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The Last Ditch was a basement bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, that did some of the math for you. It kept a KN-95 requirement at the door years after most businesses had quietly dropped theirs, long after the rest of the country decided that caring about COVID belonged to an increasingly eccentric minority, and for a certain kind of lesbian that requirement was the difference between having a Saturday night and spending another Saturday on the couch refreshing the group chat.
It described itself as a place for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends,” and it tried to run like it meant that. If you couldn’t afford the cover you got in anyway. In a country where lesbian bars have been closing for decades, somebody had found a room, paid the electric bill, stocked the bar and unlocked the door, and a lesbian in Western Massachusetts could reasonably expect to walk downstairs and find other lesbians there. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds, and it’s the first thing that disappeared once the Last Ditch turned into a national argument about masks, disability, lesbian culture and whether queer people can spend fifteen consecutive minutes together without somebody producing screenshots.
Then the bar had to survive, which is where it gets ugly in the boring way. A bar can call itself whatever radical thing its owners like, but the building still sits inside property relations that don’t give a fuck about anybody’s politics. The landlord wants rent, because landlords have a famously limited interest in lesbian community infrastructure, and the workers need wages, because radical politics has never once made groceries free. The distributor wants to get paid too, and alcohol distributors remain stubbornly resistant to being paid in mutual aid.
The Last Ditch was trying to deliver a social good through the business model of a bar, and a bar only works if enough people pay. People who couldn’t afford to pay kept coming because the bar wanted them there, and it wanted them there for good reasons. Attendance dropped anyway. Workers struggled to get paid while the rent stacked up, and the place had promised the people around it more than its register could cover. Its politics told it to let more people in while its economics needed more people paying, and eventually that fight showed up as a change to the mask policy.
The bar announced that Saturday nights were going mask optional and addressed the people most affected as its “immunocompromised disabled divas.” I’ve sat in enough organizing Discords and 2 a.m. group chats to picture how that sentence got written: somebody knew the news was going to land like shit and reached for a cute word to cushion it. It works the way “hun” works when somebody’s taking something from you, where the sweetness is right there to cover for the part that isn’t sweet. And it made everything worse, because now you’ve told disabled patrons that the one room organized around their bodies has decided they cost too much, and you’ve called them divas while doing it. It’s the kind of communications decision that makes you wonder whether every person in the room simultaneously lost the ability to read the sentence before posting it.
Disabled patrons got angry, and they had every right to. Some of them had built their whole relationship to the Last Ditch around knowing that this one room kept precautions every other room had dropped. The bar’s own policy had told them their presence mattered enough for the place to run differently, so when the policy bent under money pressure, a lot of them heard that the commitment had always been negotiable. That’s what happens when an institution makes a promise: people organize their lives around it. If a bar builds its political identity on being accessible to people shut out everywhere else, those people are going to lean on it harder than a regular customer leans on a regular business, because the bar asked them to think of themselves as members of something.
The Last Ditch owed them a real explanation of what had changed and why, and the announcement didn’t give them one. Its tone took a hard money decision and made it feel personal to people who already get treated as disposable in public life.
Then the whole thing blew past anything proportionate. People accused the bar of eugenics and talked about the owners as though they’d developed a political commitment to disabled people dying. One commenter reportedly hoped the place would get firebombed. The bar apologized for the tone of the announcement, and by then the fight had already left the people who shared a scene and wandered into the kind of public spectacle social media is extraordinarily good at manufacturing. The Boston Globe covered it, and the story traveled far past Western Massachusetts. Then Ted Cruz, a man I’m sure has lost many nights of sleep over disabled lesbians’ access to nightlife, had opinions about a basement bar in Greenfield. That should have been the moment everybody realized the original dispute had moved into an entirely different political environment.
The people who actually drank there still had to figure out what kind of bar they wanted and whether it would survive. The national audience took on no responsibility for any of that. They got to make whatever point they came to make and then disappear, and the lesbians in Western Massachusetts got whatever was left after everybody else found something new to be mad about.
