THE FEW, THE PROUD
Just 3 spots left standing in city’s once-vibrant lesbian-bar scene
More lesbian bars operated in 1930s New York City than in 2019.
With the closing of the Bum Bum bar in Queens late last year, just three are left.
“It’s really easy to feel really sad about it and to go into mourning, and maybe even panic a little bit: ‘Oh my God, they’re all disappearing. What’s happening? Where will lesbians go?’ ” artist Gwen Shockey said.
Fifty years after the Stonewall riots, the only lesbian bars left in the city that ignited the out-and-proud quest for equality are Henrietta Hudson and Cubbyhole in Greenwich Village and Ginger’s Bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
“I think a huge part of it is that there’s just a shift happening in the ways that people are partying and spending time together,” Shockey said.
Shockey, 31, a print maker and installation artist, has spent the last five years documenting the history of lesbian bars and clubs in the city.
Through meticulous research — aided by interviews, back issues of the Village Voice and old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting — Shockey created a digital map tracking locations “that were once lesbian bars or hosted lesbian parties or queer parties in the boroughs of New York.”
The earliest establishment in her “Addresses” project dates to 1911. In the 1930s, there were at least half a dozen spots – many in Upper Manhattan, according to Shockey’s map.
While there are fewer bars and clubs, the party goes on.
“People are craving alternative types of spaces that don’t revolve around alcohol and drinking necessarily ... where you can do other things to meet people, and not just have it be about drinking,” Shockey said.
Instead there are “monthly parties tailored more specifically to niche interests,” she explained. “Not just one identity, not just lesbians, but inclusive of people of all types who need safe spaces to be together and to party and to have community.”
Sometimes it’s an indoor pool. Sometimes it’s a roving dance party. And more events are in the outer boroughs.
“You still have bars in Manhattan like the Cubbyhole and Henrietta Hudson, but your dance venues are in Brooklyn,” said DJ Susan Morabito. “I do think that there’s more lesbian bars and parties in Brooklyn, because more lesbians live in Brooklyn, the ones who are going to go out.”
Morabito lives in the East Village is one of two DJ headliners at Pride Island Sunday on Pier 97 at Hudson River Park next month.
There’s another reason the city’s lesbian bars and clubs are disappearing — the rent is too damn high.
As institutions such as Crazy Nanny’s, Meow Mix and Rubyfruit closed up shop, gentrification kept new generations of bar owners at bay.
“For a while I was just kind of thinking about what it would look like to open a bar. Just looking at the prices of real estate here, it’s just impossible,” Shockey said.
It’s also no secret that quite a few of the lesbian and gay nightspots of yesteryear were mob-run or -owned.
Phillip Crawford, a retired lawyer and the author of the book “The Mafia and the Gays,” said he’s found several official FBI documents alluding to the involvement of the Mafia in lesbian bars.
Kooky’s on 14th St. was owned by reputed mobster Matty Ianniello, according to a 1973 FBI memo.
“Ianniello was the Genovese capo who oversaw so much of gay nightlife in New York City, and often managed interests of mobsters from other families in the gay bars,” said Crawford.
Then there is the issue of gender politics.
“It’s harder now for a lot of people, especially women ... to open businesses because of the prices of rent,” Shockey said. “Women still have a pay gap in U.S.”