Dani’s Queer Bar opened its doorways to Boston’s LGBTQ neighborhood final month, giving town its first lesbian bar in a long time. The venue joins a yearslong “lesbian bar renaissance” that has seen greater than a dozen bars for queer ladies open throughout the nation because the peak of the Covid pandemic.
Dani’s, which has branded itself as a “area for Sapphic, trans and non-binary neighborhood members,” was greater than two years within the making. Prior to opening the bar, founder Thais Rocha hosted events for queer ladies all through town, after which in March 2022, she introduced a fundraising marketing campaign to open a brick-and-mortar venue.
“It’s all about creating the area that you just don’t see on the market for your self and for different individuals. And that’s what we’re attempting to do some by little,” Rocha instructed WGBH in Boston again in 2022. “I need all people to see that it’s potential, and it doesn’t must be one thing so scarce and arduous to realize.”
In May of final yr, Rocha was one in every of 24 small-business house owners awarded a SPACE grant by Mayor Michelle Wu’s Office of Economic Opportunity and Inclusion, which helped deliver the bar to fruition. After delays attributable to allowing points, Dani’s Queer Bar — reportedly named after Rocha’s American Eskimo pup — lastly opened Sept. 12.
Stevie Dickie attended the grand opening along with her girlfriend, Jace Williams. Dickie stated she was thrilled to lastly have an area in Boston that caters particularly to queer ladies and trans and nonbinary individuals.
“I felt so good to be surrounded by individuals like me. It was so invigorating. My coronary heart was so full,” Dickie stated. “Any area we have now for neighborhood is essential, particularly since we have now so many truly male-centric areas. As lengthy as I’ve lived right here, there actually was no place for us to go and meet individuals and be with our particular neighborhood. People have been actually lacking that. There was type of like a gap, so I believe [Dani’s] is admittedly filling a necessity right here in our metropolis.”
Several lesbians dwelling in Boston and a number of native information stories stated that earlier than Dani’s, there hadn’t been a devoted lesbian bar within the metropolis for not less than twenty years.
In the spring of 2020, across the starting of the Covid-19 pandemic, an NBC News evaluation discovered there have been solely about 16 lesbian bars left within the U.S., down from a excessive of round 200 within the Nineteen Eighties, and several other of those remaining venues have been at risk of closing due to the pandemic.
Erica Rose, co-founder of The Lesbian Bar Project, which has documented and fundraised for the United States’ remaining lesbian bars, stated there are a couple of components behind this decadeslong pattern, together with gentrification, misogyny in small-business loans and the gender pay hole.
While the variety of lesbian or lesbian-ish bars is nowhere close to its ’80s peak, an NBC News evaluation final yr discovered there was considerably of a resurgence, with greater than a dozen new Sapphic areas opening up since 2020.
Rose stated these areas proceed to be essential for queer ladies.
“They are an area the place you may have shelter. It’s an area the place you would possibly simply be capable of have some neighborhood and have mates or be capable of discuss to somebody who’s like-minded,” she stated.
Renee Gannon, who makes use of they/them pronouns, and their girlfriend, Amanda Pollock, visited Dani’s on a Saturday night time final month after an eight-hour kayaking journey down Massachusetts’ Ipswich River. Though the pair was exhausted and needed to wait in line for an hour, Gannon stated, “it was completely price it.”
Having beforehand attended Sapphic pop-up occasions round Boston, Gannon stated they’re relieved to have a brick-and-mortar area they’ll lastly depend on.
“There’s been numerous cellular nightlife occasions which have gone on through the years, however I believe having a devoted area goes to be very nice,” they stated.
Kristen Porter, a chief in Boston’s lesbian neighborhood, devoted herself to creating all these roving gatherings within the larger Boston space from 1998 to 2019 along with her occasion manufacturing teams Dyke Nights and Kristen Porter Presents. Porter identified that though many everlasting areas for Sapphic gatherings, like Somewhere and Indigo bar, have shut their doorways because the ’80s and ’90s, there has at all times been a requirement for lesbian gatherings in Boston. She stated she’s thrilled that Dani’s will present a everlasting area for LGBTQ patrons to collect.
“What may be very thrilling concerning the opening of Dani’s Queer Bar is how far we’ve come to have ‘Queer’ proper there within the identify, out of the shadows, in a full-time venue that might be an inclusive area for a brand new technology,” she stated.
Dani’s is positioned on the busy thoroughfare of Boylston Street in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood.