Where did all the women go?
Susan Cox argues that lesbian spaces are still needed.
We’re told we live in an era of greater acceptance of homosexuality, yet the loss of hard-won lesbian spaces and events is a growing trend. San Francisco, known as one of the most prominent LGBT communities in the world, doesn’t have a single lesbian bar, and New York City’s lesbian spaces have dwindled severely. There are no explicitly lesbian bars in Vancouver (Lick — once the city’s only lesbian bar — closed in 2011), though there are a number of bars for gay men and “queer nights” that take place within various venues.
Well you see gay men need to have bars but lesbians don’t. Lesbians are women, and women are no fun. Women would rather be at home scrubbing the sink than out partying, so lesbian bars just aren’t necessary. Right?
This “progress” explanation not only falls flat because stigma around lesbianism remains, but because it fails to account for the fact that spaces for gay males have remained largely intact. In my hometown of Philadelphia, for example, a peek at any “gayborhood” calendar offers a plethora of events catering to gay men, including: gay bingo, gaybill (musical theater night), gay burlesque roulette, free country line dancing, gay antiques show, and a best gay mac and cheese contest.
By contrast, the latest Phillesbian Fall Guide lists events such as: a beer festival… No, not a lesbian beer festival — just a regular one. In fact, there’s not a single explicitly lesbian event in the guide (unless a Tegan and Sara concert counts).
The last lesbian bar in Philadelphia, Sisters, closed in 2013, turning the country’s first gayborhood into a mostly male affair. So although rainbows proudly decorate street signs and crosswalks, there’s little real diversity to be found.
Well it’s natural. It’s how god intended it. Men are for the world and women are for the home, you know. Men get to go out, and women get to stay home. Besides, women are exclusionary.
It seems the burden of “queering” “identity” always falls on women in particular. For example, why is it usually women’s bathrooms that are turned into “all-gender”/“inclusive” bathrooms, while men’s rooms remain unchanged? Why are lesbian events accused of bigotry and bullied out of existence, while those for gay males continue on their merry way?
Feminist writer Sarah Ditum points out that it is primarily women’s spaces and organizations, “not services intended for men,” that are attacked for being “non-inclusive.” She names “rape crisis centres (Vancouver Rape Relief), abortion rights campaigns (A Night of a Thousand Vaginas), and women-only music festivals (Michfest)” as just a few examples. “Gentleman’s clubs — those all-male bastions of the Establishment — have not been targeted for protests,” Ditum writes.
It appears that even though the project of “queering” is, we’re told, about going beyond gender, the movement disproportionately affects females in negative ways.
That’s because everybody hates women.
“Well you see gay men need to have bars but lesbians don’t. Lesbians are women, and women are no fun. Women would rather be at home scrubbing the sink than out partying, so lesbian bars just aren’t necessary. Right?”
No. Wrong.
Gay men have gay bars because they patronize those bars and keep them open. Same as any business.
“Well it’s natural. It’s how god intended it. Men are for the world and women are for the home, you know. Men get to go out, and women get to stay home. Besides, women are exclusionary.”
Again no. These gay men events are being organized by those same gay men. Are you saying they should be organizing events for the the lesbian community?
“That’s because everybody hates women.”
Yeah, that’s it….
Would it not be possible for someone to, you know, open, a lesbian bar, rather than just bemoaning their absence?
What do you mean “someone”? The author of this piece? Me?
Are you really saying that people shouldn’t criticize social arrangements, but instead correct them all by themselves?
My understanding is that it’s in large part economics. Women don’t make as much as men. Lesbians participating in an ‘openly gay’ subculture are more stigmatised these days than gay men who do the same, and hence are less likely to have access to well-paying jobs. A household with two women is likely to have fewer financial resources than a household with two men. Women often have childcare responsibilities or other time commitments and expenses. All this adds up to lesbians not really having enough leisure time or discretionary income to support our own nightlife or public culture.
Which doesn’t alter the fact that women’s spaces are supposed to be ‘inclusive’ (and we are mercilessly shredded if we have a problem with that) while no one seems to care whether men’s spaces are. And yeah, the older I get the more I’m inclined to agree that everybody hates women.
Plus there’s also a nasty feedback loop going on. Lesbians are seen as unhip compared to gay men – the gay couple on Modern Family have a running theme of how dreary lesbians are, and of course the gay couple are part of the core cast, the family in Modern Family, while lesbians are not. Lesbians get upbraided over the “cotton ceiling” while there is no equivalent for gay men. Mich Fest got hounded out of existence. Lesbians are basically being shamed out of public life, so naturally lesbian bars are less popular than gay bars.
