On the very again of Babe’s, a queer-owned girls’s sports activities bar that opened in Chicago final 12 months, hangs an old-school scoreboard above a set of steel bleachers. It’s arduous to not think about somebody reliving (a a lot gayer model of) some stereotypical highschool gymnasium makeout session whereas sitting there. Trophies line the partitions, together with a large variety of TVs streaming girls’s gymnastics, a UConn girls’s basketball sport, and All Girls’s Sports activities Community (AWSN), the Whoopi Goldberg-cofounded sports activities community.
In line with an NBC Information report, the variety of girls’s sports activities bars in america was set to quadruple in 2025. Portland’s The Sports activities Bra, based by Jenny Nguyen in 2022, kickstarted the style; in 2024, the bar introduced its plans to franchise. In line with Babe’s co-founder Nora McConnell-Johnson, the cohort that laid the blueprint are inclined to have smaller areas, and lean extra restaurant than bar. “Youthful millennials are beginning to open their bars now, and I feel that’s going to be an interesting second wave,” she says. “[They’re] exhibiting what it seems to be wish to be a girls’s sports activities bar, however with a vibe.” These vibes usually imply a extra trendy aesthetic, elevated cocktails, and an undeniably queer power.
In 2019, alarms signaling the perilous decline of lesbian bars in America reached a fever pitch. At its lowest level, the nationwide lesbian bar tally had reportedly dwindled to only 15. The culprits had been acquainted to any type of queer decay: gentrification, the wage hole, sexist financiers, the rise of relationship apps. And whereas the COVID-19 pandemic spurned anxious experiences questioning how these areas might presumably survive yet one more blow, one thing stunning occurred within the aftermath as an alternative. Lesbian bars began bobbing up (and typically, sadly, closing proper again down) with a renewed vigor.
Proper earlier than my go to to Babe’s, two different queer-owned girls’s sports activities bars opened in Brooklyn in the identical week: Athena Keke’s in Clinton Hill and Blazers in Williamsburg. Whereas each institutions establish as girls’s sports activities bars in the beginning, “if somebody calls us a queer bar, we don’t right them, as a result of we love our neighborhood and we would like this to be an area for them,” says Chandler Robertson, one in every of Blazers’ trio of co-founders who met on Hinge.
Many of those bars depend on queer-coded particulars to telegraph that it’s a welcoming house, like a photograph of The L Phrase solid from the notorious basketball episode that hangs within the entryway at Athena Keke’s. Blazer’s, in the meantime, shows a delight flag behind the bar.
“Girls’s sports activities is a web site of lesbian tradition and gathering,” says McConnell-Johnson, “and likewise, girls’s sports activities is larger than that, too.”
Within the first lesbian bar growth of the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, neighborhood organizing grew to become a vital element of what went on in these areas. As queer tradition grew to become mainstream within the 2000s and 2010s, nevertheless, an fascinating shift befell: Homosexual bars of all stripes began shuttering at report velocity. It was nearly as if Obama-era optimism translated to queer political complacency, zapping these areas of their once-urgent goal. And whereas the recent wave of queer bars opening up immediately aren’t essentially websites of nice political upheaval, they’re tapping into one thing from that golden age. Occasions and programming that transcend a perfunctory theme evening appear to decrease the social barrier to entry that youthful, extra IRL-anxious patrons would possibly in any other case face.
Previous to opening, Athena Keke’s co-founders drummed up publicity for his or her idea by launching pop-ups all around the metropolis. They hosted a brunch in the course of the New York Liberty WNBA Championship victory parade, tailgated USWNT soccer video games, and threw watch events at different bars till they managed to open their doorways. “I feel it actually helped set up the thought and the model,” says Murray. “It compiled proof that this might work, that there’s an viewers.” It is probably not neighborhood organizing within the political sense, however merely organizing the neighborhood round something appears to be a option to maintain clientele engaged in a notoriously difficult-to-sustain bar subculture.
One dividing line amongst girls’s sports activities bar house owners is the choice to air males’s sports activities inside. Babe’s takes a hardline stance towards it. “I’ll die on this hill,” McConnell-Johnson insists, recalling an evening when the VP of comms for the Chicago Bears got here in and expressed aid that the Bears sport wasn’t on. “There’s a totally different vibe and magic to this place as a result of there aren’t any males on the screens.”
On the opposite facet, Blazers says its neighborhood has expressed a need to look at males’s sports activities in a friendlier house. “We hear it on a regular basis,” says co-founder Debany Dávila. “[They’re] so excited to not be at a daily sports activities bar and be requested to call three gamers. If it’s not interfering with our imaginative and prescient of placing girls’s sports activities at heart stage, we predict there’s house for all of it.”
And lest it look like girls’s sports activities bars are bastions of kumbaya girlboss positivity, Babe’s, not less than, makes loads of house for principled haters. After Indiana Fever All-Star guard Caitlin Clark made feedback that some followers interpreted to be anti-union, McConnell-Johnson toyed with the thought of internet hosting a quasi jersey buy-back program: “Come donate your Clark jersey, we’ll offer you a free drink, after which we’ll do a ritual burning.”
