all photos courtesy of the author

Another St. Patrick’s Day has arrived, and the patrons of Ginger’s Bar are overcome by good luck. Outside the bar’s rainbow awning, there is someone hot you can kiss, something green you can smoke. Girls are swapping lighters, reapplying their lip gloss. Indoors, drag queen and DJ Candy Warhol, arrived from Cork, Ireland, is blasting Madonna. It’s 11:30, as the song goes, the men are at home, and Ginger’s is jumping, as it has for 25 years, enduring as a lesbian sanctuary, often despite existential threats.

For her big quarter-century, Ginger’s is balling out all weekend — Irish linedancers, drag queen DJ’s, live music — and for good reason. Ginger’s is one of four lesbian bars remaining in New York City, and 34 across the US as of last year. Founded in 2000 by the red-haired Sheila Frayne, the cash-only, Irish-themed dive bar closed indefinitely during the pandemic, a wake-up call for its patrons, who rallied around the bar to prevent its closure. One of Ginger’s champions, Erica Rose, is co-founder with Elina Street of the Lesbian Bar Project. In 2020, the Lesbian Bar Project filmed and released a PSA about the dire state of lesbian bars in America, launching a crowdfunding campaign that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Community efforts like these kept bars afloat during the hardest months of the pandemic. For Rose, losing spaces like Ginger’s was never an option.

“The lesbian bars in New York raised me as a queer person. I lived in South Slope in my early twenties, and Ginger’s was a twenty minute walk from me,” Rose remembers. “It was the bar in which I felt seen, where I could really relax and chill and be with my friends. There’s a misconception that lesbian bars are primarily for hookup culture and dating — and look, that has happened,” Rose adds with a laugh, “but it’s also a place that my queer friends could gather and not be bothered. With the patio and pool table, it feels like a place you can just gossip, chat, hang.”

Park Slope, the neighborhood where Ginger’s is located, is notoriously wealthy and white. Once known in the nineties as “Dyke Slope,” its lesbian community was essentially gentrified out. “Ginger’s,” one article mourned in 2006, “has become a neighborhood bar for a neighborhood that no longer really exists.” Twenty years later, however, a new generation is claiming space at Ginger’s, embodying a fluid feeling of neighborhood that transcends generations, identities, and geographic location. There are the mainstays, the old guard who remembers the famed L Word watch parties and have spent decades talking shit at its pool table. But tonight, on the dance floor, most patrons are in our twenties. We’ve traveled from other parts of the city to participate in the festivities — or are even coming from upstate. Doc Martens and Blundstones abound, baggy pants and big jackets on their resurgence from decades past — if it weren’t for the iPhones and recession drink prices, you could almost imagine it was opening night.

Shannon, a South Asian patron, points out the middle school across the street where she was once bussed in from Sunset Park. “I went to that middle school with Jeremy Allen White, and we were in the same theater program,” she says, in the casual lore-dropping tone I associate with native New Yorkers, “and after every play, all the teachers would come here to celebrate opening night. A lot of kids and teachers came from families with same-sex parents. It was very normal to us.” By the time Shannon, now in her thirties, began attending Ginger’s, the bar had changed. “It’s very community-based, and a lot of different ages,” she says. “It’s not like the older people have left. But now different people are here.”

Now, Ginger’s also sports an enormous trans flag above its archway. It strikes me immediately, a signal of solidarity to those who are too often excluded from mainstream lesbian and queer spaces; think, for example, of Stonewall National Monument’s recent erasure of the “T”  on its official national park website. Another vintage sign reads: Give racism the boot! Signs like this, of earnest political commitment, erupt between kitschy Irish decor, all Guinness banners and tinsel. If Ginger’s is a church, it takes the ‘big tent’ approach, offering sanctuary to a wide range of queers. The neighborhood has certainly changed; Dyke Slope is no more, but the face of queerness continues to expand, and Ginger’s is determined to keep up. Sometimes, prioritizing inclusiveness can feel like chasing a shifting goal post. Mostly, though, it feels like the entire point of being queer. Tonight, with its new generation of patrons warming up the dance floor, you get the sense that Ginger’s will live forever.

Amya is celebrating her twenty-first birthday at Ginger’s, which makes her exactly four years younger than the bar itself. “It’s going great. The vibes are up, the morale is up, and people are having a good time,” Amya tells me excitedly. “I think it’s great to have a space that is safe and feels welcoming.” She’s a student at SUNY Purchase, but made the trek down to celebrate with her aunt, Joselyn, who’s been coming to Ginger’s for years. Joselyn, meanwhile, remembers her last drink at Ginger’s, a precious moment from the old world, before everything was shut down by Covid. She was on the patio with her friend Caitlin, playing with their pet bunny, and crying. “We weren’t sure what was going to happen with the pandemic,” Joselyn says. “But I remember then that we were very happy.”