ACCOUNTABILITY HAS TO PRODUCE AN AFTER
Feminism spent generations building ways to make domination visible, because so much of what happens to women is designed to look like ordinary life. The family hides economic dependence inside love, and heterosexuality hides coercion inside romance. Institutions keep people out with rules that look neutral until you ask who they keep failing. Disability politics pushed that analysis into buildings and showed that a space doesn’t need a sign banning disabled people when the assumption that they won’t show up is already built into the stairs and the door policy.
That’s a real achievement, and it gave us better tools. The weak spot comes afterward. Knowing exactly what happened doesn’t tell a community what the relationship between the people involved is supposed to look like once everybody has said their piece, and we got much better at the first skill than the second. A scene can describe in immaculate political language who did what to whom and still have no idea how those people are supposed to share a room on Friday.
Accountability has to produce an after because communities keep going after the fight ends, or they collapse, and when they collapse people lose things they can’t easily get back. Sometimes the harm is bad enough that continued relationship would reproduce it, and sometimes certain people really shouldn’t share a space. Treating separation as the default answer to every conflict, though, eventually builds a community whose main institutional skill is making itself smaller.
People are going to fuck up, because people hurt each other even when they share politics. Institutions are going to fuck up too, because they organize relationships at a scale where one person’s bad call becomes everybody’s policy. So a political community needs some way of deciding which failures mean separation and which ones mean change.
The Last Ditch makes that painfully obvious, because the fight grew out of material needs that no amount of moral clarity could make go away. Disabled patrons needed social space they could get into without eating the risk everywhere else carried, and the bar needed enough money to stay open. Deciding which need was more sympathetic wouldn’t have made the other one vanish. The rent was due whoever won the argument online, and disabled lesbians were still going to need somewhere to go on a Saturday. You can’t accountability your way out of a material contradiction, and the only move left is working out how accessibility gets paid for without asking one struggling bar to eat the cost forever.
What we usually do instead is run a moral investigation. We find the person who behaved badly and settle on the language for what she did. Then we treat the assignment of blame as though it solved something, and the bar still can’t make payroll, and disabled lesbians in Western Massachusetts still don’t have anywhere to go.
If your politics can explain exactly who fucked up and can’t explain what everybody should do Monday morning, you’ve built an extremely elaborate court system without building much of a community.
WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS ALREADY KNOWS HOW MUCH A SOCIAL WORLD TAKES TO BUILD
It’s almost too on the nose that this happened in Western Massachusetts, where lesbians spent decades showing what it actually takes to build a social world, which mostly comes down to enough of us living close enough together for long enough. Northampton got its national reputation because women moved there partly because other lesbians already had, and that density let ordinary proximity harden into institutions, including the informal one where everybody knows who to call when your life falls apart.
You can feel a profound spiritual identification with every lesbian alive and still have nobody to call when you need somewhere to sleep tonight. Community gets material when somebody knows somebody who has a couch, and the couch only shows up because people spent enough time around each other for identification to turn into relationship. Western Massachusetts matters to lesbian history because lesbians there built enough of those relationships that lesbian life could reproduce itself through institutions.
None of it was ever pure, since no community made of human beings has achieved that fascinating condition. Lesbian spaces reproduced racial hierarchy, because being a lesbian didn’t lift anybody out of the racial order around her. Economic inequality stayed put because sexual orientation doesn’t redistribute property, and women who shared a softball league and, in some cases, the same three exes still fought about feminism, because sharing a social world never guaranteed sharing a theory.
Conflict is what happens when people stay in relationship long enough for their differences to have consequences. Some of those fights got worked through without wrecking the relationships the scene depended on, and some didn’t, and the ones that didn’t are the reason people still talk about what got lost.
