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Owner Jolene Linsangan calls her first year a “rollercoaster,” even after a lifetime spent in and around the restaurant industry. In San Francisco, the bar Jolene’s opened just a year ago to fill the void for queer people who are left out of the male-centric bar spaces elsewhere in the city. A crowd at Jolene’s in San Francisco Courtesy of Jolene’s Many of the bar owners I spoke to are getting by trading off bills, hoping for landlord understanding, and maxing out their credit cards some aren’t sure if they can last past June or July if they remain closed. Without major community and even government support, COVID-19 could reduce those numbers further - or cause a full-on extinction. In the 1980s, there were hundreds, according to a study which has confirmed the gut feeling in queer America that the gay bar is in decline, and lesbian bars are the most endangered. While there is no official Queer Bar Registry, current estimates put the number of lesbian bars in the United States at a vanishingly small 16. There’s no handbook.”Īs the pandemic stretches onward, America’s few remaining lesbian bars are hanging on for dear life, and waiting for their moment. I’ve been in this industry so long, and I’ve never gone through anything like this, and neither has anybody else. “Having already lost everything, all our food, and reopening again, which cost a lot of money, we had to close four days later. That triumph and relief were short-lived: On March 15, Nashville ordered all bars and restaurants to close to curb the spread of COVID-19. “Everybody who walked in those doors, we had the biggest hugs ever,” Suppan says. The owners, staff, and friends threw themselves into eight days of repairs to save the bar. Co-owners Christa Suppan and Jonda Valentine rallied their community to save the bar a friend launched a GoFundMe that raised over $16,000. Among the businesses hit was the Lipstick Lounge, a lesbian-owned “bar for humans” open for almost 18 years. On the night of March 2, a tornado churned through Nashville, ripping through whole neighborhoods and damaging swaths of restaurants.