The lines are long for lesbian and queer nightlife events around Boston. Lesbian yacht parties sell out with hundreds of people on the waitlist and Pride Bar Fest attracted five thousand people last year.
”The need is there,” said Thais Rocha, co-founder of LGBTQ Nightlife Events in Boston. “We try to do as many events as we can. Obviously we're limited by space and people allowing us to have events in these spaces.”
Now, a permanent space for lesbian and queer nightlife will be housed at Dani’s Queer Bar in the Back Bay. Rocha is co-owner of Dani’s and spoke with Boston Public Radio on Wednesday about its anticipated opening this summer.
Dani’s was originally slated to open for Pride Month, but a delay in liquor license approval has pushed that back. Rocha now estimates Dani’s will open its doors by late August.
The bar sprung from an effort by Rocha and others to fill a gap in Boston’s nightlife that catered specifically to LGBTQ+ women and nonbinary people. In the United States there are only 27 bars for lesbian women.
“We are on the road to hopefully being number 28 in the country,” said Rocha. In the interim, Rocha and LGBTQ Nightlife Events have hosted events to fill the gap in lesbian nightlife while also fundraising for Dani’s. These events included Sapphic Night yacht parties and the Pride Bar Festival block party on Lansdowne Street.
“Just presale tickets alone, we've already surpassed what we did last year,” Rocha said about the festival.
Even with this success, Rocha said they sometimes have trouble finding spaces that will host LGBTQ+ events in Boston. “We get things like, 'oh, you know, we don't want to scare away our patrons,' or, 'no, we already have a gay event at our space,'” Rocha said.
But at the city level, Boston has been supportive of LGBTQ+ events. “We've been in contact with the Office of LGBTQ+ Advancement. They're very helpful there,” Rocha said.
Security is also a concern for event organizers when they are hosting LGBTQ+ events. “We don’t want disrespectful people to come in and disrupt the peaceful environment that we've created,” said Rocha. “So it's really a joint effort when we have an event, especially at a borrowed space, that we work with security and make sure that we're all being vigilant to keep everybody safe.”