This gets sharper when there aren’t many institutions left, because the ideology of infinite exit assumes a social abundance that lesbians just don’t have. You can quit the organization that disappointed you or stop going to the bar after somebody handles a fight badly. You can cut the girl who hurt you out of your life, and every one of those decisions can make sense on its own terms. Add them up and you get a population that can’t sustain collective life, because collective life needs shared institutions and shared institutions need some of the people they’ve hurt to keep showing up.
Lesbians are finite, and lesbian institutions are considerably more finite than lesbians. We can’t keep shrinking the list of people we’re willing to share a room with and then act like some mysterious historical force closed all the bars.
Sometimes the institution needs to change because staying in it as it is would reproduce the harm. Sometimes the relationship needs to end because nothing could make it safe. A community still needs some way of telling those situations apart from the ones where people could stay together if the terms changed.
WE HAVE ASKED THE LESBIAN BAR TO BECOME AN ENTIRE SOCIAL SYSTEM
The Last Ditch was in an impossible spot partly because it was never allowed to just be a bar. When the lesbian community center closes, the bar picks up its functions, because the bar is one of the only places lesbians still reliably run into each other. When every other queer space drops its mask policy, the one that kept it inherits responsibility for everybody the others shut out, whether it asked for that or not. Political organizations have weakened too, so people start expecting the bar to be where political norms get hashed out.
Every trans girl who has ever been the only one in her friend group with a car and a stable-ish apartment knows exactly how this goes. Nobody decided she’d be the emergency contact. She was just there and she was reliable, so her phone is the one that lights up at 2 a.m. when somebody’s estradiol shipment gets seized at customs or somebody needs a ride home from a date that went sideways. She helps because she wants to and because nobody else will, and somewhere around year two she’s covering other girls’ rent shortfalls on a retail paycheck while nobody asks how her own doctor’s appointments are going. Everybody’s need got routed through one woman who couldn’t hold it forever. The Last Ditch was that girl with a liquor license, because eventually one basement is carrying pieces of an entire lesbian civil society and paying for it with drink sales, and then everybody acts shocked when the economics show up.
Lesbian bars carry this harder than most places, because lesbian social life has always sat right next to feminist politics. Nobody has ever really thought of the lesbian bar as simply a place where lesbians happen to drink. Women needed informal institutions to give them safety and support they couldn’t get anywhere else, the bar became one of them, and that history is beautiful. Keeping it means being honest about its limits. I don’t want lesbian bars stripped of politics, because the politics are part of why they mattered. I want enough lesbian infrastructure that every surviving bar doesn’t have to become our entire fucking government.
A lesbian bar is already doing something politically significant when lesbians can reliably find each other there, and we should take seriously how much that simple fact holds before we demand that the same bar fix every other failure of lesbian civil society.
ACCESSIBILITY HAS TO BE REPRODUCED MATERIALLY
We tend to talk about accessibility as if the deciding factor were how much the people in charge care, as if every inaccessible space were a failure of values and enough commitment would find a way. Values matter, and they also make accessibility sound free. Accessibility is a relationship between a person and the conditions that let her participate, and those conditions cost money.
A mask policy is cheaper than an elevator and still isn’t free. A rule that changes who walks through your door changes who your regulars are, and over time it changes what kind of business you are. Every institutional arrangement costs somebody something, and a community that actually wants accessibility has to figure out who pays instead of assuming somebody’s goodwill will cover it forever.
The disabled patrons who relied on the Last Ditch had found a rare room arranged partly around their bodies, and losing one accessible bar hits differently when almost every other bar has already shut you out. Their anger says a lot about the world around that basement. One small business had become wildly important because there was almost nothing else. The fragility was there before the policy changed, because a whole scene’s accessible social life was sitting inside one business that a slow Saturday could put under.
If a community wants permanently masked lesbian space to exist, it needs a way of keeping that space alive through the stretches when drink sales can’t carry it. That might mean funding that takes the pressure off nightly revenue, and the people actually building it should work out what form that takes. Without something like that, accessibility lasts exactly as long as somebody can personally eat the cost, which eventually turns political commitment into martyrdom, and martyrdom is a terrible business model even when everybody involved has impeccable politics.
