Moby Dyke and the Quest for Lesbian Bars
A conversation with Krista Burton, author of the new book, Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Lesbian Bars in America
I first encountered Krista Burton’s work via her legendary blog, Effing Dykes. If you’re not aware, Effing Dykes was a blog about lesbians and lesbian culture that covered important issues like fingerbanging with acrylic nails, dyke alikes, and how to tell if a girl is gay or just “alternative.” It’s difficult to overstate the grip Krista’s writing had on me and my friends as baby dykes circa 2011. Krista wrote about loving women and wanting to have sex with them in a joyful, unabashed way. Queerness was not only normal on Effing Dykes, it was a superior way-of-being. And even though the late 2000s/early 2010s were a low point in lesbian fashion (close your eyes and imagine walking into a foam party full of dykes with Justin Bieber hair, deep v-necks, and skinny jeans), Effing Dykes was the first place on the internet where I saw pictures of real, everyday queer people living their lives and being friends.
In her new book, Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America, Krista visits 20 of the last remaining lesbian bars in America to answer such questions as: What goes on at lesbian bars and why have so many closed in recent years? How do lesbian bars build community, especially in conservative areas and small cities? Is it okay to be a gay person who hates karaoke? Will Krista, a femme who wears stretchy dresses and is married to a trans man, be dismissed as straight?
What I loved most about Moby Dyke is that it is extremely funny—this book had me chortling deep into the night and waking up my girlfriend. The second best thing is that Moby Dyke is not Twitter discourse or an academic paper. Krista’s not trying to write the definitive work on dykes or dyke bars. It’s more of a reflection on life, love, and where queer spaces fit into it all. There’s so much here about familial homophobia (Krista was raised Mormon and chose to rebuild a relationship with her parents after several years of strained, intermittent contact), pandemic grief, losing a parent, small-town life, and aging as a queer person. I also appreciated that this is a travel book written by someone with limited funds and a full-time day job. I just really recommend this book, okay!!
I interviewed Krista over Zoom (okay, Google Meet) and then via Google Doc about, what else, lesbian bars. This interview was so much fun and I hope you enjoy it, too. Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Lesbian Bars in America is out TODAY!! You can find it wherever books are sold. Read an excerpt here.
Maddy: The subtitle of your book is “an obsessive quest to track down the last remaining lesbian bars in America,“ and as promised, you visit 20 lesbian bars across the the country. You visit famous dyke bars like Cubbyhole in New York and spots that are lesser-known--if only because they’re not in major cities-- like Walker’s Pint in Milwaukee and The Back Door in Bloomington. I was thrilled to learn that Oklahoma has not one, but three, lesbian bars.
Years ago, I moved to Madison for grad school and connected with this person who told me about an incredible dyke bar called Mickey’s. When I actually went to Mickey’s, I was confused because there wasn’t any one demographic in attendance. It seemed like a true neighborhood bar. I saw college students, bros playing billiards, and a group of moms with small children in tow. I was confused until I realized my friend just meant that all the lesbians she knew went there. So I have to ask you: what makes a lesbian bar a lesbian bar? And how did you select the bars in your book? Did you have strict criteria or was it more touchy-feely?
Krista: Your Mickey’s story is extremely on-brand for lesbian bar stories! I cannot tell you how many times I told someone I was doing this book, and then they told me that while ___[name of city] does have an established lesbian bar, “all the queers actually go to ____[name of bar that is not a lesbian bar but has the gayest clientele in town].”
I had strict criteria for which bars I went to for Moby Dyke. It was both helpful (the criteria narrowed down the bars!) and a bummer (the rules meant I didn’t get to go to all the queer bars I wanted to for this book.) To be included, a bar had to either:
Self-identify as a lesbian bar; and/or
Self-identify as a queer bar (in a space that has always been a lesbian bar in the past.) So like, it was OK, rule–wise, if a bar had rebranded to be more inclusive (we love to see it!) but I only went to visit if the bar had historically been known as a lesbian bar.
M: That makes sense. You are just one woman and it would be a wild, multi-year journey to visit every single bar loved and patronized by dykes.
When I got my paws on an advanced copy of Moby Dyke, I posted a BeReal of the cover and someone in the replies was like, “THERE’S A LESBIAN BAR IN DC CALLED A LEAGUE OF HER OWN!” And then I shared it on IG and someone was like, “I HOPE CUBBYHOLE IS IN THERE!” So clearly lesbians have a lot of feelings about lesbian bars. Also, A League of Her Own and Cubbyhole are two of the bars you visit in the book. I’m wondering if there were any lesbian bars that people seemed especially enthusiastic about? Either during the research phase or during your actual visit?
