Within minutes of stepping into Juice, San Francisco’s hottest new rotating lesbian nightclub, 23-year-old Shannon O’Malley realized she was on unfamiliar turf. Promoter Medeia Cohen’s club, with rotating themes — Bangkok Brothel, Hospital, Jeannie in a Bottle — was designed as a supersexy, highly eroticised blend of nightclub and theme park. On one Western-themed night there were girls donning cowboy drag and Daisy Duke getups. Other women were quarantined in a mock petting zoo or standing in line to get branded like cattle. At the center of it all was an ice sculpture of a naked woman where O’Malley poured shots between the ice maiden’s breasts and leaned over to catch the booze in her mouth as it came out through Ms. Ice’s um, other private areas. O’Malley, a Miami native, had never seen anything like it. Welcome to the brave new world of lesbian entertainment.

GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN

Although at press time Juice was looking for a new home, it looks as if Mariah Hanson, the pre-eminent lesbian club promoter in San Francisco, might just be able to help. Hanson has been producing events ever since she opened Club Skirts in 1989 to address the needs of what she calls “over 1,100 entertainment-starved women.” Club Skirts led to the infamous Girl Spot as well as to the Dinah Shore Weekend in Palm Springs, Calif., and the Monterey Women’s Festival. Her events are sexy, trendy, mainstream, and packed with women. Now Hanson is doing what some say can’t be done. Last month she opened a seven-day-a-week lesbian club in San Francisco — the first in 12 years — called the Cherry Bar and Lounge.

“This club is more about community and less about my own programming,” says Hanson, who has offered Cherry Bar to all Bay area lesbian promoters. Five women have already jumped at the offer, including popular dyke party promoter Paige Hodel, who created Club Q, the longest-running lesbian nightclub in the city. “I’ve had my day. It’s a remarkable and exciting opportunity for me to act as a consultant to younger promoters, and to help foster a positive, win-win environment instead of this cutthroat, greedy environment the straight club owners foster.”

Lesbian circuit club promoters in Southern California have a different experience altogether. Competition there is fierce. Yvonne Marquez and her partner of 11 years, Patricia Gomez, are Latina women in their early 30s who promote roving nightclubs with names like Venus Goddesses and Girls, Isis, and Desert Goddess. These circuit clubs, now in Southern California and Phoenix, move from city to city and state to state, attracting upward of 400 women a night. They’ve partnered with major record labels to give away CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, and promo items from artists like Madonna, Shakira, and JLo. They have go-go goddesses and topless dancers, performance artists and drag kings, shot specials and cool DJs, and lots of really hot women in attendance.

Nearby, Nicolle DiSimone and Amy Rubin are owners of a year-old Southern California women’s circuit party, the PussyCat Lounge for Girls, which draws 1,000 women a night. Their 20-something clientele is hip and cutting-edge and there as much for the erotic experience (think spontaneous lap dances and plenty of skin) as for the revelry. PussyCat’s infamous sex-kitten dancers — mainly lesbian — have an almost cultlike following.

“Women no longer have to settle for dive bars in bad neighborhoods,” says DiSimone. “We are entitled to enjoy the same lifestyle and atmosphere as our straight and gay male counterparts. Women want big, exciting events packed with other women. We see ourselves as the new breed of lesbian club. Bigger, better, and more outrageous.”

Inc Pagliuca understands that concept well. Opening night at her new roving party, Club Mango-LA, offered a live erotic show in which three female performance artists were handcuffed to a chain-link fence onstage. Pagliuca, 40, says, “We are trying to make this a high-energy, cross-culture club with a bit of an edge, where all types of lesbians will have fun. We don’t want to cater only to one subculture, such as the lipstick-lesbian crowd or the S/M crowd. We’re aiming for a place where everyone will feel comfortable and have a fun night out.”

This new club concept has taken hold all across the country. In Chicago, Jennifer Murphy has been running Girlbar for six years, and she entertains over 300 women a night on weekends. “I see it as a bar … where you can find women who don’t fit the typical lesbian stereotype,” Murphy says of her 20- and 30-something clientele. “Our customers would say ‘lipstick lesbians.’”

