Sandwiched between a Baskin Robbins and Domino’s Pizza in a strip mall on Sunset Boulevard, a queer bar is changing history with every hot dog and glass of orange wine served. Named after Rita Mae Brown’s classic lesbian novel “Rubyfruit Jungle,” The Ruby Fruit opened in February, becoming one of two brick-and-mortar lesbian and genderqueer bars in LA.
On a Thursday morning, The Ruby Fruit‘s front door is propped open. Inside, close to a dozen customers are gathered around wood tables and green booths, MacBooks and notebooks open. They are here for Let’s Werk, a coworking event The Ruby Fruit hosts every week in partnership with Cuties Los Angeles, a Black-owned community space that organizes events for the queer and trans community.
According to Mara Herbkersman, co-owner of The Ruby Fruit, the event is one in a series of daytime events she is hosting to expand the time and space in which the “sapphically inclined” have traditionally been able to gather in community. Specifically, such events offer people who don’t drink the opportunity to still participate in other aspects of queer life, Herbkersman said.
“We want people to come in and meet new people and work around folks that have similar identities,” Herbkersman said. “It’s about having a place to be, a home.”
The idea to host Let’s Werk came from the changes in office culture in response to the pandemic, with more and more people working remotely, Herbkersman said.
“Also LA is such a freelance city anyway, there’s so many people that naturally are already working in these alternative ways,” Herbkersman said. “And so we wanted to look at this space as not just a restaurant or bar, but also [as] a community space.”
Thursday was Emily Yonkers’ first time attending the event and second time at the bar — she said she came once before for a date. Yonkers said she was using the morning to work on her short film, which she pitched as following a lesbian couple who are about to attend their last couples therapy session when they get trapped together in an elevator.
Jasmin Williams said it was also her first time at the event that she was excited to be working in an intentionally queer space.
“Because I’m here with this event, I know that it’s going to be a queer space. Whereas in cafes, there’s probably still a lot of queer people in there, but it’s less guaranteed that it’s a queer space,” Williams said. “I feel a little bit safer, a little bit more excited, a little bit more interested in everyone who’s here.”
Tara Pixley, a visual journalist and professor who came to The Ruby Fruit to continue writing a photojournalism textbook, said customers play a part in keeping these spaces open and thriving.
“Showing up can bring radical attention to the erasure of [queer] spaces and queer life,” Pixley said. “So by being here, buying coffee, buying food, I’m contributing to the community that I’ve tried to keep alive and vibrant.”
While events like Let’s Werk and Sip and Sketch are intended as community spaces, Herbkersman said they also have roots in very practical considerations. According to Herbkersman, doing business during the bar’s daytime hours — 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. — is vital to surviving a world that sometimes seems intent on shutting bars like theirs down.
“We’ve got our heads to the ground and we’re just really trying to stay open and keep this sustainable for the long haul,” Herbkersman said. “We want longevity, we don’t want this to be just a short blip in the radar.”
Being open during the day is just one way The Ruby Fruit is changing the narrative of lesbian bars, Herbkersman said. Another is the language with which she and co-owner Emily Bielagus have chosen to refer to the bar.
“Lesbian bar is the word that people use to describe spaces like this very often, but we thought that might be exclusionary wording because there are a lot of people in our lives who don’t use the word lesbian to describe themselves, myself included,” Herbkersman said. “[So] we polled some friends and we were starting to talk about other words to describe how we feel and sapphic came up. ‘Sapphically inclined’ implies something, but also leaves a little bit up to the imagination as well.”
Changing history can also come down to the simple act of staying open, Herbkersman said.
According to Occidental College American Studies Professor Heather Lukes, Silver Lake used to be such an epicenter of Los Angeles queer culture that it was known as the Swish Alps. Gay bars abounded, they said, many catering to gay men but a few to lesbians and gender non-conforming people too. Such bars were a space where the “sapphically inclined” could live outside of the heteronormative norm, even for a short time, Lukes said.
According to Lukes, when a host of factors — from gentrification to general acceptance to the rise of social media — drove lesbian bars to close their doors in the 1980s, Los Angeles was no exception to the national pattern.
“Part of it is people just drink less,” Lukes said. “And part of it [is] that we have social media now, so people can connect in ways that they were not able to [before]. You just had a telephone, a mailbox and a neighborhood bar.”
The fact that bars like The Ruby Fruit and Honey’s are opening now is no coincidence, Lukes said. Instead, they said the reopenings coincide with a renewed hunger to be in public spaces following the pandemic and a nostalgia for the past.
“[Lesbian bars are coming back] in the same way that, say, vinyl records are coming back,” Lukes said. “I think that people are realizing that they miss things.”
When it comes to The Ruby Fruit, the bar’s success may lie in its creativity, according to Lukes. From the hours they observe to the language they use, Herbkersman and Bielagus are changing the definition of the lesbian bar, Lukes said.
“I think [The Ruby Fruit] is an incredibly creative thought of what kind of more general social gap is happening in our world right now,” Lukes said. “And why not have it be for lesbian and non-binary identifying people?”
Despite challenges in keeping business thriving, Herbkersman said the community response has been beyond her wildest dreams.
“We just didn’t understand the impact of what this would be…it moves me to tears on a daily basis,” Herbkersman said, wiping away tears. “It’s so intense and it’s so beautiful. We have women who come here who are historians of lesbian bars, and they come here and they thank us and hug us and they’re like, ‘You’re the future.’”
Contact Claire O’Callahan at ocallahan@oxy.edu
