DC’s Gay Community Stands Together in the Face of Hardship – Thrillist

It’s the kind of place where you can go to any bar and feel comfortable. At my bars, Pitchers and A League of Her Own, we have a lot of transgender people who come in, and it’s great that they feel comfortable here. Because we have a lesbian bar attached, the gays don’t care that there are women in here because we’re all part of the same community.

I opened Pitchers in June of 2018 for Pride Weekend, that was our opening weekend. I said it was the hardest soft opening ever. And A League of Her Own opened in August. But [A League of Her Own] was always part of the plan. I think a lot of lesbians knew the bar was coming, so they came to Pitchers. There was always a part of me that felt bad there wasn’t a place for lesbians to go anywhere. We had Phase 1 back in the day, but people would ask me if there were any lesbian bars in the city, and I had to say: “no not really.” We’re the nation’s capital and we don’t have a lesbian bar? So when I was doing a tour of this space, I saw there was a whole separate entrance which I thought was perfect. It felt like A League of Her Own needed its own entrance and exit to make them feel like they truly had their own space.

My vision for the bar was for it to be a community bar. Say you live in Idaho and you’re in this little town—big enough that they have a gay bar, but still small—you’re forced to have lesbians, gay guys, transgender people, everybody, all backgrounds together in one space because you only have one space. That’s what I wanted to create. When you live in a big city, you have more spaces. But the more spaces you have, the more segregated the bars get because you have one type of person that goes to this bar and one type of person that goes to that bar. So I figured if I had one bar that had everything, it would create a feeling that everybody is welcome. And that’s really what we have here. When you walk in and you see a bartender, you’re going to see somebody who looks like you and that’s my goal. I just wanted to be the one bar in the city that everyone likes to go to because everyone feels comfortable there.