In Boston, promoter Melinda Ancillo’s lesbian circuit event, Club Europa, has become a veritable institution in only four years, pulling in 400 women each Friday (and even more to its annual liquid latex party). “For a number of years, we were the only dance nightclub in Boston for women,” Ancillo says. “We take that responsibility very seriously.”

Ancillo, 40, remembers her first bar experience as unpleasant: “The only thing I really remember … is having to dodge a beer bottle thrown by one woman at another.” These days, she says, “Our nightlife is just one aspect of our complex society, which has moved openly into mainstream society.”

Alana Keynes, 24, is one of the dykes benefiting from this mainstreaming. By day, she’s a D.C. newspaper reporter; by night, she’s ClubGirl — an undercover reviewer for a lesbian Web site. Her first bar visit two years ago, to D.C.’s Phase One, was quite a shock. “Phase One in particular is known for its older women sporting mullets, which was something I had never seen before in mass quantity,” says Keynes. “The place was pretty small and seedy, but that’s to be expected, especially with lesbian bars.”

Across town from Juice, Margarita Samra, a 45-year-old leather dyke and bartender at the Pendulum (a 33-year-old gay men’s bar), wanted to carve out space for lesbians in San Francisco’s Castro District. Her weekly lesbian nightclub, Alley Catz, was born last year after endless grassroots promotion, and attracted one of the most diverse groups of lesbians in San Francisco, perhaps because of the Pendulum’s reputation as a bar for men of color. A no-cover dance club with a record-breaking 13-hour-long happy hour, Alley Catz has become a welcome respite for lesbians, many of whom migrate at some point during the evening to the Lexington (which doesn’t have a dance floor). Samra, who says she doesn’t like the feel of big dance productions (“I’m up against the pink wall of exclusion”), says that women are attracted to Alley Catz in part because of their special events (such as “Hep Cat” for hepatitis research).

HERSTORY FORGOTTEN

It’s not that those 13-hour-long happy hours aren’t fun, but some lesbian bar pioneers point out that our ability to enjoy those experiences openly was won by battles of previous generations. Once upon a time, says Samra, “Every time women went out as gay women, they were breaking the law. Everything had to be underground. Too many women don’t get that … the battles that were fought don’t even register with them.”

Charlene Schneider was only 17 when she walked into her first lesbian bar, the Tiger Lounge in New Orleans. “I felt at home, because finally, I knew where I belonged. … It was wonderful seeing people like myself,” Schneider, now 62, recalls. “I saw eight of the butchest women you’ve ever seen in your life. I fell in love with each and every one of them.”

The year was 1957, and McCarthyism had a stranglehold on America; it was a time when lesbians were an illegal social group and cops made regular arrests at queer bars. Schneider herself was arrested four times in bar raids and, in the 1960s, she lost her job at NASA because they considered her lifestyle a security risk. In 1977, Schneider created a safe haven for herself and other lesbians by opening Charlene’s, a lesbian bar in New Orleans.

While Charlene’s was still in its infancy, Rikki Streicher’s lesbian bar Maude’s had been open in San Francisco for 11 years. Though Maude’s and Charlene’s were founded in different decades, each opened while homosexuality was still an illegal act in their respective states. In fact, when Maude’s was founded, simply having a female bartender was illegal in California.

“Lesbian bar cultures of the past were directly related to the gay civil-rights movement precisely because these cultures were created by women who were willing to fight for their right to public space, often at great risk to their personal and professional lives,” says Kelly Hankin, assistant professor of film studies at the University of Redlands, and author of “The Girls in the Back Room: Looking at the Lesbian Bar.” “The fight for public space is still central to our civil-rights agenda … and these women were staking their claim on space well before it was crystallized around politics.”

Bars were “a place for lesbians to come to and to struggle with what was then an emerging political movement,” agrees 51-year-old Nisa Donnelly, author of “The Bar Stories.” “They were the center of the lesbian community. … You have to remember that there were very few women’s bookstores, Gay Pride was still a very small parade, lesbians were not on television or in movies or in the mainstream media. That was all just beginning. So if you wanted to be with other lesbians, the bars were where you went.”

