How to Destroy a Lesbian Bar
· The Atlantic
Way back in the wilds of 2013, I organized an event on feminism at a public venue in London. I was then the online editor of a left-wing magazine, and we had some of the best feminist columnists around. What a chance to show them off! A warm and supportive evening to celebrate a social movement that was then having a resurgence! Can you guess where this is going?!
I remembered that event as I read The Boston Globe’s extraordinarily viral account this week of a meltdown at the Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The lesbian bar strayed from the path of righteousness—brace yourselves—by announcing late last month that it would go mask-optional on Saturday nights. (“Greenfield hasn’t reported any COVID cases in more than two months,” the Globe’s Annalisa Quinn notes.) The bar was deluged with complaints that it was engaged in a “mass disabling event” that would kill its patrons, and was “no better than a fascist.” Even worse, some people involved were probably white women. One Instagram user, an artist who goes by Soe Noire, accused the owners of flirting with eugenics and “putting profit over people.”
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Now, my event didn’t quite generate that level of take-me-to-the-fainting-couch backlash. But we were besieged online by a squadron of nitpickers, who started from the position that they hated the event and worked backwards to find out why. Deviously, I had foiled them by ensuring that the panel was racially mixed, and by including a transgender woman, foreclosing the promising “cis white bitches” line of attack then popular in feminist circles. The hall was wheelchair-accessible and had a hearing loop for deaf attendees, Gaza had not yet emerged as a purity test, and COVID was not even a twinkle in a diseased bat’s eye. Conceding that the event had passed every intersectional test, the detractors fell back on the great constant: capitalism. Although all of the panelists had waived their speaking fee, we were charging £5 (about $6.50) a ticket, to cover the room rental. Was I not aware, one tweeter asked, that £5 was the cost of a meal to a single mother? Checkmate. The crime had been found, and I was guilty of being a privileged idiot, rolling around in my feminist loot like Scrooge McDuck.
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The left’s new moralism will backfire]
The event went ahead, but you never knew when one person’s gripe would derail everything; what we had envisioned as a warm, community-focused discussion instead felt like volunteering for a sprint through a minefield. (In the end, none of the haters turned up, and it was a pleasant evening.) This was the moment when I realized that social media had empowered drive-by whinings by sociopaths, and that progressive politics had allowed them to cloak themselves in righteousness. What might once have been recognized as narcissism, jealousy, the result of a personality disorder—or just plain boredom—was now transfigured into “calling out” those who had erred. The people pointing fingers usually did nothing themselves, apart from complaining, which had the happy side effect that they could never be accused of committing an impure act.
My experience pales beside that of Jackie Matellian, the 26-year-old proprietor of the Last Ditch, who, according to the Globe, had run up $50,000 in debt and had been sleeping in her truck as a result of the business’s troubles. She tried to do everything right: The bar was declared to be a safe space for the unhoused, and a no-go zone for police. She and her former co-owners (one of whom uses it/its pronouns) waived the cover charge for anyone who couldn’t pay; more and more patrons took advantage. After the backlash to the change in the mask policy, the bar apologized, explaining that the mask-optional night would help members of the queer community who needed to lip-read. None of this appeased the critics, one of whom felt the bar was insufficiently devoted to “revolutionary praxis,” which is like normal praxis but the discussions you have about it go around and around forever. “How are we supposed to be ‘connected in the revolution’ if we are spreading disease to one another? Nah,” Soe Noire posted.
At this point, Matellian should have realized that you can’t negotiate with terrorists, even ones with long COVID. Instead, though, she optimistically subjected herself to a struggle session—sorry, a mediation-and-accountability process—so that everyone could air their grievances.
The podcast Blocked and Reported, which broke the story of the Last Ditch earlier this month, obtained audio recordings of this meeting, in which pronoun declarations were required. As Katie Herzog, a co-host of the podcast, observed, the participants included “two people named after plants” (Sage and Moss; a third was named Yams). Those attending on Zoom were relentlessly hostile, demanding to know the mediator’s race and whether they would be institutionalized for disclosing any mental-health conditions to her. One of the Last Ditch volunteers told the meeting that the bar was $3,900 in debt and needed to pay within days, but Soe Noire—a self-declared lesbian using he/him pronouns—changed the subject to how the policy change made him feel unsafe. The Last Ditch had failed to uphold “COVID-cautious principles, anti-racism, or revolution,” Noire said. (Reminder: This is a bar. You know, the place where you go to drink beer.)
Most people might be surprised that arguments over masking are still so febrile years after even cautious blue-state schools resumed in-person teaching. But across the United States, some small subcultures live as though it’s still April 2020. That’s because pandemic protections and mitigations quickly became left-coded, to the extent that Donald Trump now has to pretend he didn’t oversee the successful vaccine program. In this context, perma-masking is every bit as much a political symbol as wearing a MAGA hat or a keffiyeh.
Anxiety and depression rates spiked during the pandemic, and some vulnerable people have never really recovered from the effects of physical isolation and the sense of oppressive dread they felt during months when thousands of Americans died. On the right, these emotions drive people toward conspiracism about Chinese bioweapons and false flags and “mass formation psychosis,” the idea that gullible populations were hypnotized into accepting shutdown measures. On the left, these anxieties coincide with a political critique—that Americans and their predatory private-health-care system do not care about disabled people. Masking is a visible symbol of resistance to this injustice, as well as a practical measure against the spread of disease. Notably, too, self-reported long COVID is disproportionately high among trans and bi Americans. Unless science uncovers measurable respiratory differences between bisexuals and the rest of the population, one explanation is that more LGBTQ Americans live in social contexts in which vague, unpleasant symptoms such as brain fog are interpreted as long COVID.
