A Last Ditch Effort Couldn’t Save Lesbianism

About a month ago, I wrote an article titled “I Survived the Lesbian Bar Discourse of 2026.” Against all odds, there is an update. Unfortunately, it is considerably less funny. 

At around 11:30 a.m. Monday morning, I opened Instagram and saw four words from Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue: “Last Ditch Needs You.” I clicked immediately. There were no comments yet. I was too early.

Not for long.

Before Last Ditch turned the comments off around 1 p.m., I watched the reactions pile up beneath the announcement that they were looking for new owners and were closing. Some were genuinely apologetic, thanking the bar and wishing its owners well. Others called the closure the “most avoidable thing ever.” Some were simply hateful. There was something especially depressing about watching a space announce that it might disappear and seeing its comment section almost immediately become another trial over whether it deserved to exist in the first place.

Last Ditch is now “SOFT CLOSING effective immediately.” Already-booked events will continue while its current organizers search for someone willing to take over the venue. An accompanying graphic reads “Last Ditch Needs You” and asks for “co-owners, owners, or full sale,” advertising approximately $70,000 worth of equipment, furniture, updates and repairs, social media, inventory and other assets.

An attempted transition into a worker-owned cooperative has stalled because the bar still lacks a board or leadership to manage the transfer. “We have put our lives on hold to foster networks of care, resources, and a home base for organizing,” the announcement reads. “It’s time we pass it on.” That sentence, “we have put our lives on hold,” is harder to meme than the lesbian bar discourse. That is precisely why it matters more.

A month ago, the possibility that Last Ditch might close was one of the least funny details buried beneath an extremely funny national spectacle. The bar’s decision to make Saturday nights mask-optional had somehow transformed a basement lesbian bar in Greenfield into national news. There were arguments about disability justice and Covid-19 precautions, conservative pundits, purity politics, journalists descending on Greenfield and, yes, clown school.

But underneath the lesbian internet’s ideological WrestleMania was the much more boring problem of money. Jackie Matellian, by then the sole remaining founder, was responsible for a $50,000 business loan and working several jobs. The possibility of closure was already there. It was simply considerably less interesting to the internet than lesbians fighting with each other, conservatives, and everyone else who thought they could have an opinion on this.

Now the online discourse has moved on. The reality did not.

And I find that devastating. Not because Last Ditch was perfect. If you read my last article, you know I have approximately 4,000 thoughts about Last Ditch, queer politics and the bizarre conflict that briefly turned Greenfield, Mass., into the center of the lesbian internet.

I still desperately want the bar to survive. 

Maybe this feels particularly bleak because Last Ditch is not disappearing alone. Eight days before this announcement, Marsha’s, Philadelphia’s first queer-owned women’s sports bar, served its final customers just over a year since its opening. The bar existed partly because its founder, Chivonn Anderson, once had to argue with a bartender just to get the Women’s World Cup put on a television. The premise of Marsha’s was almost comically modest: What if women and queer people could walk into a sports bar without having to negotiate for their own interests to become visible? And yet, it only lasted from September 2025 to Oct. 18. There are only so many times queer people can describe the closure of another gathering place as “the end of an era” before we have to ask why all of our eras are becoming so short.

The Lesbian Bar Project currently lists 36 lesbian bars in the U.S. Around 200 existed in 1980. When the project launched in 2020, it estimated that only 16 remained. Look how many there used to be. Look how few are left. Look how lucky we are to have any at all. But what disappeared was not simply 164 businesses that happened to sell alcohol to homosexuals. Queer history has never only been a history of who queer people were. It is also a history of where queer people were permitted to exist.

And for much of American history, the answer was: not many places. That made bars unusually important. They were some of the rare public spaces where queer people could reliably find one another. And precisely because queer people could find one another there, these spaces became obvious targets for surveillance and policing. In New York, the State Liquor Authority treated establishments serving gay customers as “disorderly,” threatening or revoking liquor licenses, while police routinely raided queer bars. The Sea Colony, a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, was reportedly raided weekly during the 1950s and 1960s. Police and liquor authorities used allegations of loitering, lewd conduct and cross-dressing alongside liquor regulations to police the people gathering inside. The most famous example is, of course, the 1969 raid on the Stonewall Inn. But Stonewall matters precisely because the raid itself was not extraordinary. Raids were routine.

The extraordinary part was that people fought back. Controlling queer sexuality has therefore often meant controlling queer spaces: closing the bar, revoking its license, raiding it, surveilling it, and making gathering there dangerous. The circumstances today are obviously different. Last Ditch is not being raided by police. Marsha’s was not shuttered by a vice squad.

But the historical lesson about space remains useful: A right to exist is not quite the same thing as having somewhere to exist. Queer visibility has expanded enormously since the heyday of the lesbian bar. In many places, a lesbian couple can walk into a regular restaurant, order a drink and behave like a couple without having to locate the one establishment in town where doing so is permitted. That is, obviously, progress.

