LOS ANGELES – A pleasantly bitter, gently botanical, sort of purple non-alcoholic cocktail in it, and I was just happy to be caught in the lure of the ruby fruit.
What could be better on a rainy weeknight than chatting with friends and strangers crushed at the bar, snacking on fried giant beans and tearing apart limp slices of mortadella drizzled with hot honey?
The crowd, the food, the playlist, the efficiency and warmth of the staff – a few hours later, when my group started winding down and putting on their coats, I almost resisted leaving. Surely we can have another round of drinks and hot dogs, or at least order some canelés with a crispy base. We could hang out here forever anyway, or at least until 10pm when they close.
The Ruby Fruit is a small wine bar in a nondescript mall on Sunset Boulevard that shares a parking lot with a Domino’s and a Baskin-Robbins, but it’s hard to overstate the collective joy in the room. Dedicated lesbian spaces are rare in Los Angeles (or just about anywhere) and usually exist temporarily as pop-ups. But this one would be here tomorrow night, and the night after that, and the night after that.
Emily Bielagus and Mara Herbkersman, the owners, describe the Ruby Fruit as “a strip-mall wine bar for the sapphic-minded,” and more specifically a safe space for lesbian, transgender, and non-binary people.
The bar, which opened in February, does not accept reservations. Most evenings, even before the doors open, people are waiting outside in a chatty queue, smoking, bumping into friends, picking out wines by the glass.
If you land one of the tables, an evening at Ruby Fruit can easily turn into a real dinner. In addition to the snack dishes of marinated olives and grilled bread, loaded hot dogs and grilled chicken sandwiches, there are a handful of carefully curated plates – Japanese sweet potatoes roasted over charcoal, glazed with dashi butter, as well as smoked beets on ricotta, and a succulent salad of chicory and citrus. A few desserts, including a tender olive oil cake and Cara Cara orange sorbet, are made in house.
But the wine bar’s beauty lies in its creative use of nooks and crannies, shared counters and narrow ledges, corridors and corners where bodies and drinks aren’t supposed to fit, but somehow they do. The crowd is cooperative and accommodating. The room is full.
None of this matches the recent story of the lesbian bar in America, which is one of sad, empty tables and slow, inevitable decline. When Mrs. Bielagus and Mrs. Herbkersman told people they were going to open one, they were strongly advised not to disturb: the lesbian bar was dead.
Erica Rose and Elina Street drew attention to the dwindling number of lesbian bars across the country — from a few hundred in the 1980s to about two dozen today — with their 2020 short documentary and campaign called “The Lesbian Bar Project.”
Only in New York City three lesbian bars survive. And in Los Angeles, the Oxwood Inn 2017 closedwhile the Palms, the last lesbian bar in West Hollywood, closed ten years ago. Since then, this city’s lesbian bars have largely been limited to pop-ups (and, like Lena Wilson wrote in The Times, to the fictional queer spaces of TV shows set in Los Angeles, such as “The L Word: Generation Q” And “To live”).
While West Hollywood’s gay bar and nightlife scene is thriving, it generally caters to cisgender men — for the rest of the LGBTQ community, it’s not always clear which spaces will make them feel welcome.
Priya Arora, the host of the podcast”Strange Desi(and a former Times editor), said that as a non-binary person, they find the term “lesbian bar” unreliable, as it can be used to suggest anti-trans ideas about who can and cannot identify as a woman.
“But when I see a bar labeled ‘lesbian and queer’ or ‘lesbian and trans’, it indicates that this isn’t just another gay bar,” they said. “This is a really safe space, and it’s changing the narrative of what it means to be a gay bar, a lesbian bar, or a gay bar.”
When a second new queer bar opened in Los Angeles this year, it seemed clear that the lesbian bar wasn’t dead, and that people were building on it with intent and care, treating it like the sprawling space it can be, making it more explicit inclusive.
Mo Faulk, Kate Greenberg and Charlotte Gordon opened Honey is with Star Lovein late February, and emphasized welcoming everyone to their lesbian and queer bar – especially the trans community.
The bar, which also has a thoughtful list of non-alcoholic drinks, doesn’t really have a kitchen but sells soft pretzels during happy hour and invites food vendors to cater events. On a recent Sunday, Honey’s held its first drag brunch, featuring performances by ignacio daddy And Twinka Massalaamong other things, and served Jamaican patties by the Grohuis.
Honey’s is open late, until midnight or 2am, depending on the night, and DJs often liven up the dance floor. The bar also hosts the occasional comedy and karaoke night, as well as pop-up markets, an Oscars watch party and a recent screening of the 1999 queer classic,”But I’m a cheerleader.” Ms Greenberg noted that someone had also recently booked their 62nd birthday party there.
The team behind Honey’s aren’t sure how long the bar will last in this exact form – they signed a three-month lease with hopes of renewing. But what’s clear, after just over a month of operation, is that the space already feels essential to the city.