Last fall, Reddit user Pineapple-Squirrel4 posed a serious question on the r/ucla subreddit.
"Where are all the lesbians???? Trying to find my people," she posted.
Olivia Real, the face behind the Pineapple-Squirrel4 account and a doctoral student in political science at UCLA, hoped to find the lesbian community after moving to Westwood. But she said this required more effort than first anticipated, so I decided to help out.
While the United States maintained around 200 lesbian bars in the late 1980s, this number has shrunk to 27 bars nationally, with only two located in all of Los Angeles. Beyond these bars, it seemed to me like safe spaces for the lesbian community in LA were few and far between. And for those who prefer to socialize without alcohol or are underage – including many college students – I thought the options would be nearly nonexistent. But I discovered Bruins have remained undeterred, seeking and creating their own spaces to celebrate a diverse range of lesbian identities.
My journey started with a trip to the UCLA LGBTQ Campus Resource Center, a space for LGBTQ Bruins that offers education, advocacy services and community-building events. I walked to the LBGTQ center on a rainy Thursday afternoon, seeking out an event aptly named "Let’s Go Lesbians!" While the event’s namesake references a popular meme from the show "Billy on the Street," its participants see it as more than a lighthearted television reference and rather a space to meet other lesbian students at UCLA.
Evan Ibarra, a third-year film student and the creator of the Let’s Go Lesbians! event, said his idea initially stemmed from popular demand. Over the past two years working at the LGBTQ center, she found that many lesbians on campus had no idea how to connect with other community members.
"It was like a bajillion lesbians telling me, ‘Oh, I don't know any lesbians,’" Ibarra said. "And I know a bajillion of them, ... so I just pitched the idea."
The quarterly event, which first took place in May 2022, gives lesbians in the Bruin community a place to come together for an afternoon of crafts, food and genuine conversation.
Kelly Doherty, a fourth-year communication student, regularly attends the event. Although Doherty acknowledged it can sometimes be difficult to start conversations with other attendees, she made me feel incredibly welcomed attending the event for the first time. We sat together eating snacks and making crafts, chatting with each other for two hours.
Ibarra, who identifies as a transmasculine lesbian, understands from personal experience the importance of welcoming diverse voices in the lesbian community. Although Let’s Go Lesbians! does focus on lesbian attendees, Ibarra said the event has also attracted Bruins who identify as bisexual or generally sapphic. While there is not a hard-and-fast rule that only lesbians are allowed to come to the event, Ibarra added, the event’s main goal is to create a safe space for lesbians at UCLA. He also added that the light, social environment of Let's Go Lesbians! has attracted transgender, cisgender and nonbinary lesbians throughout the event’s history.
"I think it's been really good just for the lesbian community on campus to have some sort of representation," Ibarra said.
Aside from sharing her personal experience, Ibarra pointed me to Bianca D.M. Wilson, a senior scholar of public policy at the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute who specializes in research on LGBTQ+ representation.
Wilson recently co-published a study titled the "Health and Socioeconomic Well-Being of LBQ Women in the US." According to the 2021 report, a higher proportion of LBQ women reported feeling like they lived in communities that were less accepting of marginalized identities than GBQ men, particularly in terms of race and ethnicity.
"Historically, Black LGBT people do experience racism, whether it's minor microaggressions that might seem harmless and yet are still nonetheless impactful to more major events," Wilson said.
Wilson added that the queer community is by no means an escape from the racism that permeates the rest of society. This can lead many lesbians of color to seek out LGBTQ+ spaces where the community shares similar backgrounds and experiences as a way to avoid this racism in the greater LGBTQ+ community.
Given the challenges lesbians of color face in the wider LGBTQ+ community, I saw how the Let’s Go Lesbians! team works to provide a space where lesbians of all identities and backgrounds can come together and find happiness within their community. The first step in bringing this joy for many is to reclaim the word "lesbian."
"There’s such a disdain towards the label ‘lesbian.’ ... It’s kind of a dirty term," Ibarra said. "So I kind of just want lesbians to feel community and kind of joy in their own identity."
Real also shared the importance of taking pride in her identity as a lesbian. Before moving to Westwood this year, Real found it difficult to embrace her identity in her home community.
"Something internal in me could not accept the idea of being a lesbian," Real said. "Hearing how people would talk about lesbians around me – I think that internally built a lot of self-hatred."
Today, Real said she fully embraces this part of her identity with a little help from TikTok, crediting the app with opening her eyes to the welcoming lesbian community online.
"Having gone through that cycle of realization that there’s an online community, I think that really incentivized me to sort of look for something on campus," Real said.
With her newfound confidence, Real began searching for lesbian-centered spaces at UCLA. On her Reddit post from fall quarter, Real received many responses encouraging her to look into the club women’s rugby team. The Reddit community seemed to lead her in the right direction, as Real said she still fosters many rewarding friendships with the team members.
Using the internet to connect with the lesbian community is not an isolated experience – the search "lesbian TikTok" has more than 14 billion views. TikTok even led Doherty to discover Queer Field Day, a popular lesbian- and queer-centered beach meetup.
Doherty’s description of the meetup intrigued me. Eager to learn more about the event that has gathered thousands of lesbians in Southern California, I reached out to the Queer Field Day team and met co-creator Adrianne Casey.
Casey credits the event’s origins to social media and her friend, Lilly Brown. Brown, also known as @lilly27sings on TikTok, currently has more than 320,000 followers and regularly posts an assortment of videos on topics such as queer-centered media, her personal experiences as a lesbian and her group of queer friends. Casey said questions about how Brown made friends with so many queer-identifying people are common in the comment section of Brown’s videos.
One comment suggested Brown host a meetup in LA for followers wanting to connect with people in the queer community. In May 2021, Brown turned that idea into reality. Surrounded by some of her close friends, Brown posted a video acknowledging the difficulties of making queer friends and announced her plan to hold a meetup at Venice Beach’s rainbow lifeguard tower. Unexpectedly, the video received about 500 comments serving as informal RSVPs to the event, Casey said.
Drawing on her experience as a former camp counselor, Casey, along with her wife and Brown, created games for the event that centered around fostering connections between participants. Playing games like queer Guess Who? and bingo, many of the around 500 attendees socialized over the low-pressure, engaging activities, Casey said.
The first event was a smashing success, Casey said, with many participants requesting another event. As people struggled to find their community in person after the COVID-19 lockdown was lifted, Queer Field Day became a place to socialize with other queer Angelenos face to face, she added. In June 2021, Queer Field Day held its second meetup, this time with more than 1,000 attendees.
Almost two years since Brown’s viral TikTok post, Queer Field Day LA continues to hold events every few months for queer Angelenos of all ages. Some meetups have even yielded romantic success stories. Casey fondly recalled the February meetup, an ax-throwing event called "Meet Your Next Ax." She added that Brown recently ran into two Meet Your Next Ax attendees who met each other at the event and had gone on four dates since.
When I heard that story, I couldn’t help but smile. It seems like people are committed to growing and sustaining the lesbian community in LA.
So where are all the lesbians? In the end, Real answered her own question.
"The (lesbian) community is out there – I just got to look for it," Real said.