K: YES, wow, yes. I would say the bar that people would really get bug-eyed about was Cubbyhole in New York City. Then the same people would often immediately follow up the Cubbyhole recommendation with the phrase “Oh and also you should go to Lipstick Lounge in Nashville!” If I pressed for a reason for why they wanted me to go to Lipstick Lounge, I usually got some solemn head-shaking and a response like, “shit gets wild there.” Also, a drunk queer in Milwaukee physically tapped my chest with their pointer finger while ordering me to go to Sue Ellen’s in Dallas. While the tapping was a little heavy and uncalled for, they were not wrong; I loved that bar.
One other thing that would happen a lot was that – after hearing about my book project – someone would ask me excitedly if I was going to The Lexington Club in San Francisco or Sisters in Philadelphia or Phase 1 in D.C., and then I would have to tell them that those bars had closed and watch their faces fall.
M: Oh my God, Krista– I just had such a visceral reaction to reading the words “Sisters in Philadelphia.” Sisters was the first lesbian bar I ever visited. I’m going to stop short of calling myself a regular, but my friends and I went all the time in college. We liked that it was in Center City and we could take the train directly there from the suburbs. It was such a weird space in terms of decor and general vibes. There were portraits of sexy cat women on the walls, a mac and cheese buffet, and an enormous upstairs dance area that was always vacant. They also hosted a ton of open mics, so you’d be hanging out with your friends and someone would start doing slam poetry about Palestinian children. Sisters closed in 2013 and there was a huge outpouring of grief from all kinds of dykes, near and far. I remember seeing pictures of people standing at the locked doors with flowers and notes, as if they were mourning a person who died.
You write about this paradoxical thing that happens to a lot of lesbian bars where they’re deeply beloved and even iconic in their communities, but that affection doesn’t actually translate into customers or a viable business model. The people you talked to probably have great memories of Sisters and The Lex and Phase 1, but they didn’t know that these bars have closed. Do you have any theories about why this is?
K: Definitely. A bar owner I talked to for the book mentioned that queers tend to forget that in order for us to have our own spaces, we have to actually, you know, go to them. I think a lot of us – if we ever frequented a particular dyke bar – sometimes associate that bar with a highly specific time in our lives. And when that chapter of our life ends (maybe we move, or get sober, or break up with someone, or just decide that staying in at night is more fulfilling)... we kind of forget about the bar, and what it once meant to us. That’s why there’s so much collective grief when a lesbian bar closes – it’s fully shutting the door on a period in lots of queer lives. A bar you loved closes, and you might suddenly remember, full force, what it was to be 23 and broke and surrounded by all your friends, who all lived in the same city, and were all single and working shitty jobs and dedicated to diving into as much fun and chaos as possible. It’s not just a bar. That bar was your queer home – possibly the only safe and accepting public home you had – and that time in your life was formative!
In Seattle, at the Wildrose, the owner said she regularly gets queers coming in who announce they haven’t been there in a decade. I actually watched it happen with a noisy group that busted in one night, excitedly yelling about how long it had been since they’d been there. And they seemed kind of proud of it? Like a weird flex. And I do get it; I used to go out a lot a lot, and as I get older, I do find that staying in is the absolute tits. It’s just paradoxical, like you said. There is nothing like a dyke bar. I just want them to be around so new folks can experience them!
M: I love this cultural explanation! You’re describing my life trajectory and relationship to Sisters exactly. After I graduated from college, the only job I could find paid next to nothing and I had to get there without a car, which meant I was constantly working and on the bus just to pay rent and eat. Also my body got older and I started to get real, adult hangovers. Almost overnight, going out stopped being fun and I started to feel a lot of guilt about spending money on drinks.
In discussions about why lesbian bars are disappearing, a lot of people point to the fact that women have less disposable income than men, and of course, economic inequality goes hand-in-hand with oppression and these disparities are especially real for women of color and trans women. The Lex closing in 2015 launched a lot of my Bay Area friends into full-on grief–it really cemented that San Francisco was no longer a place where you could move to as a young, scuzzy queer and find a place to belong. But of course, San Francisco was unaffordable long before 2015 and it’s likely there were multiple factors at play. The dyke bars you visited are so different in terms of geographic location and general vibe, but all of them are still open (I love that you visited each bar on two separate nights to get a fuller sense of the bar and ensure you didn’t base your findings on an off-night). Do you feel like the lesbian bars in your book are special in some way? How have they survived when so many others have closed in recent years?
