Who belongs in a lesbian bar?
A minor altercation at a longtime West Village bar has revived this question online and prompted debate about queer spaces and whom they “belong” to. Like many viral conversations, this one started on TikTok.
In January, New York City-based influencer Lexi Stout posted a video about her night out at Cubbyhole, a lesbian bar on West 12th Street, and a staple of the community for more than 30 years.
According to Stout’s video about the evening, she was invited there by a lesbian friend, it was her first time at a lesbian bar, and she was having a blast.
After her straight male friend popped in to say hi, Stout said, another woman approached him and asked, “‘What are you doing here?’”
In her video, Stout described feeling unwelcome herself and also taken aback as the bar was full of “flamboyantly gay men.” She did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Near the end of her video, Stout asked the camera, “Are straight males not allowed to go to a lesbian bar?”
Two weeks, 7,000-plus comments, and 1.5 million views later, the woman who allegedly provoked the confrontation, Katie Pypes, decided to respond with a TikTok of her own.
In it, she recalled the event differently, noting that important context was missing.
Pypes said that, on that particular day in January, she was enjoying a regular night at the bar where she met her wife nearly a decade ago.
As she made her way to the restrooms of the cramped, 824-square-foot establishment, she found her way blocked by Stout’s straight male friend.
“I tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey excuse me, no one can get through,’” Pypes said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “He rolled his eyes at me and scoffed a bit, so I asked him, ‘What are you doing in this bar?’ It didn’t go well.”
According to Pypes, after Stout’s friend group stepped in to clarify that the man was with them, the man asked Pypes, “If I wasn’t with her, would that be a…
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