But being tolerated everywhere is not the same as belonging somewhere. Being allowed inside a straight bar is not the same as walking into a place built with the expectation that you would arrive. Maybe that distinction is why these closures bother me so much, even though I am not super duper involved in queer nightlife yet. 

Queer spaces have always been places where people practice ways of living that the rest of the world has not necessarily made easy. You do not simply enter them as an already-realized queer person, order a vodka cranberry and leave. You watch. You meet people older than you. You encounter identities and politics and ways of dressing and speaking and relating that you might never have encountered otherwise. You see who has been doing this longer than you. Who kisses whom. Who knows whom. Who takes care of whom. You discover that certain kinds of lives are possible because somebody else is already living one in front of you.

In that sense, queer spaces do something stranger than represent queer community. They produce it. The problem is that somebody still has to pay the rent. Yes, the lesbian bar is commercial, and yes, capitalism has once again found a way into my lesbianism. But what happens inside cannot be reduced to the transaction that keeps the doors unlocked.

And this is where I keep returning to an uncomfortable thought: I could have gone more. I went to Last Ditch more than once. I talked to people there. I wrote about it. I defended its existence. I followed the discourse obsessively. But I could have gone to karaoke again. I could have brought more friends. I could have bought another drink. I could have gone to its furry rave. Of course, this is not actually about my individual failure to purchase enough vodka cranberries to stabilize the lesbian-bar economy.

Nor is it fair to turn Last Ditch’s closure into a morality play in which mean queers on Instagram killed the lesbian bar. Its financial problems predated the controversy. In September, it had already reported unpaid work, overdue rent and considerable debt. And the longer history of lesbian bar closures obviously cannot be explained by one spectacularly miserable Instagram comment section. I also do not want “support lesbian bars” to become another version of “remember to shop local!” Individual consumer choices cannot single-handedly fix structural economic problems. You cannot Venmo your way out of the political economy. But there is nevertheless something uncomfortable about how much easier it is to symbolically value queer space than materially sustain it.

Moreover, a queer space organized around care cannot depend indefinitely on the exhaustion of the people providing it. If preserving the lesbian bar requires its operators to sacrifice their financial security, health, time and lives, then we have not actually solved the problem of queer community. We have privatized it. We have taken something we describe as communal infrastructure and handed the cost of maintaining it to a handful of people. We ask them to create accessibility, safety, art, nightlife, mutual aid, organizing, entertainment and community while also somehow operating a financially viable small business. Then the rest of us stand outside and debate whether they are doing it correctly. That’s bleak! Nobody should have to martyr themselves so the rest of us can do karaoke or go to a furry rave.

I hope someone buys Last Ditch. I hope the cooperative happens. I hope somebody figures out a financial model that works. But I am no longer convinced that the lesson here is simply to save Last Ditch. It is that we should build a world in which Last Ditch does not need to rely on miracles. 

Because that is the part of the statistics on disappearing lesbian bars that bothers me most. Thirty six lesbian bars should not feel like an incredible achievement. A lesbian bar should not have to function simultaneously as a nightclub, mutual-aid network, community center, performance venue, political experiment and emergency social infrastructure while somehow selling enough drinks to pay commercial rent. 

Perhaps the real contradiction is that we keep asking queer businesses to provide things that are not really businesses at all. Belonging is not a product. Intergenerational community is not a product. Having somewhere to go when you do not know anybody yet is not a product. Seeing somebody twenty years older than you living a life you had not imagined for yourself is not a product. And yet, in the absence of durable public and communal infrastructure, we keep making these things depend on whether enough people showed up on Saturday night and bought a second drink.

So yes, go to the lesbian bar. Go on a boring Wednesday. Buy a Coke if you don’t drink. Tip well. Bring your friends. Support the queer bookstore, the queer cafe, the queer sports bar, the sober gathering space, the community center. Don’t wait until someone posts the black-background Instagram graphic informing you that you have 72 hours to experience a place you had been meaning to visit for six months.

But do not confuse showing up with solving the problem. Because I don’t want every lesbian space to become a story older queer people tell younger queer people about somewhere they used to go. I don’t want the lesbian bar turned into an archive. I don’t want it preserved in documentaries, oral histories, tote bags, old photographs and increasingly astonishing statistics about how many used to exist.

I just want the bar.

I want somewhere banal enough that nobody has to call its continued existence miraculous. Somewhere you can go too often, or not often enough. Somewhere with a bad karaoke night and a weird event you almost skip. Somewhere capable of becoming boring, because boring means it has survived long enough to stop feeling endangered.

So if Last Ditch survives this, and if the next owners throw another furry rave, I swear to God, I will be there.

Because I survived the lesbian bar discourse of 2026.

I would really like the lesbian bar to survive it, too.