The more useful question the Last Ditch raises is how a lesbian community plans to keep accessible social life going when the market gives businesses no reason to, and answering it requires organization, because structural problems can’t be solved by locating one unusually virtuous bartender.
THE INTERNET REMOVED THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PARTICIPATION AND CONSEQUENCE
The fight changed shape once the Last Ditch became national content, because the people participating stopped sharing any stake in what came next.
Before the story spread, most of the people arguing had skin in it. A disabled patron who hated the masking change still needed an accessible lesbian bar in Western Massachusetts to exist. The workers needed the place to survive because their paychecks came out of it, and the owners’ whole lives were tangled up in the room they’d built.
The national audience had none of that. A stranger could hold up the Last Ditch as proof that queer politics had become ridiculous and lose nothing if the bar closed the next month. Another stranger could hold it up as proof of ableism in lesbian spaces without ever having to build the accessible bar that would replace the one getting dragged. Both of them logged off with their takes intact, because neither one had to live inside what happened.
People who expect to see each other again have a reason to keep the door open, because tomorrow exists for them. The spectator gets the fight in its most dramatic moments, so escalation entertains her more than resolution ever could. Repair makes terrible content, since repair usually means a lot of long, awkward conversations whose conclusion is that everybody has to behave somewhat differently, and nobody screenshots the slow rebuilding of trust. Outrage travels because it squeezes the whole thing into something you can understand in one scroll: somebody gets to be the villain and somebody gets to be the victim, and everybody watching gets permission to have an opinion about people they’ll never meet.
Then the audience leaves, and the people who live there stay. They’ll keep running into each other at potlucks and at the next meeting, because Western Massachusetts doesn’t magically generate a second lesbian population whenever the first one has a fight. Small scenes overlap whether anybody finds that emotionally convenient, which is why the people who stay have a stake in reconciliation the audience never had.
DISABLED PEOPLE SHOULD NOT BECOME CHARACTERS IN SOMEBODY ELSE’S STORY
Once conservative commentators showed up, people sympathetic to the bar got handed a pretty ugly temptation because they could start reading the original disabled critics through the national backlash and write them off as the ridiculous people who caused the whole spectacle.
I refuse to do that because disabled people don’t become wrong when Ted Cruz discovers their fight. If patrons felt the Last Ditch had built its credibility on their access and then pulled back when that access got expensive, that grievance belongs inside the relationship that produced it, and the later behavior of strangers can’t go back and change what the decision meant to the people it hit.
The spectacle makes that distinction matter more, because disabled people have spent their whole lives getting turned into symbols by people who don’t care whether they live. Conservatives who have never shown much interest in expanding disability access can suddenly find enormous concern for a local disability dispute when it lets them laugh at queers. People defending the bar can turn around and treat the disabled patrons as embarrassing obstacles to lesbian institutional survival. Either way, disabled people get consumed for somebody else’s argument.
They deserve accessible social infrastructure, and enough of it that one bar’s decision could never shrink somebody’s entire social world. The fact that it did shows how little of that infrastructure exists. If there were several accessible lesbian spaces within driving distance, the Last Ditch’s choice would still matter, because exclusion stings whether or not there’s a backup, but it wouldn’t be able to wipe out a whole category of somebody’s life. Scarcity magnifies every institutional failure, since every surviving institution ends up responsible for more of the world, so tearing down an inadequate bar can’t count as a win when the actual problem is that there aren’t enough adequate ones. Sometimes you have to change the institution you actually have, because the perfect one you’re imagining behind it doesn’t exist.
AN INSTITUTION CAN HURT YOU AND REMAIN PART OF YOUR SOCIAL WORLD
We need some way of saying that an institution hurt people and is still worth keeping. Anybody serious about building anything needs that, because anything that lasts long enough is going to fail somebody. If institutions only get to stay worthy while they’re innocent, every institution old enough to matter eventually becomes indefensible.
