The rise and fall of America’s lesbian bars. Can they be saved?

Erica Rose and Elina Street both credit New York’s Cubbyhole, an LGBTQ bar in the West Village for helping them come out and find their community. (Photo: Lesbian Bar Project)

Writer and social commentator Roxane Gay chuckled while describing her first visit to a lesbian bar—Panic Bar in Lincoln, Nebraska. “I was 21,” she says, “Maybe 20.” Gay describes the bar, which closed this fall, as a dive, and summed up…