that expands far beyond the immediate metro area, in terms of the clientele they attract?

KARP: Definitely. Yeah. And not just in the South. I think just in general, in more conservative states and small, more rural or less densely-populated areas. People will travel to go to the bar. There’s a bar that we covered in Bloomington, Indiana — The Back Door — that’s like the only queer space in a 50-mile radius. And the owner was telling us that, “Yeah, people drive like two, three hours to come visit this bar because it’s just the only choice.”

MW: Does having a choice sometimes spoil the bar experience? For example, do places with more bar or nightclub options end up cannibalizing each other and stealing each other’s customers?

KARP: I don’t think so. I’m just like, “We should have all the spaces. We should have more than one.” In New York, there’s four spaces that we covered in the book. There’s even more open today. And I don’t think that they’re really competing for business, because there’s so many people here. There’s enough people in the community to give business to all the spaces. With lesbians, we still don’t have enough bars to cannibalize each other. We have like six bars in New York throughout all of the boroughs, maybe.

MW: Do the lesbian bars in smaller towns or cities where there are fewer options foster a more inclusive environment between subsets of the lesbian community?

KARP: I think in smaller cities or more rural areas, they definitely foster a more diverse community. But I also think I should say that the idea of a lesbian-exclusive bar doesn’t exist anymore. I think it only really existed for a flash in the history of lesbian bars in general, but that’s a separate point. But across the board, in smaller towns and cities and larger cities, these lesbian, dyke, sapphic-centric bars are welcoming to the entire queer community.

MW: I want to follow up on that, because one of the much-debated issues we hear about is the idea of trans-inclusivity or exclusivity when it comes to traditionally women’s spaces. Do you feel there are still spaces that are trans-exclusive or a little more TERFy than the modern-day lesbian bar?

KARP: It’s not something that I’ve seen in any of the bars that we’ve covered. I think every formal lesbian bar that exists today makes a concerted effort to be trans-inclusive, and I think that is how it should be. I’ve also never seen it be an issue in person. I really think these trans-exclusionary lesbian spaces mainly exist on the Internet. Maybe they exist in real life, and it’s just so far removed from the circles that I choose to participate in that I don’t even know where to find them, but I see the discourse around it play out online so much more frequently than I see it happen in real life.

And that is not to invalidate or discredit the experience of trans women and trans people in lesbian bars. I’m sure that there are individual experiences of transphobia in lesbian bars that happen more frequently than I would like them to happen. But at the bar policy, ownership level, the intention is to foster inclusion at every space I’ve ever been to.

MW: What was something that surprised you or that you weren’t expecting to find during your journey?

KARP: Something that surprised me throughout the trip is how recent the history of criminalization of queerness is. There are different laws that we’ve seen throughout history that were used to criminalize lesbianism, queer women, especially butch and gender-nonconforming queer women. There were masquerading laws that were used to criminalize queer women for wearing pants or more masculine attire. There was a history of police raids of lesbian bars, and rules that bars had historically about not being able to dance or not being able to touch one another, because you could be arrested for dancing with another woman or touching another woman in a bar.

I’m not totally clear on what actual law was being used to charge people with that — I think maybe it was like disorderly conduct or obscenity. Those are two types of laws that, throughout history, have been used to criminalize women carte blanche. But that era of criminalization is really not that long ago. I felt like I was constantly, at least emotionally, surprised by going into a bar, meeting anyone over the age of 50 or 60, and hearing, firsthand, from them how they experienced that in their own life and in the queer spaces that they grew up in. That was something that resonated with me.

MW: What was it like for you emotionally to hear those stories?

KARP: It really puts things into perspective, I guess. That’s a little bit cliché to say, but we take so much for granted. I think the most emotional story that we heard was Nancy Valverde, who passed away a couple of years ago and was an incredible lesbian Chicana activist and human in L.A. She grew up in L.A., and she was arrested nearly every Friday night throughout the 1950s for wearing pants. Not that the LAPD was going around arresting every woman in pants, but because she was very clearly gender-nonconforming and somewhat androgynous and butch, and they could use these masquerading laws that were still on the books to harass her.

That she never considered changing the way she dressed, I think, is the most powerful part of that story to me. That compromising her identity was just out of the question for her, and was worth spending the weekend in jail, often. That story tugs at my heartstrings. I feel a lot of gratitude to her and to people like her for what they went through to win the protections and privileges that we have today.

Nancy did eventually take the LAPD to court and they ruled that masquerading laws could not be used in this way to criminalize queer people. And that did a lot for the queer community in L.A. and nationally. I think that it’s a good lesson for us, in the moment that we’re in politically, for how we persevere and move forward. And it gives me some comfort to think that our elders and our ancestors have done this before, and we can, too, if we have to.

MW: What would you like readers to take away from your book?

KARP: I want people to feel seen and like they are part of a community and like they are part of a history, a legacy, and a lineage of LGBTQ people that have always existed and will always exist. I hope that people have the experience that I have had in the bars of grasping how recent a lot of this history of criminalization and of fighting back is, and feel empowered to take up the fight, so to speak.

MW: We often see stories about lesbian bars or queer spaces in general, saying, “We’re having a GoFundMe to raise money because of X, Y, Z. And we’re getting no support. Or the city’s come down on us with fines or something that we’re contesting.” And that obviously threatens the existence of such spaces. What is the call to action, or the thing that people can do to help save these spaces?

KARP: I think there’s two. The first one is to go to these places. The biggest thing any space needs is patronage and business, so show your support with your feet and get over there. And then the second piece of it, I think, is to ask bars what they need and how you can support them, and what problems or challenges they might be facing before it gets to the point of “We have to raise $100,000 to save the bar.” Because, at the end of the day, we live under capitalism, and these spaces are businesses, and they need a good business plan. They need, oftentimes, a good lease with good terms, or a permanent home.

They need, potentially, support with building issues or city issues or local law issues, liquor license issues that they might not know how to deal with on their own. And I think a lot of people in our community may have that specific knowledge or expertise and be able to help.

Generally, you don’t open a lesbian bar because you’re like, “I’m a business person and this is going to be a great idea, and I have a great business plan. And I know exactly how to run it. And I’m going to make a bunch of money.” You open a lesbian bar because you love the community and you want to create this space, but you don’t necessarily have the business background or the real estate background to have all the answers and know exactly how to move forward. So I hope that community members can ask their spaces what they need, and that spaces can ask their community for help before it gets to the life-or-death moment, because we value these spaces. We want them to survive.

The Lesbian Bar Chronicles (Hardcover, 280 pages, $29.95) is published by Beacon Press. To order a copy, visit https://beacon.org/The-Lesbian-Bar-Chronicles-P2460.aspx.

To read an exclusive excerpt from The Lesbian Bar Chronicles, about D.C.’s A League of Her own and As You Are Bar, click here.

Cruising is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Google Podcasts. Listen by visiting www.cruisingpod.com/episodes.