Keeping something has to mean more than defending whatever currently exists. An institution survives by changing while holding on to enough continuity that people still recognize what they share. What’s worth keeping about the Last Ditch lives in that basement: the relationships, and the expectation that lesbians can find each other there. Keeping those doesn’t require defending every policy or every decision the people running it made.
Unconditional defense and destruction both skip the part where anything changes. Defending the bar against every criticism because lesbian institutions are scarce turns scarcity into a hall pass. Destroying it because it failed disabled patrons leaves disabled patrons in possession of exactly zero additional accessible lesbian bars. We keep treating removal as though it builds the replacement, and it doesn’t. You can destroy a bad institution in an afternoon and spend twenty years discovering that nobody built another one. Once the relationships and the trust are gone, rebuilding them takes a lot more than finding another basement and putting up a sign.
So the question is whether what exists inside the Last Ditch can become a bar better able to meet the needs its failure exposed. That takes criticism, since somebody has to name what went wrong, and it takes keeping the place open, since there has to be something left to change. Everybody who builds anything eventually hits this point, where the beautiful new thing the founders imagined turns into the annoying real thing everybody has to maintain.
RECONCILIATION IS A FORM OF POLITICAL POWER
I know how “reconciliation” sounds because it sounds like something a nonprofit says after it runs out of analysis and wants to end the retreat on a hopeful note. What I mean is about capacity: a community that can only end damaged relationships has one move, and that move gets more expensive every time.
Our movements have a huge vocabulary for rupture and almost none for the way back. We know how to describe who hurt whom and who shouldn’t be in which space, and I’ve used that vocabulary and will use it again. We don’t know how a damaged relationship becomes possible again on new terms, or what the person who got hurt gets to demand besides somebody’s departure.
Punishment is easy to see because it changes somebody’s social position where everybody can watch. She loses the platform or the invite, everyone points at the outcome, and accountability gets marked complete. Reconciliation is harder to see, because what it produces is a relationship that works again under changed conditions, with both people different from who they were when things broke. That takes judgment about whether anything actually changed and whether it changed enough.
Not every relationship can be repaired, and nobody should have to stay in relationship with someone whose presence makes safety impossible. A theory of reconciliation that doesn’t leave room for permanent separation is just compulsory reconciliation, which reproduces domination in a softer voice. The hard part is telling which relationships can’t continue and which ones could if the terms changed, and a community that can’t tell the difference gets stuck choosing between tolerating harm and breaking itself into pieces, which is an extremely weak position from which to build power.
People get scared to admit wrongdoing when admitting it looks like a one-way ticket to social death, and organizations get defensive when owning a failure could end them, so denial starts looking like the smart survival strategy. If there are real routes back, those incentives shift. Someone can admit she behaved terribly because there’s language for what she’s supposed to do next, and the person she hurt can demand concrete change because the demand is aimed at the relationship. Sometimes it fails anyway, because one side can’t or won’t meet the conditions, and that doesn’t make the capacity useless.
Organizing means people have to keep dealing with each other after discovering that shared ideology didn’t turn them into creatures incapable of hurting one another. If your organization lasts long enough, somebody is going to fuck the wrong person and somebody is going to misuse whatever authority she has. People turn resentments like that into political positions, because human beings are spectacularly talented at converting interpersonal misery into theory. The question is whether the institution has enough structure to keep every fight from becoming existential, and a community that can transform relationships has more power than one that can only end them.
EXILE ALSO PRODUCES POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES
The people you exile don’t disappear because they still have relationships and sometimes an audience, and now they might also have a grievance big enough to build a whole political identity around the scene that kicked them out.
Anybody who’s spent time in the girls’ Discord servers and group chats has watched this happen. Somebody gets removed with screenshots and a pinned callout, and everybody treats the removal as the end of it. Then she’s posting from an alt, or she’s moved two states over and is telling her version of the story to a new crowd of dolls who never heard the other one. The ban doesn’t follow her to the next server, and the block button doesn’t reach into the physical world, where she’s still on the same surgeon’s waitlist as you and still broke in the same ways you’re broke.
