“Our choice to view ourselves as a women’s bar affects so many people very deeply rooted in our community,” Leach says. She says the decision to identify as a women’s bar and not a lesbian bar is not only motivated by appearances or the bottom line. When she talks about Gossip, she crackles like a bonfire. She has a big smile and auburn hair that’s been waved with precision. We are open to everyone.”Ī few days later, Brittany Rae Leach, Gossip’s head of marketing, joins me at the bar during off hours. “Under that women’s umbrella is gay, straight, bi, trans, pan, you name it. We’re a women’s bar,” Girton emphasizes during our initial meeting. Girton says part of the reason Gossip is the last remaining lesbian bar in Southern California is because, well, it isn’t. The term lesbian can hardly encapsulate everyone living with a marginalized gender or sexual identity. Lesbian bars may be shuttering because they struggle to practice gender inclusivity too. At Barrel & Board, her new restaurant, she says it’s 14 of the 23, including one of the managers. At Gossip, she says 27 out of 50 staffers are people of color, including the head chef and lead host. The pandemic had resulted in massive gaps in her staff when she was finally able to fill them earlier this year, Girton knew she wanted to be more intentional about diversity. “As diverse as I thought we were, we had a lot of growing to do,” she says. Her first step was to adapt her hiring practices. Since Gossip opened in 2009, it’s been the only brick-and-mortar lesbian bar in all of Southern California, including Los Angeles.Īt Gossip Grill, Girton says the collective reckoning around Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020 forced her to acknowledge her own shortcomings as a white business owner and helped her imagine a path to greater inclusivity in her establishments. She says San Diego lesbians in those days were “spoiled” with three venues to choose from: Club Bombay (later renamed Six Degrees), The Flame, and another called Patti’s Bar. Girton settled in San Diego in 1999-a time when, she remembers, women weren’t welcome at boys bars. Gossip, the block’s sole dive intended for women, stands out among them.
We’re in San Diego’s historic gayborhood, as the locals call it, on a stretch of University Avenue that is home to at least six gay bars (boys bars, as Girton calls them). We sit at a high-top table on the perimeter of the dance floor, chatting about how she opened this bar 12 years ago the doors are open to the patio and I can feel the velvet sun, ubiquitous over Hillcrest, warming my legs. She’s sporting loud paisley prints in all shades of blue-a party of one at 3 p.m. Moe Girton’s white-blonde faux-hawk floods cotton-candy pink under Gossip Grill’s disco balls and neon lights.