by Ella Stern

In the late 1980s, the United States had over 200 lesbian bars. That number hit a low in 2019: only an estimated 16 across the country. A new wave of lesbian bars has opened since, numbering an estimated 37 today. In Minneapolis, the Brass Strap hopes to provide a safe, community-oriented space for Twin Cities sapphics and become number 38.


Several years ago, CJ Jennings, one of the Brass Strap’s original co-founders, was freezing in the Minnesota cold, having left a punk bar to share a queer kiss somewhere that felt secluded and, therefore, safer. They decided, then, that Minneapolis needed a lesbian bar.


“We need to have a space where we don't have to go outside to a back corner in the dark just to have a first kiss,” Jennings said. “We want to be in the light like everyone else.”


Jennings and their co-founders built a coalition and started fundraising, keeping the goal of a safe space in mind all the while. At an early event, an art market and fundraiser with DJs and dancing, some attendees said that “being there was like the first time that they felt [in public] like they could dance as if they were at home,” Jennings recalled.


In the early stages of their work to open the Brass Strap, some of the original co-founders road tripped around the country to visit bars and talk to their owners. Inspired by the Lesbian Bar Project, they created a documentary to showcase the bars; they also learned from the experiences of these bars and their communities.


“We heard from a lot of Black and brown queer people across all of our interviews that the one thing that lesbian spaces need to do better at is being more inclusive,” Jennings said. “People should not have to choose which identity they want to feel seen in, in a space that they go into.”


Across the interviews that Brass Strap founders conducted, community members stressed the need to keep Black and brown people at the forefront when creating events and spaces, down to the programming and music.


To strengthen their racial inclusivity, the Brass Strap has been engaging in coalition work and building intentional relationships, according to Jennings. They have also held mutual aid events, including a in partnership with Sappho’s Social Club, to support neighbors affected by ICE’s occupation of Minnesota. Jennings sees this work as “showing up for people who need the help, and building community that way, rather than just putting out a statement.”


The co-founders are also working to build an intergenerational space. To do so, they have visited older lesbians’ spaces and “[felt] that level of community that had been built over so long,” Jennings said. There, they have talked with older lesbians and told them about the Brass Strap in hopes of bringing them in.


To Jennings, inclusivity is crucial because queer spaces remain necessary for all to access.


“Historically, queer spaces and queer-inclusive spaces have been the only places that people can actually be themselves,” Jennings said. “I think now, with people being able to be more out and open, people have told themselves that we don't need these spaces anymore. … And I just don't think that that's true.”


The co-founders are aiming to further prioritize community through the bar’s unique model.


The Brass Strap is structured as a multi-stakeholder co-op, a format that, when combined with a liquor license, has never been done in Minnesota. Within this model, workers will become owners, and customers can choose to be owners. This format stems from a belief that decisions “need to be made by the workers and the customers,” Jennings said.


The co-op currently has about 70 member-owners, at various tiers of membership. All member-owners are able to vote on decisions, run for the board, and serve on committees.


This unprecedented model has complicated the opening process; for instance, it took the co-founders three years to find a lawyer who could satisfactorily structure the co-op. However, Jennings sees the community input that this model allows as a necessary investment in the bar’s future.


“We would be open right now if we dropped the co-op formation,” Jennings said. “But the thing is, we would be open right now, but we might not be open tomorrow.”


The Brass Strap’s co-founders have toured at least a dozen potential bar locations since December 2024. Although Jennings said the co-founders are the closest they have ever been to locking down a space, they are not yet ready to announce what that might be.


Once the bar opens for good, Jennings is most excited for people “to make huge memories there. I can’t wait for our first wedding at the bar. … Working in the service industry, those were always my favorite parts: hearing how a space can be so important to someone.”


Jennings hopes that, from the work that they and their co-founders have put into the Brass Strap, others learn that they can open a lesbian bar, too.


“None of us have really ever felt like any other space was competition for us—and not in a cocky way, but in a way of abundance mindset rather than scarcity,” Jennings said. “Capitalism wants us to think that there is a scarcity in everything and in everyone, and that's just not true. We [queer people] are abundant, and we deserve an abundance of choices.”

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Ella Stern is a rising senior at Macalester College and a journalist living in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her journalism focuses on the labor movement, and she loves to write and talk about queer spaces and intergenerational queer connection.