A lesbian doesn’t stop being a lesbian because other lesbians hate her. A trans woman doesn’t stop sharing material conditions with other trans women because a Discord server banned her. Social relations are considerably less obedient than block buttons.
Sometimes exclusion is still necessary, because the harm of letting somebody stay outweighs whatever her exile will cost. That calculation still has to count the cost. A scene that keeps producing people with nothing left to lose in relation to it should get curious about what happens to them afterward, because in a population this small they don’t go anywhere. They come back through another platform or another faction, and the people who exiled them act shocked every time.
Reconciliation won’t fit every case. A community that can bring back people who actually change just has fewer reasons to manufacture permanent enemies out of every serious fight, and that matters most when people stay tangled up geographically and socially whether they like each other or not. Western Massachusetts is still going to contain everybody who fought about the Last Ditch long after the internet stops caring about them, and they should probably develop a politics appropriate to that fact.
LESBIANS NEED INSTITUTIONS BECAUSE VISIBILITY CANNOT ORGANIZE US
Lesbians have more cultural visibility right now than at almost any point I can think of, and our physical infrastructure is so thin that one basement bar changing its mask rule turned into a regional crisis for disabled dykes. Those facts sit right next to each other because representation and organization produce different kinds of power. Representation changes how lesbians show up in culture, and organization changes what lesbians can do together.
A TV character can make lesbian existence legible to millions of people without creating a single relationship between the lesbians watching her. A bar with a few dozen regulars reaches almost nobody culturally and still puts the same women in the same room over and over until they can act together. Women don’t become an organized class just because we share a position under patriarchy. Shared conditions make political identification possible, and it takes institutions to give women places where they can find out their private problems are connected to other women’s lives.
Mostly that happens through repetition. You see the same woman enough times to learn about her life, and eventually something you thought was your own private disaster starts looking less private, because the woman on the next stool is describing her version of it. That can stay completely informal. The bar never has to become a seminar, since social knowledge moves through ordinary relationships long before anybody gives it a theoretical name. That’s part of why I keep saying women need institutions: a class that wants to act collectively needs places where its members meet each other as more than isolated individuals who happen to share a demographic category. Lesbian spaces make unusually dense relationships among women whose lives aren’t organized around a husband, and those relationships can turn political even when nobody walked in that night planning to organize anything. Sometimes the political significance of the room is simply that the same women keep coming back.
LESBIANS NEED PLACES WHERE NOTHING IS HAPPENING
I’ve become convinced that one of the things queer life has lost is ordinary time together. So much of it runs on events now, where gathering needs an explicit excuse. There’s a performance or a fundraiser, everybody shows up around the same time, and everybody scatters when the scheduled part ends. Events can be wonderful, and an event still can’t do what an institution does, which is give you somewhere to come back to after the exciting part is over.
Ordinary time lets relationships develop without anybody needing a reason. You get familiar with somebody because she’s there again next week, and eventually you know enough about each other that the conversation doesn’t start from zero every time. That familiarity turns into infrastructure, because people become resources for one another just by staying in contact. Workers’ clubs and socialist social spaces mattered to political movements partly for this reason. The formal political education mattered, and the relationships around it gave people reasons to keep coming and networks their ideas could travel through, since people rarely become durable political subjects through information alone.
Lesbians need rooms where seeing another lesbian becomes ordinary enough that every encounter doesn’t carry the pressure of being an Event for Queer People. We need somewhere to become boring to one another. Boredom means the relationship survived the novelty, and you’ve gotten past the version of her you made up the first time you went home with her to the woman who actually lives her life. The Last Ditch mattered partly because it was a room where that slow accumulation could happen, and losing rooms like that weakens lesbian social life even while thousands of lesbian events keep happening, because events reproduce attendance and institutions reproduce relationships.