K: The lesbian bars I covered in the book are absolutely special. We’re talking special glitter-rainbow-sobbing-face-emoji-spaces, some of them actual gay oases surrounded by 400 square miles of no dyke bars in any direction. But then again, The Lexington Club was really special. And so was Sisters. And Rubyfruit Jungle in New Orleans, and Pi in Minneapolis. And they’ve all closed. Not to Pollyanna it here, but I think every dedicated lesbian and queer bar is special, even if a bar is “special” because everyone knows it’s a little gross, with sticky floors and $2 beers and shocking bathrooms and walls that hundreds of people have written their names on in Sharpie. These spaces are special because they’re ours – they’re maybe the one place in town we can go to feel completely at home in public. To see and be seen by other queers. And when you don’t feel that from any other space, you can get a lil’ attached to a place that’s thrown open its doors specifically to you.
I don’t necessarily think the bars that are still open have some sort of secret to staying open, though. Lesbian bars close for lots of different reasons – sometimes it’s honestly just bad luck, like, maybe the bar doesn’t own the building, and then the building owner decides that condos would be excellent in that location, and that’s it. But! I will say that some of the bars that are still open are open because their owners want their bar to stay open more than anything else. And they’re fighting for it every day. Others are rebranding to be more emphatically inclusive; still others are adding events every night of the week to bring people in. And for some of them, it’s really working! I don’t know about you, but I’d find it very difficult to resist a Dildo Races night at my local lesbian bar in favor of Netflix alone at my house. The pull would just be too strong.
M: I’m absolutely coming to Dildo Races, but I need to be home by 10:30. Any later and I start to miss my dogs. My final question for you is kind of a big one: if you were to open your own dyke bar, what would it be called and where would it be located? What would the inside be like? Are Dildo Races nightly or just on weekends? imho, Krista’s is an incredible name for a lesbian bar.
K: This is my favorite question someone’s ever asked me about this project!! OMG I don’t think you would even believe how many hours I’ve spent thinking and discussing this exact thing. OK: If I was going to open a lesbian bar, it would be here, where I live, in Northfield, Minnesota, because I have a childhood fantasy of being able to easily walk to the place that I work, and also because there is no lesbian bar currently in Minneapolis, or even within 300 miles of Northfield, which would make my bar a ~homosexual destination~. Now, Northfield is a river town – it sits right on the Cannon River – and there is an abandoned building here that would be perfect for turning into a dyke bar. This place has the only patio set directly on the river in town, and it also has several hotel rooms (!!!) on top of it, and I swear to god, I can see it now: queers come to Northfield for the bar and I lovingly tuck them into bed after they’ve had one too many excellent cocktails. They go to sleep with their windows flung wide open to the sounds of the river rushing past, and they wake up to me bustling around in an apron downstairs, pouring coffee and baking muffins to bring up to them on a tray. Wow, this is turning into a B&B fantasy isn’t it? OK BACK TO THE BAR. It doesn’t have a name yet, but it does have events every night (dildo bingo is first Tuesday of the month), as well as weekend dance parties, and the music bounces across the river at night, irritating half the town and thrilling the other half. There are strife-filled city council meetings about the bar; it is a source of constant conversation in town. Teens try to sneak in all the time. We add a beach volleyball court. A gay bar buys the building next door. They add a patio. Together, we go in on a giant pontoon boat, and queers spend evenings cruising down the river at sunset, pride flags whipping in the wind as their hot butch captain points out blue herons and bald eagle nests. Northfield slowly and then rapidly becomes The Provincetown of the Midwest, and so many queer people move here that you have to reserve a time slot for the dog park, and the town cafe stops buying cow milk altogether, because what even is the point??
A lesbian bar is really only the first rung on the queer takeover ladder. Will you come visit?
M: Yes, absolutely. It would be the honor of a lifetime to drink an iced oat milk latte in the Provincetown of the Midwest. I love that there is a whole city development plan attached to your dyke bar, as well as heated municipal drama. That is vision!! I might attempt something similar in Oshkosh, WI.
Thank you so much for coming on the newsletter and chatting about Moby Dyke, which is available now from your local library or anywhere that sells books.
K: Thank you so much for having me!!!! CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU IN NORTHFIELD AT THE NEW LESBIAN BAR <3 <3 <3 🐉
Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Lesbian Bars in America is out TODAY!! You can find it wherever books are sold. Read an excerpt here.
Thank you so much for this wonderful interview! I'm totally picking this book up from All She Wrote ASAP!
As someone from MN, I am both incensed that I had no idea Pi existed and horrified at the idea of a dyke bar in Northfield. It's also a college town, and what would all those privileged (Carleton) and deeply Lutheran (St. Olaf) college students do with such a thing?!
Also, is Krista Burton not on social media? I can't seem to find anything, and when I tried looking for Effing Dykes, all that comes up right now is press stuff for Moby Dyke.
Finished the book and then read this interview :) It was really lovely and heartwarming!