Rainbow Spaces Matter, Even When You're Not a Regular
Reflections on a lesbian bar, its owner, and the power of connection
Note to subscribers: Thanks for sticking with me! I took a break over the summer to travel and relax, and to immerse in the work whirlwind that is August and the start of the school year. Now that the school year is underway, I plan to resume posting once or twice per month.
My first memories at the bar were made with volleyball teammates.
On the backyard court wedged between a brick wall and tall picket fences, we’d take turns facing off—serving and digging, diving, setting, and hitting, then egging each other on from the sidelines, beer bottles slick in our grip.
I remember a heightened awareness of my body—feet bare, sand clinging to forearms and shins, the stretch in my hamstrings, bottom, and back as I crouched, anticipating where the ball might land, the tingle at the nape of my neck when I noticed a woman’s gaze lingering.
I wasn’t a great player, maybe not even good, but I enjoyed how the effort felt in my muscles and lungs, the camaraderie of competing and sweating amid music, sunshine, and laughter—a crackle of attraction in the air.
Though I didn’t acknowledge it then, that was the season my sexuality began to rise like mercury in August, a sweltering Richmond August. The following year, when it got too hot for me to ignore, I quit volleyball, attempting to bury that part of my identity. It didn’t work.
Eventually I went back, not to volleyball but to Babe’s, this time as an out lesbian.
More memories flicker from the bar’s cavernous interior: leaning against a wall, sipping a Zima, sensing the bottle’s ridges under my fingers as I watched my date draw back her pool cue. And later, dancing under a disco ball, a dizzying heat sizzling when her body brushed against mine.
I hadn’t thought about my early days at Babe’s, either chapter, in a long time.
Then last week, when I unfolded Thursday’s Richmond Times Dispatch and placed it on the checkout desk, I stopped. There, on the front page, was a photo of the bar with the headline, “Babe’s owner dies at 71.” Tears sprang to my eyes. I scooped the paper up and carried it to my office, not wanting to break down in front of students.
Why was this hitting me so hard?
I’d heard that Vicky Hester, the bar’s longtime owner, was struggling with cancer, but we didn’t really know each other. As for Babe’s, I went there occasionally the first couple years after coming out but wasn’t a regular. I’ve returned over the decades since, but not that often. As an introvert and morning person, the late-night bar scene just isn’t my normal habitat, even if it’s a friendly lesbian bar.
Yet, Babe’s was and is more than a bar.
It is a vessel of LGBTQIA history, especially lesbian history, and a vessel of memory.
Located on a prominent corner in the heart of Carytown, a district that buzzes with activity, it’s also a bold testament to our community’s presence in Richmond and a hub for queer-oriented activities. I participated in a few readings there back in 2017.
Yet even when years pass between my visits to Babe’s, I walk or drive by that corner regularly on the way to get a haircut, shop at Penzey’s or Mongrel, catch a movie at the Byrd, or go out for a meal, coffee, or ice cream with friends. Each time I see the gold awning or the window lettering, “oldest lesbian bar on the East Coast, est. 1978,” it kindles a kind of affirmation inside.
“We’re still here,” it proclaims. I was beginning to understand my tears.
I looked down at the paper in my hands. It wasn’t just the news itself, I realized.
It was where the news was—on the front page of a newspaper published 90 minutes south of the White House. Lesbian news, LGBTQIA news above the fold at a time when our history, our rights, and for transgender folks, even their existence, are being erased or increasingly threatened.
Threats. Anti-LGBTQIA laws and rhetoric. Erasure. Violence. They aren’t new.
In the mid-late 1990’s, people who identified as LGBTQIA were fighting to keep their jobs, their children, to access healthcare, to visit their lover in the hospital, to stay in their home after a partner’s death, to live their lives outside the closet. Some still are.
A few localities began to take steps toward equality. Yet, at the same time, vocal politicians, preachers, and radio personalities demonized us, blaming natural disasters and other tragedies on us or on the country’s tolerance of homosexuals.
Such messages spilled onto the streets in different ways. I recall a carload of college guys slowing to a crawl in front of Babe’s to hurl lewd, menacing remarks at the women outside. It wasn’t unusual. In the 80’s, after the bar first opened, and in earlier decades, the intensity of the threats had been worse. Some of the bar’s patrons carry wounds from those older times.
Now, this latest wave of hate.
I looked at the paper again, a smile blossoming as my eyes rested on the color photo of Vicky draping a rainbow flag on the wall outside Babe’s to celebrate same-sex marriage becoming legal. It seemed to glow from the page.
When I unfurled that paper, the feelings that arose sprang, at least in part, from what Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh called “interbeing…the understanding that nothing exists separately from anything else.” It’s a concept I first read about in his book Peace is Every Step.
Babe’s would not have endured if not for Vicky. I would not have these memories, and our community would not have this beacon of resilience if not for her. Neither of us would have married our wives without countless people over many years who made that possible—those who marched, wrote, and lobbied, those who supported front-line folks, pressing a coffee into their hands as they headed out the door or hugging them when they got home, and everyone who lived and is living out.
The paper itself would not exist without the trees and sunlight, soil and rain that made its existence possible (Hanh). And then there’s the journalist who wrote the article (Gwyndolyn Miles), the editor who designed the front page, and the people who printed and delivered it.
We also inter-are with the people who’d prefer that we disappear. As I hold this awareness, I hear Holly Near singing, “We’re still here, choosing love over fear…” (song; lyrics; Peace Becomes You CD).
Interbeing is a truth of our existence. In certain moments, this truth courses through me like a river, time and place blurring in a confluence of currents. Seeing this headline and photo was one of those moments.
Thank you, Vicky. Thank you, Gwyndolyn. Thank you, editor. Thank you, generations of sisters, siblings, and ancestors, known and unknown. Thank you, too many elements in the universe to name.
May those of us who are still here persist in creating a world in which we can all inter-be in peace.
Here’s a poem for your pocket until the next post: “[Poem III]” by Adrienne Rich (an excerpt from “Twenty-One Love Poems”).
If Vicky’s dedication to keeping Babe’s open touched your life too, or you appreciate other ways she made a difference within and beyond LGBTQIA circles in Richmond, consider making a donation to the Vicky Hester Food Pantry at the Metropolitan Community Church of Richmond.
Wendy, thank you for this thoughtful reflection on our shared history. May we, in our own unique ways, expand that history and keep it alive, vibrant, and on going!