It is April 2024, and I am on the basement dancefloor of Twisted Element, a gay bar in Calgary. Club music is blasting; fog and colourful lights fill the room; there are rainbow flags and murals on every wall. This should be a space where I feel safe to be out, proud, and 100% myself. But I’m not. I am a queer woman, surrounded mostly by big, drunk, shirtless, bearded men, and I hardly feel more comfortable here than I do at Houston’s or Roadhouse back home in Brandon.
My experience is not unique. Throughout time, lesbians and queer women have been constantly excluded from LGBTQ+ spaces. When I visited Calgary in April, Twisted Element had weekly gay-men-oriented “F*ck Me Fridays” – but no equivalent for the sapphic community to be found. Misogyny is a real issue in the LGBTQ+ community, and it always has been, but it often goes totally unnoticed by the queer people (usually men) who perpetuate it – and since these people are often the most vocal members of the community, the “lesbophobia” extends to society at large without anyone even realizing. For example, if you ask a random person to picture a queer couple, a pair of gay men almost always come to mind first. Even in our brains, lesbians are secondary - an afterthought.
Lesbian bars used to exist all over the world, including nearly every major Canadian city. These were once spaces for women (and non-binary folks who love women!) to socialize, dance, get drunk, have fun, and feel completely safe in their identities. Today, there is not a single lesbian bar in all of Canada. In some places (rarely) there are lesbian-oriented nights at gay bars. And, in cities like Montreal (even more rarely) small groups of queer women and non-binary people have popped up to organize sapphic-oriented events – but these groups usually end up hopping from location to location, without any permanent space to call their own. Permanent, physical spaces for queer women are important! Just like many LGBTQ+ people might feel uncomfortable at a typically straight bar like Roadhouse, I imagine hosting a WLW night at a similar “hetero-bar" that houses these negative associations would not be attractive to many queer people. These people could probably benefit from the same event, if only it were in a safer, more comfortable space.
In the United States, there are less than 20 lesbian bars remaining - compared to over 800 bars oriented mostly to gay men. Here in Canada, there are literally zero lesbian bars left in our country, and around 50 gay bars. Lavender Menace, the most recent lesbian-oriented bar I could find, closed its doors in 2022. A combination of factors led to its closing - financial difficulties following the pandemic was the main cause, but an increase in homophobic violence was also a major concern. It is very hard to stomach that homophobes played a big part in taking away the last of these spaces from our community.
Some have argued that lesbian bars are no longer needed, due to changing social norms that allow queer couples to be visible in straight-dominated spaces, like our very own nightclubs here in Brandon. If that were true, wouldn’t gay bars no longer be needed either? I think the folks who claim lesbian bars are unnecessary are likely the same people who would cringe if they walked into Stons on a Saturday night to see a bunch of queer people making out on the dance floor. They don’t want us to be in their spaces, but they don’t want us to have our own spaces; they want us to stay home and be invisible to them.
Queer women have always, always been overlooked. We’ve used this to our advantage; in several historical contexts, sapphic identity and sexuality flourished in silence, because gay men were seen as the bigger threat to society. But just because we were forced to be invisible then doesn’t mean we should be invisible now or ever.
I don’t have an answer for this question. I’m certainly not trying to argue that gay men should not have spaces where they feel proud and comfortable to be themselves. They absolutely should! But I’m frustrated, because so should we.