The pandemic is a trauma that few are ready to talk about. For queer young people who came of age in its shadow, we remember how suicide risks were at an all-time high. Now we’re still coming of age amid a recession, with shrinking third spaces, a loneliness epidemic, and high economic barriers to participation. When I bring up the pandemic to Joselyn, she can’t believe five years have passed. “It’s night and day,” Joselyn says of the difference between pre- and post-pandemic Ginger’s. She cites the fact that queer spaces felt so vulnerable in those years. “Everyone found out the real numbers and statistics about the bars, so now even people who are sober come to support the safe space. Especially because, there’s only, what, four now?”

Javi, Shannon, Joselyn, and Amya

Joselyn recalls the night everything changed, after Ginger’s reopened in 2022. Her friend Javi had begun hosting karaoke nights — initially every other Thursday, then weekly, to meet growing demand. (“It’s bumping every Thursday!” she reports.) “The first night of karaoke here was very special, because the bar had closed down during the pandemic,” Joselyn recalls. “Everyone was like, oh shit, this is gone. But to see it revived — and there was a line down the block to get into karaoke, which was also Caitlin’s birthday.”

This is her aforementioned friend with the bunny. Everyone at Ginger’s seems interconnected, like they were born and raised in the bar. As if on cue, Javi himself steps outside, wearing a custom Ginger’s 25th anniversary jersey. He feels passionately about Ginger’s post-pandemic revival, a feat he attributes to the tireless, daily investment of community members. “Post-pandemic — this is where it gets beautiful. You follow me?” he says of the time after the bar reopened. “I think, post-pandemic, people who hadn’t really thought about community, or creating spaces, just showed up and were like, I’m here to drink a beer! Post-pandemic made me realize we just can’t take these things for granted. We have to contribute to the magic.”

Javi points out something I had felt awkward to bring up: the fact that Ginger’s crowd is still rather white. “Ginger’s has really honed in on the fact that in this day and age, we need to create communities that people feel safe in, of all genders and races. I’ve witnessed a few opportunities where people challenged that they didn’t feel as welcome here, especially people of color,” he says. But he feels confident that “if you didn’t feel safe, there are a lot of people who would move to action.” As the karaoke host, sometimes-event planner, and sometimes-doorman, he is one of those people. It’s clear that Ginger’s wouldn’t be the same without him.

Tonight the vibes are up at Ginger’s, and a lesbian renaissance is underway, but our community is far from secure. In the grand scheme of things, politically, queer people are the most endangered we’ve ever been. The new Trump administration has made attacking queer people, especially trans people, a mainstay of its political agenda, with a flurry of executive orders officially recognizing only two sexes and repealing policies that promote equity, diversity, and anti-discrimination. Taking cues from the political climate, major companies like Google have announced they will end their DEI programs, and earlier this week San Francisco Pride lost significant funding — $300,000 — as multiple corporate sponsors pulled out.

Lesbian bars are particularly vulnerable to closure, rising rents, and gentrification. Just last month, Brooklyn lost Mary’s, another Irish queer bar in Williamsburg. Many spots have come and gone, documented by projects like the Addresses Project, although several of the spaces listed as ‘active’ on that map have since shuttered. When I ask Rose why lesbian bars are so precarious, she points out that “we can’t talk about the loss of lesbian bars without talking about misogyny. Women have always been financially at a disadvantage compared to men.” Rose cites the wage gap, plus the often-forgotten legal barriers that women only overcame in recent decades, such as the right to open a line of credit, or get a liquor license, that prevented lesbians from taking up real estate the way gay men have. There are few sapphic equivalents for famous gayborhoods, like the West Village, WeHo, Boystown, or the Castro. “Lesbian bars had to exist in hiding in heteronormative neighborhoods,” Rose said. “Some of them didn’t have open windows, or were literally underground. They didn’t get a lot of visibility, and were spread by word of mouth.”

Tonight, with the rainbow flags across its awning, and queer people spilling out onto the streets, Ginger’s is far from invisible. Visibility, of course, is not the end goal of queerness. What many people long for, I know, is safety — something we understand comes from community. Indeed, many queer spaces have risen to the challenge of our times by embracing a political identity more reminiscent of the ‘60s and ‘70s — Pride, as we are often reminded, started as a riot, not a party. Today, Ginger’s is more than a bar — it is a space where people can socialize, fundraise, date, and meet their needs collectively. Where we already have everything we need. Twenty-five years in it is an imperfect space, but hopeful nonetheless, continually reinventing itself in a way that feels very, very gay.

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!