Lnyc lesbian dating

by Natasha Frost

Alex Peresman, 25, a student and model, couldn’t work out why Her, an app for women seeking to date women, kept showing her matches far outside of her desired age range and area. “I kept matching with 18-year-olds from upstate New York,” she remembered.

In a city like New York, with its vibrant LGBT community, you might expect a dating app for queer women to be full of options. But when Peresman emailed the app’s makers and explained that it seemed to be buggy, they explained that there were simply too few users for the settings to work effectively.

This was just one attempt Peresman made in a six-year quest to date women in New York.  Her search came to an end in January of this year, when she finally met someone and started a romantic relationship. But during that six-year period, she went to pop-up events for queer women, visited New York’s limited number of lesbian bars, and waded into the online dating pool: OkCupid, Tinder, Bumble. Nothing seemed to work.

Compared to the plethora of options available for gay men, New York’s lesbian community is underserved. The few lesbian bars that exist – Cubbyhole and Henrietta Hudson, in the West Village; Ginger’s Bar in Brooklyn; and Bum Bum Bar in Queens – attract a mixed group of genders and sexualities. On a Saturday evening at Cubbyhole, on West 12th Street, the crowd is at least 30 percent male. Two well-dressed men sit at the bar’s corner discussing whether they should feed the meter or get another drink.

They jostle for space at the bar, under a ceiling studded with thousands of metal staples, glimmering like the Milky Way. Rainbow streamers hang in the windows; plastic grapes glow yellow-green above the entrance to the two bathroom cubicles. The bathroom doors both have a female figure on the door, and a tongue-in-cheek sign above the bar advertises Hot Pockets for $3 apiece – but, as a gay woman, it might be hard to know who was up for being flirted with.

In contrast, there are at least 30 bars aimed at the gay male population in the city. On a sweaty Friday night at a gay bar called The Ritz, on 46th Street, there’s not a single female face to be found at the bar or on the dance floor. According to Match.com’s 2017 Singles in America survey, 64 percent of singles flirt ‘at a bar’ – but a lack of lesbian-only bars is making it harder for lesbian singles to meet their partners in traditional ways.

Across the country, the bar scene for lesbians is in a slump. San Francisco’s iconic ‘dyke bar’, The Lexington, closed down in 2015. Earlier this month, Washington D.C.’s Phase 1 ended its 45-year-run as the oldest lesbian bar in the country. And here in New York, veteran establishments like Meow Mix and The Clit Club have long since closed their doors for good. Online, too, there are a variety of apps for gay men looking to date, fall in love or just have sex: Scruff, Grindr and Surge are just a few examples.

Researcher Jen Jack Gieseking, who has written extensively about queer spaces, worries that a lack of lesbian bars is a problem not just for meeting other women, but for having a place where queer women can feel at home and dress and behave as they like. Beyond that, they’re community building.

While American attitudes trend towards tolerance and acceptance, lesbians bars across the country seem to have fallen on hard times. (Flicker/Philippe Leroyer)

Their losses, he says, are felt acutely across the board: “Lesbian bars continue to afford the possibility for always slightly more diverse socializing across race, age and class than other social venues, particularly during young adulthood and most especially when coming out.”

Still, one upside of the lack of options is a burgeoning pop-up scene: Facebook events for ‘LezzerTag’, bar nights and other themed activities abound.

Babetown is a recent example. Founded by chef Alex Koones, the company organizes what it calls “moving pop-up dinner parties for queer and trans women and non-binary people.” Koones cooks and usually hosts the parties in friends’ homes across Brooklyn. Each, she says, is “an evening of food, wine and gayness.”

Babetown puts on between two and three events a month, from ‘Galentines’ to ‘Seder’ to ‘Brunch’, which sell out in hours, weeks ahead of time. Liquor flows freely, dinners are apparently delicious, and the evening is usually just $35 – all, perhaps, contributing to its record success.

Though they aren’t necessarily billed as opportunities to hook up, she has been quoted as saying she knows of at least three couples that have met at these private parties. Koones did not respond to requests for an interview from NY City Lens.

Peresman attended one of these dinners, helping out in the kitchen for a reduced ticket. But while the evening was fun, she says she didn’t meet anyone she hoped to see again.

She wonders, though, if the difficulties of dating women in New York might be more to do with outlook than opportunity. “Friends I have who don’t live in NYC assumed that it would be easier, because there are so many queer people here,” she said. “But everyone takes it for granted. I’ve definitely been guilty of that myself – we all see each other as disposable.”

More than that, she said, she’s noticed that women fail to make the first move, whether in person or online. “I don’t know if it has to do with the way that women are socialized,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s what I think — but it’s certainly what I’m wondering.”

Peresman is now in a relationship with a man, and although she says she would rather date women, she remembers the experience as having been exhausting. “I don’t want to go back to that,” she said.

Erika Kincaid, 25, a student program director, similarly struggled to find love in the city. She too says she did not know when was the right time to make a move. “Women don’t know if they’re supposed to reach out, or if it will be taken well. The fear is inhibiting,” she said. “I think that we’re taught to be on the receiving end of conversation, we’re supposed to be more subdued, but if two women who think that they’re not supposed to talk first… Well, what are you supposed to do?”

But things are changing, she thinks. Bars and clubs might be lacking, but the “lesbian community is definitely making an effort to make spaces” and hold events to make meeting other women possible. Like Peresman, she has also attended queer pop-up events and occasional bar nights.

After a couple of years of singledom, Kincaid met her current girlfriend through OK Cupid, a free online dating site that caters to singles of all genders and sexualities. Eight months ago, she reached out and asked her for tacos. Now, they “practically, though not officially” live together.

The twist? Kincaid’s New York love story has actually led her away from the city. She now lives in New Jersey, where her girlfriend is from and also lives. Kincaid laughs at the suggestion that it might be easier to find love on the other side of the Hudson River.

“It’s worth it if you keep trying,” she said. “There’s got to be a reason why there’s so many lesbian couples having children in Park Slope.”