At 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 metallic bleachers. It’s exhausting 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 Women’s Sports Network (AWSN), the Whoopi Goldberg-cofounded sports network.
According to an NBC News report, the variety of girls’s sports activities bars in the United States was set to quadruple in 2025. Portland’s The Sports Bra, based by Jenny Nguyen in 2022, kickstarted the style; in 2024, the bar announced its plans to franchise. According to 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. “Younger millennials are starting to open their bars now, and I think that’s going to be a fascinating second wave,” she says. “[They’re] showing what it looks like to be a women’s sports bar, but with a vibe.” Those vibes typically imply a extra trendy aesthetic, elevated cocktails, and an undeniably queer vitality.
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 courting apps. And whereas the COVID-19 pandemic spurned anxious reports questioning how these areas may probably survive one more blow, one thing stunning occurred in the aftermath as an alternative. Lesbian bars began springing up (and generally, sadly, closing proper again down) with a renewed vigor.
Right 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. While each institutions establish as girls’s sports activities bars at the beginning, “if someone calls us a queer bar, we don’t correct them, because we love our community and we want this to be a space for them,” says Chandler Robertson, one among 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 area, like a photograph of The L Word forged from the notorious basketball episode that hangs in the entryway at Athena Keke’s. Blazer’s, in the meantime, shows a pleasure flag behind the bar.
“Women’s sports is a site of lesbian culture and gathering,” says McConnell-Johnson, “and also, women’s sports is greater than that, too.”
In the first lesbian bar increase of the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, group organizing turned a vital element of what went on in these areas. As queer tradition turned mainstream in the 2000s and 2010s, nonetheless, an fascinating shift happened: Gay bars of all stripes began shuttering at file velocity. It was virtually as if Obama-era optimism translated to queer political complacency, zapping these areas of their once-urgent function. And whereas the contemporary wave of queer bars opening up right this moment aren’t essentially websites of nice political upheaval, they’re tapping into one thing from that golden age. Events and programming that transcend a perfunctory theme night time appear to decrease the social barrier to entry that younger, more IRL-anxious patrons may in any other case face.
Prior to opening, Athena Keke’s co-founders drummed up publicity for his or her idea by launching pop-ups throughout the metropolis. They hosted a brunch throughout 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 think it really helped establish the idea and the brand,” says Murray. “It compiled proof that this could work, that there is an audience.” It is probably not group organizing in the political sense, however merely organizing the group round something appears to be a strategy to hold clientele engaged in a notoriously difficult-to-sustain bar subculture.
One dividing line amongst girls’s sports activities bar homeowners is the resolution to air males’s sports activities inside. Babe’s takes a hardline stance in opposition to it. “I will die on this hill,” McConnell-Johnson insists, recalling an evening when the VP of comms for the Chicago Bears got here in and expressed reduction that the Bears sport wasn’t on. “There is a different vibe and magic to this place because there are no men on the screens.”
On the different facet, Blazers says its group has expressed a want to observe males’s sports activities in a friendlier area. “We hear it all the time,” 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 middle stage, we expect there’s area for all of it.”
And lest it look like girls’s sports activities bars are bastions of kumbaya girlboss positivity, Babe’s, at the very least, makes loads of area for principled haters. After Indiana Fever All-Star guard Caitlin Clark made comments 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 give you a free drink, and then we’ll do a ritual burning.”