a lesbian bar went mask-optional one night a week to make rent. the internet called it eugenics.

via The Boston Globe, whose reporter Annalisa Quinn went to the meeting, and its follow-up on the reaction.

"It is with love we inform our immunocompromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional."

That is the sentence. Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue, a lesbian bar in a basement in Greenfield, Massachusetts, posted it to Instagram on August 31, according to the Boston Globe, partway down a cheerful update about DJs and a volunteer meetup. Until then, the Globe reports, everyone inside had to wear a well-fitted KN-95 "or better" at all times. Now, one night a week, they would not.

The thread reached 442 comments. One, as quoted by the Globe: "Just say you're being complicit in a mass disabling event and get it over with." The bar apologized two days later. The apology went up without alt-text, the Globe reports, which set off a second round.

why a lesbian bar dropped its mask rule

Money, and not very much of it. Three housemates in their mid-20s opened Last Ditch last year, per the Globe, to replace two local queer bars that had closed, as a place for "dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends." Nobody was turned away for lack of funds. More and more people said they could not pay the cover, and the bar let them in anyway. It fell behind on its bills. After talking to the Massachusetts LGBT Chamber of Commerce, the owners decided to bend one rule to bring in more customers.

By September, the Globe reports, only one founder was still running it. One of the other two had enrolled in clown school.

the three and a half hour meeting

The one who stayed is Jackie Matellian. At the bar's community meeting on September 11, which the Globe attended, she told the room she had lived in her truck for six months while pouring money into the place, was working four jobs, and was responsible for the $50,000 loan the three had taken out. "I never really wanted to do this," she said, crying under her mask. "I don't think I'm doing a very good job."

The meeting opened with a breathing exercise and had two mediators. It was derailed almost immediately, per the Globe, by critics flooding the Zoom chat. Some speculated that one mediator's therapist license made her a mandated reporter, and one called her presence "wildly unsafe." Three and a half hours later, the Globe reports, little had been resolved and the landlord wanted $3,900 in back rent by Monday.

The following Saturday, the second mask-optional night, the Globe found the dance floor empty.

the phrasebook

By Wednesday the Globe piece had stopped being an article and become a phrasebook. "One had enrolled in clown school." "Immunocompromised disabled divas." A critic's Instagram story, per the Globe, saying the bar was not "a safe environment nor interested in revolutionary praxis," which one writer said should be crocheted on a pillow. A bartender, asked about a Lady Gaga night: "Gaga is canceled." The DJ that Saturday was billed as Harsh Noise Boyfriend. The sign over the bar's free store reads "PROM CANCELLED 'CUZ LESBIANS." Someone saw goody proctor at the kn95 lesbian bar.

Then Ted Cruz found it. "Wow," the senator posted on Tuesday night, adding that he "honestly did not know that there was a single place on the planet" that "still had an idiotic mask mandate." Senator, the whole story is that they relaxed it. By Wednesday afternoon Fox News had it too, and a basement bar in the Pioneer Valley had become a national parable about the left, which is a lot to put on a room with a stripper pole and a native plant garden.

the part everyone is skipping

The critics are not wrong that a promise was made and then changed, or that the people it protected have fewer places to go than anyone. And the jokes worth repeating are not about them. What is getting lost is simpler. This is a tiny queer bar run by exhausted kids who tried to be everything to everyone on no money, and the mask rule was only ever the thing the argument was about. The actual problem is that not enough people were paying the cover.

Dan Savage, quoted in the Globe's follow-up, has the business plan: "This is now the most famous bar in the world." Matellian has the only line anyone should put on a T-shirt. "That's the price you pay to be in community."