At its peak Philadelphia had as many as six lesbian bars.
By Ashlee Moore
Philadelphia’s gay bar scene took off shortly after World War II in what’s known today as the Gayborhood, a neighborhood bounded by 11th and Broad streets and Pine and Chestnut streets, Bob Skiba, curator of the William Way LGBT Community Center‘s John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives, said.
“They were really seedy and usually run by the mob,” Skiba said. “It was generally considered a white male enclave, so people of color and women did not always feel welcome there. It became important for women to find spaces that were really theirs.”
One of the first well-known and well-documented lesbian bars in the 1960s was Rusty’s, located behind what is now Moriarty’s. At their peak, Philadelphia had as many as five or six lesbian bars operating at the same time through the 70s, while the 1980s became the high point of queer women’s bars with the opening of Sneakers, Mamzelle’s, and the short-lived Black lesbian bar Mahogany, according to Skiba’s lesbian and gay travel guides.
Skiba’s 20-year collection of archival documents and oral histories shows many of these spaces were centered on queer women at certain times or on particular floors but weren’t wholly dedicated to them.
Sisters was a hub for political action, Timaree Schmit, a Philadelphia-based sexologist, educator, and former performer and producer at Sisters Nightclub said, with organizers using the venue to raise money, gather signatures, and introduce political issues to new audiences through the shows Schmit herself produced there.
Queer bars were historically more willing to open their doors to community events for free, knowing that attendees would support the bar in return, she said.
Davis, author of The Queen’s English, an LGBTQIA dictionary, noted lesbian bars were also sites where early forms of queer language, identity, and expression—such as butch and femme—were shaped.
By the turn of the century, even long-standing establishments like Sisters couldn’t compete with high overhead and nights that got slower and slower, Schmit said.
In an era when queer people faced widespread discrimination in public life, lesbian bars offered a rare sense of safety and belonging, Schmit said. Spaces like Sisters allowed queer women to socialize without the constant vigilance required in mainstream, mixed-gender venues, she added.
In mixed or straight spaces, unwanted male advances were so normalized that going out meant “you’re going to have to have your guard up the whole time,” Schmit said.