Seven's words inspired me to invite some women to hang out with me. And so if you deviate from heteronormativity, then I want to love and embrace your queer self in all the ways that you want to be." "We find ways to be separate, and that's just ridiculous when we need each other so much," she said. "We're just the 10%, if that. She encouraged me to continue building community where I could. Throughout the process of collecting interviews, I began to fear that it would be much more difficult to meet queer women as these public spaces continued to disappear.īut Seven reminded me that even as spaces disappear, queer women won't. She has discovered more about herself and her own identity through spending time there, similar to how Seven Harris did at Isis. "She's been a snake wrangler, worked at Trader Joe's, and her apartment is exquisite," Agatha said. "Like, just everything that you want out of such a space."Īgatha said hanging out in her friend's apartment is a way to connect with people who identify themselves in all kinds of ways. She said one of her favorite third spaces is actually the home of one of her friends. "Not that I've never set foot in them, but I just like that is not where I conduct most of my space experiences, if you will." "I don't frequent any kind of bar," said my friend Agatha Eydenberg. A recent study showed only 21 lesbian bars remain in the U.S., down from 200 in the 1980s. And with the rise of the Internet and other types of "third spaces" such as coffee shops, bars are just one of the many ways people meet each other these days. Today, there are no bars exclusively dedicated to women in Cleveland, and that's not unusual. Seven said she thinks lesbian bars started to close because women were at least perceived to drink less or stay at home more than men. You know, you walked in the bar, like the door was here and the bar was here, and there was a little bit of a dance floor. "I was just this nerdy Black girl, you know, trying to find her way," she said with a laugh. "And Isis was small. Her favorite bar in the 1980s and 1990s was called Isis. "I came out when I was 19 years old and I am 55 now," said Phyllis Seven Harris, the Center's executive director and my former boss. So I asked some of my friends and coworkers. I wanted to learn more about queer women's nightlife in Cleveland: what it used to be like and how it is today. Why didn't that seem to happen in the bars? On this night, though, there were none in sight, and the energy was overwhelmingly masculine - just like at most of the other gay bars I knew.Īt the time, I was youth coordinator at the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland. I worked with people who expressed their gender in all kinds of ways. "Women?" he said, and thought for a moment. "They come in spurts." "Where are all the women?" I asked one of the other guys at the bar. One night, I was sitting at the Leather Stallion, a gay bar in Cleveland, and couldn't help but notice something missing.