"I hope your venue gets firebombed." That was a real comment on a real Instagram post from a small lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, announcing that one night a week, masks would be optional.
The Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue opened in 2025 as a COVID-conscious, anti-capitalist bar where no one could be turned away, and it's now the subject of what has reportedly become the Boston Globe's most clicked story in a decade. This is Just The Gist (MINI!) of the Last Ditch lesbian bar: the $50,000 loan, the 400-comment Instagram post, the 3½ hour community meeting that fell apart on Zoom, and the co-founder who left to go to clown school.
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Saturday Night at the Massachusetts Lesbian Bar Everyone Is Talking About (The New York Times, 2026)
Mask-free Saturday nearly cancelled at Massachusetts lesbian bar at center of controversy (New York Post, 2026)
How to Destroy a Lesbian Bar (The Atlantic, 2026)
#NotAllLesbians - we can't let the Massachusetts bar drama turn us all into a punchline (The Guardian, 2026)
A Western Mass. lesbian bar required KN-95 masks. When it changed the rules, all hell broke loose. (The Boston Globe, 2026)
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