It’s kind of an interesting/horrifying point that some of what I’ve been hearing and reading (here and elsewhere) as good as says that ‘lesbian’ is no longer a viable label–choosing it for yourself could send the message that you might not be willing to have sex with male-bodied women, which is unacceptable. While, again, no one seems to be bothering men who identify as ‘gay’ about their ostentatiously male-oriented exclusivity.
There may be a generational thing as well. The documentary ‘Last Call at Maude’s’ covered the history of a major Lesbian landmark of San Francisco. A lesbian bar that started before the City laws permitted women to tend bars.
A matter that kept coming up in all the interviews, but never took center stage, was that bar ‘culture’ was riddled with alcoholism. A substantial portion of the regulars who supported Maude’s either died, or sobered up. The great community that Maude’s helped foster couldn’t survive without being subsidized by the booze industry. It is tragic that the social, community, and yes, party, resource the place represented depended too much on heavy boozing.
Oh yes, that. Fair point. I don’t like bars or taverns or even pubs myself, partly because I don’t like alcohol. I prefer coffeehouse culture.
@7 It is true that we don’t socialise around alcohol as much as we used to, just in general (I remember a few years ago binge-watching Columbo, and was amazed that EVERYONE in the show had cocktails in their hands at all times (and also that it was apparently perfectly normal to show someone getting into their PJs climbing into bed, downing their sleeping pill, and lying down to go to sleep)). Lots of pubs here can’t stay in business just selling alcohol, and are looking for other business models. Lots serve food, others hold paying events. But this doesn’t explain why it’s only lesbian bars, not bars for gay men, that are disappearing or have disappeared.
Having thought about this it’s now my one of my NY resolutions to show my support for these spaces by visiting, for the first time, my city’s gay bar (just looked at photos on their website and I think there are women in them–I’ll see how woman-friendly the place is).
An at-least-interesting and apparently relevant read, from 2012:
http://undergraduateethnography.org/files/Eichenberger_0.pdf
“Male domination of subcultural space is not a new concept. For example, LeBlanc discusses the male numerical domination in the punk subculture (LeBlanc 1999, 105-106). Female subculturalists are often pushed out to the periphery of male dominated subcultures. They are allowed to participate, but only if they adhere to norms and values defined by males (Blazak 2012).”
Criticisms welcome, I haven’t looked through all her references in detail to see how strong her position is…
I lived in Chicago in the late 1980s, and had a good friend who was a bartender at a lesbian bar. She invited me to come see her there, and hang out – this was probably 1989. This bar required that one push a bell to be buzzed in, and so that is what I did. A regular bar, whose security had to be enforced with a locked door. Now, I am a male, by birth and self-definition, and received a fair amount of looks when I was buzzed in and asked for my friend. When my friend came out, she said, “Boyfriend!!!” We hugged, and the looks dissipated.
Here is my point: in Chicago, in 1989, and probably for some years after that, lesbians had to gather behind a locked door in order to be safe. Behind a locked door. Can we say that spaces have become so absolutely so fucking safe in the years since then?
Hm…not to deny that safety was an issue (for my example as well as yours), but I used to hang out at a Goth bar in a big city at about the same time period, and we had to be let in because the place was a technically illegal ‘private club’ serving alcohol without an appropriate license.
I just would have thought that supply would follow demand, as it almost always does elsewhere in the economy.
I’m not asking this rhetorically – I’m just bringing up a possibility that occurs to me with zero prior conviction one way or the other about it – but is it possible that lesbians have less use for distinct spaces (bars particularly) than gay men do? With bars, it’s a matter of wanting to participate in a bar scene of some sort that will bring people in – if women are less inclined to do that than men are, there’s going to be less demand for lesbian bars and having fewer of them won’t be a problem.
For that matter, are women seeking women as numerous as men seeking men?
For all I know, it could very well be that women are, all else being equal, MORE inclined to the bar scene than men and MORE frequently seeking same-sex encounters, which would make this disparity even worse than otherwise. I’m just asking because these seem to be two variables that could account for this that I don’t know don’t apply.
I saw an interesting and relevant documentary.
Other people might also be interested.
Here is a link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JePugX1YkG4
( :-/ )