A WOMEN’S MOVEMENT CANNOT BE BUILT FROM PEOPLE WHO CANNOT SURVIVE CONFLICT
I want women organized as a class, and that desire means nothing if our idea of organization assumes women only stay together until somebody behaves badly. Women have conflicting interests, because class position, race and sexuality keep structuring our lives even though patriarchy puts us in a shared material relation. Any women’s movement big enough to matter is going to contain serious internal conflict, and no organizational technique is going to make that stop being true.
We need institutions that can process those conflicts without letting every contradiction dissolve the organization holding it. That’s one reason I find fantasies of a perfectly safe political community so limiting. Organizing drags people into relationships where their interests and interpretations collide, so safety has to include ways of dealing with conflict before it becomes domination. That takes rules and institutional memory, so a scene learns from its last disaster instead of improvising justice from scratch every time somebody gets hurt.
The Last Ditch is tiny next to a women’s movement, and the problem is the same. Can people recognize harm without treating that recognition as proof the relationship is over, and can an institution change enough to deserve people coming back? Can the people who got hurt get real influence over what changes without the institution having to die to prove their pain mattered? If we can’t answer that inside one lesbian bar, we’re going to have a spectacular time trying to answer it inside a mass women’s movement.
KEEP THE FUCKING BAR OPEN LONG ENOUGH TO CHANGE IT
I don’t want the ending where everybody keeps her position pure while the Last Ditch disappears. That ending gives you an extremely clean discourse and a materially poorer lesbian world, where everybody won the argument and nobody has anywhere to go on Saturday night.
The national audience will move on, because the internet always finds another local disaster to consume. Conservatives will find some other queers having a human moment to turn into an afternoon of content, and people elsewhere on the left will find another fight to prove their politics on. Western Massachusetts will still be there after the audience leaves. Disabled lesbians will still need accessible social space, and the Last Ditch closing won’t magically build the accessible bar that ought to replace it. The people running the bar will still have to face why patrons who trusted them felt abandoned, and everybody around the bar will still have to answer the money question this whole mess exposed, since accessibility can’t survive forever as an unfunded moral expectation dumped on whichever struggling business happens to still be open.
I want the Last Ditch to take seriously what disabled patrons went through, because keeping an institution means letting the people who depend on it change it. I also want the people who care about accessibility to treat keeping accessible places alive as a material problem that needs resources, because politics gets useless fast when the demands float free of the conditions needed to meet them. Then everybody has to figure out how to share a social world again. They don’t have to love each other or agree about every piece of what happened, because they need enough commitment to lesbian life continuing that a fight can change their relationships without automatically wrecking the infrastructure those relationships grew out of.
A relationship patched up by forgetting just reruns the same fight later, so reconciliation has to fold the fight into the relationship’s history and change the terms it continues on. The Last Ditch could become a better bar precisely because it failed. The disabled patrons who called it out could end up with real say over how accessibility gets kept, and the lesbians around it could come out understanding that institutions need collective investment if we expect them to provide things the market won’t. That would actually produce something, while another cancellation would produce an empty room.
I’m tired of watching the girls lose the rooms, and I’m tired of getting more visible every year while the physical places we could ever build power in keep closing. I want lesbians to have institutions sturdy enough to survive our disagreements and organizations that can accumulate history, because every generation starting over from zero keeps us politically adolescent forever. I want the people who fuck up to face what they did and change enough that coming back becomes possible, when the harm allows for it.
The Last Ditch is one basement bar in Western Massachusetts, and I’m not pretending its survival decides the future of feminism. The fight over it just exposes how much better we’ve gotten at explaining why relationships should end than at explaining how damaged ones can turn into different ones.
Eventually the internet will leave Greenfield alone, while the lesbians will still be there with whatever institutions survived them and the disabled people will still be there with whatever access the community managed to build. They’ll inherit the material consequences of a fight that thousands of strangers watched as entertainment, and I hope they keep the fucking bar open long enough to change it.