Like Schnieder, Eja TaUmojo, a 57-year-old university instructor, started bar-hopping when she was still underage. “My girlfriend … was 18 with a fake ID, and mostly I spent time sitting in the car drooling while she went inside and had fun,” she laughs.

TaUmojo, an African-Indian lesbian who lives in rural Oregon with her partner of 22 years, doesn’t go to bars much anymore. She points to the younger crowd, modern music, and changing lesbian culture. “A friend of mine took a woman home one night and it turned out to be a man. There are so many titles now. Before, it was easy; you were either butch or femme.”

Oregonian Michelle Barnard came out in 1975, when the bar was the only place to meet socially. She doesn’t go much now, either, for similar reasons. But she remembers the early days. “I guess we broke some ice for [younger dykes]. We probably experienced more homophobic violence. I was beat up on the streets three times in my first year out, and I’m pretty petite.”

BYE BYE, LOVE?

“When a new women’s bar opens and the novelty wears off, the women don’t support it as much,” says Samra. “Regardless of how much women bitch that there aren’t more women’s bars … the facts speak for themselves. Women don’t support a seven-day-a-week club.”

Audrey Joseph is a club promoter for some of the decade’s hottest gay men’s clubs in San Francisco — Pleasuredome, Club Universe — and some lesbian one-offs. She’s been promoting clubs since the ’60s in New York and California, and says she decided what kind of club she wanted based on atmosphere and music (including big name acts like Cyndi Lauper and the B-52’s), but in the end, “what I wanted attracted more men than women.” Joseph, herself a lesbian, agrees that women’s support for bars has dwindled; she cites, then rejects, theories such as age, nesting and depoliticization.

“We don’t need the bars the way we did 20 or 30 years ago,” says Donnelly. “So the bars have moved from being the center of our communities into a more logical place, which is to fill an entertainment function.” Like many, she cites the 12-step movement as part of the change. “Alcoholism came out of the closet in a very big way,” she adds. “Sadly, I do think that bars and bar culture contributed to alcoholism. When that’s the only place you can go to be with other lesbians, and you drink, and everyone around you is drinking, then most women are going to drink.”

Our desire for stringent identity politics may also be changing. The Wild Side West has been a San Francisco lesbian bar for 33 years, though the owners regard it as a “sports bar.” In Chicago, two lesbians own the neighborhood Old Town Ale House; in Memphis, the lesbian-owned Madison Flame is known more for its kick-ass blues than for its dyke clientele. In Salt Lake City, some lesbian bars are membership-only affairs. And “Xena” nights brought straight folks to lesbian bars, changing the landscape in some neighborhoods forever.

So have lesbian bars morphed into überglam circuit clubs?

“They haven’t really morphed; they’ve been preyed upon by straight establishments,” argues Barbara Hecker, owner of Silicon Valley’s Club Savoy. “A common practice is for a failing straight bar to host a gay night to try to attract more business. Because there’s less competition for the gay market, the straight community will take this avenue to try to capture patrons,” she says. “Gay patrons will flock to the new bar because it’s something different to go to. After a couple of months, existing permanent gay establishments will lose customers due to the increase in competition. Most gay bars will end up going broke and will close.”

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Despite the growing popularity of circuit clubs, some permanent lesbian bars do continue to thrive, and they pride themselves on offering a safe haven for lesbians, a sentiment that seems to harken back to those expressed by pioneering lesbian bar owners.

The Savoy, founded in 1969, moved to its new Santa Clara, Calif., location in the 1970s (making it one of the oldest lesbian bars in the country). The Savoy is popular with a diverse crowd, probably because they never charge a cover, haven’t changed their drink prices in half a decade, and offer the back room for private parties at no charge. Savoy, which attracts up to 250 women a night, is the only exclusively lesbian bar in Silicon Valley.

