NPR: How Dave's Lesbian Bar builds queer community in New York

By Benham Jones

In my neighborhood of Astoria in Queens, N.Y., there's a Dave's for almost everything, from Dave's Shoes to Dave's Cabinets. It's a brand that camouflages itself into any local landscape — reliable but nearly invisible. And for the past few years, there's been a new Dave in town: Dave's Lesbian Bar, a pop-up event series that I've been involved with as a volunteer and a worker.

Dave's Lesbian Bar is a monthly pop-up event started by Kristin Dausch — also known as "Dave" — a Midwest transplant who landed in New York in 2009 and began working as a nanny while moonlighting as a singer, songwriter and performer. After taking stock of the community they'd built over three years of co-hosting the long-running local open mic program "Show N' Tell," as well as the emerging network of neighborhood mutual aid organizations that cropped up during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dausch started to dream big. Given the steady closure of lesbian bars across the country, documented by the preservation campaign The Lesbian Bar Project, they began to dream of building a queer-led bar and music venue in the neighborhood that functioned as a mutual aid hub during the day.