The political division helps explain why masking is portrayed in certain progressive enclaves as a way of resisting eugenics. But it doesn’t quite explain the boiling fury of the people demanding masks at the Last Ditch. At this point, let me also bring in the word mimophant. This is a term for someone who has the hide of an elephant when criticizing others, but the delicate skin of a mimosa flower when criticized themselves. At the mediation meeting, Soe Noire, who had previously performed at the bar but was otherwise not deeply involved with it, was extremely attentive to his own feelings of pain. He also groused that while other speakers were limited to two minutes apiece, Matellian—who had faced sniping from all sides for more than an hour—chose to “go overtime and cry for three minutes.”
Anyone who has spent time in dysfunctional activist spaces will be familiar with this dynamic: The designated target is expected to soak up endless criticism in silence, or even express gratitude for the correction. If the target gets upset, they can be accused of “centering their own pain” at the expense of the marginalized. Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling White Fragility has a whole section about the tendency of certain women to weep in such circumstances, a phenomenon she dismisses as “white tears.” The overall effect of this approach is like when a school bully slams someone into the lockers and then taunts them for crying. Oh, the widdle baby got hurt, did they? This is sadism disguised as activism.
The audio reveals that Noire followed up on his complaint by explaining that “as a trans person, there’s a lot of emotional and physical labor that goes into this.” (The physical labor of—whining?) Returning for another meeting would expose Noire to “harm.” In the second round of complaints, Noire demanded a complete change of leadership in the bar’s management team, and concluded: “Pay me.”
What followed my own feminist-event drama was a political education. Gradually, my friendship group began to pass around articles that made sense of the patterns we were seeing. In a 2012 blog post, the writer Matt Bruenig described what he called “purity leftism.” “When purity leftists do actions and organizing, their interest is not in reducing oppression as much as it is in reducing their own participation in it,” he wrote. “Above all else, they want to be able to say that they are not oppressing, not that oppression has ended.” Such people were prone, Bruenig said, to “self-marginalizing lifestyles and costumes.” A year later, he offered another useful phrase: identitarian deference, or the presumption that “privileged individuals should defer to the opinions and views of oppressed individuals.”
Since then, I have become alert to all of the red flags of purity leftism: complaints about “white tears,” the sadism of the get-up-so-I-can-hit-you-again tendency, the use of jargon such as praxis while fretting that the conversation is dominated by the privileged, and the hyperbolic assertions of nebulous “harm.” (Rhetorical inflation has gotten so bad that everything is a genocide.)
[Helen Lewis: The Gaza left and the gender left]
These gambits work because accommodating the oppressed and less fortunate is a social good. Public venues should have wheelchair ramps, and you shouldn’t go to the children’s cancer ward with a terrible head cold. What the purity leftists exploit is a reluctance to say how much accommodation is enough. If masking was desirable at the height of the COVID pandemic, it must still be appropriate now—and anyone who says otherwise doesn’t care about the disabled. If respecting people with gender dysphoria is a sign of tolerance, then no one should question whether calling a human being “it” is reasonable or progressive. Communities that talk like this are very attached to the concept of “mutual aid,” but some people suck up a lot of care and support without ever putting a shift in to help others. Good-natured herbivorous lefties are easy marks for narcissists and mimophants.
It’s noteworthy that the Last Ditch meltdown was caused, ultimately, by the pandemic of 2020. The coronavirus and wokeness were two novel pathogens. Our physical immune system didn’t know how to react to COVID, while our social immune system adapted slowly to the speed with which activists organized on social media. Several of the cancellations I covered in that period would not have played out the same way without Slack groups, Zoom meetings, and Twitter threads—forums that allowed bad actors to dominate the discussion, and prevented the broad mass of reasonable people from realizing that they were in the majority. I’ve lost count of the number of times a small clique of whiners so hijacked a left-wing event that the organizers eventually conceded defeat: One fond memory is of the fat-positive club that was forced to apologize for playing the song “Spice Up Your Life” because one of the lyrics refers to a “yellow man in Timbuktu.” The situation at the Last Ditch is very similar. Soe Noire rampaged through Greenfield’s LGBTQ community like a dose of the clap.
The most interesting aspect of the Last Ditch saga has been the reaction. The story drove 1,000 subscriptions to the Globe, and generated more traffic than any other article the paper had published this year, according to Semafor’s Max Tani. Even on Bluesky, the spiritual home of perma-masking, the response settled somewhere around “the pandemic broke people’s brains,” with the occasional interjection that queer communities should not air their grievances in public, for the sake of the movement. Soe Noire alone is unrepentant, posting on Instagram that “the antimaskers and randos coming in to give their useless two cents, you might wanna read a book.”
In the 13 years since I got mobbed for charging £5 to attend an event, and the six years since the beginning of the pandemic, our social immune system has learned to adapt. Even the 83-year-old Democratic ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, Rosa DeLauro, has been joking online about taking a tour group to the bar. The Last Ditch’s future might be precarious, but so is the future of the social-justice protection racket.