Mary Young, the 27-year-old manager of the Flame in San Diego, feels we owe early bar owners a great deal. “[Flame owner] Carla [Coshow] once said she does this because … she’s playing a part in many, many women’s lives and offering them a place where they can be comfortable with who they are seven days a week.” The Flame, once a 1940s steak-and-bourbon restaurant, is now one of San Diego’s two lesbian bars. The bar fills to capacity every weekend with “sexy” women — goth, trans, butch/femme — and hosts a house band (Flame Fatales), drag-king shows, fund-raisers, live music, go-go dancers, and some oddball features such as “butt darts” and lube wrestling. Though the Flame is bigger than the other San Diego lesbian bar, Six Degrees, Young insists, “I think all the gay bars out here serve the same purpose … to provide a safe and exciting environment where you can celebrate being who and what you are.”

Dawn Jackson’s bar, Buddies II, is still where you go to do that. The only lesbian-owned and -operated club in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, the 20-year-old Buddies II brings in 1,000 women a week for a long list of events: karaoke, sand and water volleyball, fund-raisers, bands, live singers, card readers, weddings, baby showers and memorial services. It’s the kind of bar that Jackson, 49, would have loved to see when she came out at 19. “Thirty years ago, it was frightful,” she recalls.

Tired of fighting for space in gay clubs helped spur 50-something Sue Pierce and her sister to open Sisters Dance Bar in Portland, Maine, nine years ago. Just two hours from Boston, Sisters is less high-energy and lip gloss — just a friendly, comfy place where pool reigns supreme, lesbians still read poetry, and champagne is served free on New Year’s Eve. On Sundays, the bar opens its kitchen, serving burgers, hot dogs, and pizza. It is, in short, the kind of lesbian bar you rarely find these days. “The stand-alone lesbian bar seems to be becoming extinct,” admits Pierce. “The fact that we are small and the only girl bar in the state brings women from all over to celebrate with us. This certainly helps support us and helps pay the bills, but needless to say, a lesbian bar is not a for-profit endeavor.”

THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL?

Sure, it’s great that we can party now. But the lack of awareness about our own political history and the violence women endured to create these dyke-safe spaces concern some queer pioneers. Though the mainstream media glossed over it, Southern dykes were acutely aware that the Otherside Lounge, the Atlanta bar bombed in the mid-1990s (following a similar bombing at an abortion clinic) was a lesbian bar. Sure, activists say, lesbians no longer suffer through police bar raids or unattended dance club fires (like the one that killed dozens of New Orleans queers decades ago), but a bomb at a lesbian bar just six years ago is still a sign of the shaky ground we stand on.

Our political evolution and increasing visibility as lesbians — we’re on TV, in movies, on the covers of magazines — has made it so we don’t have to rely on the lesbian bar to be our one safe haven. But, while having our evenings of fun, bar dykes like Schneider remind us not to forget their political legacy. She’s certainly hoping Kim Ficaro doesn’t either. Ficaro, a 38-year-old clubber, took over Schneider’s old bar, dubbed it Kim’s 940, and now pulls in 500 women a week with shows, crawfish boils, and fund-raisers for women’s football. She also raised the ire of many longtime Charlene’s customers when she hosted a popular wet T-shirt contest this summer.

“Lesbian clubs,” Ficaro says defiantly, “are now being accepted as a place where people go to have fun, just like your average straight clubs.”

Perhaps demanding our right to party without political baggage is the newest lesbian form of activism.

“I don’t think modern lesbians feel they have to be radical to be a potent social force,” concludes Hanson. “To truly be radical, it’s fashionable to resist success, assimilation, and financial stability. But women have always been at the bottom rung of the financial ladder, and radical activism has inadvertently kept us there. It’s empowering to see women successfully navigate between financial success and activism. Being able to afford an HRC dinner certainly doesn’t make the same statement as burning your bra, but at least if we decide to burn it, we can afford to buy a new one. Now, that isn’t to say all lesbians are financially stable, but at least more lesbians are breaking though. Our bars and nightclubs reflect that change.”

*Some names have been changed at the request of those being interviewed.

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