Last month, Boston’s LGBTQ community welcomed Dani’s Queer Bar, the city’s first lesbian bar in decades. With the opening of over a dozen bars for queer women around the nation since the height of the Covid pandemic, the venue is part of a nationwide trend known as the “lesbian bar renaissance.”
More than two years went into creating Dani’s, which bills itself as a “space for Sapphic, trans, and non-binary community members.”
Thais Rocha, the bar’s founder, threw queer women’s events all around the city before announcing in March 2022 that she was starting a fundraising campaign to create a physical location.
“It’s all about creating the space that you don’t see out there for yourself and for other people. And that’s what we’re trying to do a little by little,” Rocha stated to WGBH in Boston back in 2022. “I want everybody to see that it is possible, and it doesn’t have to be something so scarce and hard to attain.”
Rocha was one of 24 small-business owners who received a SPACE grant in May of last year from Mayor Michelle Wu’s Office of Economic Opportunity and Inclusion, which aided in the establishment of the bar.
Dani’s Queer Bar, which was purportedly named after Rocha’s American Eskimo puppy, ultimately opened on September 12 following delays brought on by permit concerns.
Stevie Dickie went to the grand opening with Jace Williams, her girlfriend. Dickie expressed her happiness at having a place in Boston dedicated to serving queer women, transgender individuals, and nonbinary persons.
“I felt so good to be surrounded by people like me. It was so invigorating. My heart was so full,” Dickie stated. “Any space we have for community is important, especially since we have so many really male-centric spaces. As long as I’ve lived here, there really was no place for us to go and meet people and be with our specific community. People were really missing that. There was kind of like a hole, so I think [Dani’s] is really filling a need here in our city.”
Prior to Dani’s, there hadn’t been a dedicated lesbian bar in the city for at least 20 years, according to a number of lesbians who live in Boston and numerous local press stories.
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A few reasons for this decades-long trend, according to Erica Rose, co-founder of The Lesbian Bar Project, which has chronicled and raised money for the few lesbian bars still operating in the United States, are gentrification, misogyny in small-business financing, and the gender pay gap.
From 1998 until 2019, Kristen Porter, a prominent figure in the lesbian scene in Boston, committed herself to organizing these kinds of mobile events around the surrounding region through her event production companies, Dyke Nights and Kristen Porter Presents.
Lesbian events have always been in demand in Boston, despite the fact that many long-term venues for Sapphic gatherings, such as Somewhere and Indigo bar, have closed their doors during the 1980s and 1990s.
She expressed her excitement that Dani’s will offer a dedicated area for LGBTQ customers to congregate.
By: nbcnews.com
