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Since that inaugural event, Dave's has popped up in different places every month, evolving and growing a little bit with each party. It was happening even if only a handful of people came out," Dausch recalls. "We knew we wanted to do this and we had to try. With a borrowed sound system and a kiddie pool doubling as a cooler, the first Dave's Lesbian Bar event launched in earnest on 31st Avenue, July 21, 2021, showcasing queer bands, offering haircuts and tattoos, and collecting food and clothes for the Astoria Food Pantry. Space was still a question, but the pandemic had given rise to a new network of "Open Streets," a city-sanctioned program turning commercial corridors into alternative use zones. They knew there was much to learn about owning and operating a space, but at least they could get their feet wet by throwing a killer queer party once a month.
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Undeterred by the difficulties of opening a venue in New York City, Dausch and a small group of collaborators fleshed out the Dave's concept and put together a fundraising model based around a series of pop-ups in different locations around Astoria. "And when everybody else is like, 'Yeah that's also my dream,' you realize we've all been thinking the same thing - just a space to get together and try to make something new, try to build a world that doesn't look like the one we have now." "It started out being my dream, wanting to make music every night and help the community every day," Dausch says. Given the steady closure of lesbian bars across the country, documented by the preservation campaign The Lesbian Bar Project, they began to dream of building a queer-led bar and music venue in the neighborhood that functioned as a mutual aid hub during the day. After taking stock of the community they'd built over three years of co-hosting the long-running local open mic program "Show N' Tell," as well as the emerging network of neighborhood mutual aid organizations that cropped up during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dausch started to dream big. And for the past few years, there's been a new Dave in town: Dave's Lesbian Bar, a pop-up event series that I've been involved with as a volunteer and a worker.ĭave's Lesbian Bar is a monthly pop-up event started by Kristin Dausch - also known as "Dave" - a Midwest transplant who landed in New York in 2009 and began working as a nanny while moonlighting as a singer, songwriter and performer. It's a brand that camouflages itself into any local landscape - reliable but nearly invisible.
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In my neighborhood of Astoria in Queens, N.Y., there's a Dave's for almost everything, from Dave's Shoes to Dave's Cabinets.