As Pride Month continues and queer events and spaces bustle steadily through June, the forefront of the LGBTQ+ acronym wonders, where are the Lesbian bars?
In Australia, it seems the space doesn’t exist.
That is despite an estimated 4.5 per cent of Australians, 16 years and over, identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics
In real figures that is more than 910,000 LGBTQ+ Australians, with 1.5 per cent identifying as gay or lesbian. Exact statistics are not available as to how the 1.5 per cent identify.
This is a significant proportion of the population, and yet the infrastructure that supports these communities, notably for lesbian and queer women, remains disproportionately scarce.
The landscape of LGBTQ+ nightlife in Australia is constantly changing. In Sydney, the iconic Oxford Street claims its identity as being the home of Mardi Gras and beyond, housing numerous LGBTQ+-focused establishments.
Despite Sydney being the LGBTQ+ hotspot, its run of establishments mainly caters to gay men. So where are the lesbian girls meant to go?
Currently, Sydney’s only lesbian club is Birdcage, held on a Wednesday at The Bank Hotel in Newtown.
The event provides space for queer women in Sydney to find community and dance freely in a like-minded, female-dominated environment.
Outside of Birdcage, there are no permanent venues in Sydney that are solely dedicated to queer women.
Founder of Hands-On Entertainment, Erin Barnes, in an interview with Gamamari, noted her disappointment in the lack of lesbian nightlife when moving to Sydney from Manchester.
“I think it’s super important to have spaces that are particularly focused on lesbians, queer women, and non-binary people,” Ms Barnes said.
“Sydney has so many options for cis gay men… We have such a great community here in Sydney that we need to nourish.”
This isn’t just an Australian issue. Across the world, lesbian bars have been vanishing at an alarming rate.
Source: Mattson, 2023
In the United States, between 2007 and 2019, lesbian bar listings dropped by 51.6 per cent, according to sociologist, Greggor Mattson’s analysis of national business data. This outpaces the 36.6 per cent drop in bar listings overall, highlighting the unfortunate fact that lesbian bars are shutting up shop around the world.
In 2019, there were only 15 lesbian bars recorded in the United States. That number, at its lowest point, represented an average of one lesbian bar for every 22 states.
The history of the lesbian bar has always looked different from its gay male counterpart.
Scholars like Mattson and sociologist Amin Ghaziani have pointed to different styles of queer placemaking, whereby gay male bars historically have had more financial backing and visibility, and lesbian spaces were often underfunded, underrepresented, and short-lived.
The gender pay gap does have a part to blame in this issue, as two women in a relationship will bring home far less than two men.
Source: Workplace Gender Equality Agency
In Australia, women earn on average 78 cents to the dollar in comparison to men, according to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency.
In a year that adds up to $28,425.
Due to this, lesbian and queer women are far less likely to have the financial stability needed to own and run a business, particularly one that caters to a minority of people.
Between 1987 and 1992, as mixed-gender LGBTQ+ venues were becoming more popular, lesbian bar listings saw one of their sharpest declines.
Even during a period when lesbians needed a safe space, lesbian nightlife was disappearing, without archival records.
This gap has direct spatial consequences. Inner-city areas where lesbian bars once flourished, like Sydney’s Newtown or Melbourne’s Fitzroy, are increasingly unaffordable, not only to queer business owners but to their working-class, female-identifying counterparts.
A Reddit thread from 2022 asked the question, “Melbournian wlw (women-loving-women) people! Where are the lesbian bars!!!!!”
Unfortunately for user 7500733, they were met with the harsh reality of a total of zero establishments, but rather several lesbian events that run every so often.
Instances like these further highlight the importance of the lesbian bar.
In the U.S., The Lesbian Bar Project (TLBP) was founded in 2020 to document and financially support the 16 remaining lesbian bars in the country.
After launching a short documentary and crowdfunding campaign, the initiative raised over USD $300,000 to help amplify and keep the doors of these venues open.
Through the help of this initiative, TLBP has helped grow the number of lesbian bars throughout the country. The initiative helped to raise the number of lesbian bars from 16 to 34, as of 2025.
In 2025, with queer visibility at an all-time high, it is ironic that such a venue for this wide community ceases to exist within Australia.
Western Sydney University social geographer, Andrew Gorman-Murray said it was not low demand that was causing the lack of lesbian nightlife.
“For groups that are still not politically and socially equal, like lesbians and queer women, it’s important to establish those communities for solidarity, and to provide a base for all social and political agitation and movement,” Mr Gorman-Murray said.
“For those kinds of reasons they are still important.”
Queer-centric spaces hold significance to those who gather there, and provide a place for queer people to seek refuge within their communities.
image: @birdcage_syd
