The Last Days of the Last Ditch Lesbian Bar

GONZO

Visiting Western Massachusetts' Queer Caliphate

By Isaac Simpson · October 26, 2026 · 20 min read

On October 26th, 2026 the sad news dropped that The Last Ditch lesbian bar in Greenfield, MA—”the most famous bar in America”—would be closing its doors. “We have put our lives on hold to foster networks of care, resources, and a home base for organizing,” the post read. “We still don’t have a board/leadership to manage workers owned Co-op transfer.” Besides honoring scheduled events, the bar is shutting its doors to the public effectively immediately. Luckily, I visited Last Ditch in its last days, just as it became a household name and flamed out in dysfunctional glory. “I just fell to my knees in Trader Joe’s,” read one tweet. “It was like 15 9/11s” said another. “Rest now, brother. We have the watch, and I’ll see you in Valhalla.”

Bars. Where once we plotted assassinations, we now watch Arab tourists struggle with the difference between corn and flour tortillas. But deep in the provinces the tradition of bars as public fora still remains. When traveling, I like to search “bar” in Maps and drive to the most remote, intimidating result that feels like I shouldn’t be there.

Usually the patrons are friendly, or at the very least polite enough to ignore me nipping whiskey and scrolling my phone in the corner. I can think of only three exceptions. A dive in the oil fields north of Midland, Texas. A ramshackle booze hut deep in the redwoods of Humboldt County. And, last but not least, the Last Ditch lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts. If the Midland bar mean-mugged me out, and the Humboldt bar froze me out, the Western Massachusetts bar didn’t reject me at all. It repressed me.

The Last Ditch calls itself a Lesbian Bar, but this is a misnomer. It began as an act of radical queerness, which is, as I now know, a starkly different thing from lesbian. Three local “roommates” opened it in 2025 specifically as a masks-mandated bar, catering to the “immunocompromised” queers who walk with canes and, yes it’s a cliche, usually have blue or pink dyed hair. A product of coddle culture meshed with the instinct to climb the intersectional ladder: better to be queer and chronically ill than just queer. These neo-Puritans have been making waves for their open intolerance of outsiders, not just at the Last Ditch, but also in Portland where fans of the Portland Thorns, a women’s soccer club, have heckled, assaulted, and thrown journalists and TERFs out of the stadium.

Not long after opening, Last Ditch implemented a “no pigs” rule. Yes masks, police no. When revenue hit rock bottom and two of the founders left, the remaining operator, living out of her van, instituted a desperate measure: one night a week, Saturday, the bar would host a mask-optional DJ dance party. Radical queers went nuts on Reddit, threatening to firebomb the bar if it didn’t reinstitute its mask mandate. The controversy dominated the news cycle for a week.

In reality, the virality was less about a real rift within the gay community, which amounted to basically a few Reddit comments, and more about the fact that a bar, any bar, had a mask mandate in 2026. It opened the nation’s eyes to a strange and growing subculture. People really don't realize what's happening in Western Massachusetts.

“Based lesbian” Katie Herzog, host of the Blocked and Reported podcast, has reported on Last Ditch since it opened. She describes it as a radical queer bar as opposed to a lesbian bar: lesbians drink beer, listen to NPR, and vote reliably Dem while radical queers do meth, live in their vans, and don’t vote at all. Western Massachusetts used to be the lesbian belt of the country, now it’s the “queer belt” of the country. Completely different things.

Western Mass is home to old school lesbian colleges such as Smith and Mount Holyoke, and has always been an incubator for rich kid communism. You’d be surprised how many far-left activists and influencers have roots there, particularly Pioneer Valley which encompasses a series of large small towns: Northampton, Springfield, Holyoke, and Amherst. Abbie Hoffman started in Western Mass. Rachel Maddow calls herself a product of Western Mass. Far-lefty rock star Kim Gordon came up there. Nepo baby activist of the week Fergie Chambers built his radical org in the Berkshires. Growing up, I myself spent summers in the Berkshires with my far-left parents doing weird theater shit.

Given its history as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Western Mass is mired in such a flagrantly contradictory mix of progressivism as puritanism and puritanism as progressivism that it confuses even the most committed gender goblin. Puritans were all about passionately integrating their morality into their daily and personal lives—not just following the rules, but indulging in them. They were a “pieces of flare” people, you were expected to embody the program, not just abide by it. So, in a way, the far-leftist tendency to mutilate one’s body and treat your sexuality as a moral and political act is pure puritan. Yes, the theocratic nature of wokeness has been “noticed” a million times a million ways, but when you’re out in the queer belt the paradoxical sharia-ness of it all (I mean we’re literally talking about face coverings) pressurizes everything. Listen to any radical queer podcast coverage of Last Ditch, as I did making my way through the foggy vacationlands of Massachusetts, and you will see the cognitive dissonance in full effect.

Northampton, home of Smith College. I start the night at a bar called the Tunnel, which, like Last Ditch, seems like a vagina reference. Last Ditch is in the much quieter Greenfield, roughly 45 minutes north of Northampton. The Tunnel is actually in a tunnel, a pretty little bar in a tube cavern built into a stone bridge. Six oysters and a glass full of Knob Creek. They put tomato sauce in the mignonette, which I find kind of gross, but the oysters are light, fresh, and delicious. New England oysters put Mid-Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific oysters to shame. 

I talk to the girl next to me at the bar, part of a three-person friend group of what looks like college students. She’s very pretty, half Peruvian and a little overweight. Bisexual, I learn within seconds. Her sister committed suicide at 17. Her drunk dad was too strict, pills mom not strict enough. She has POTS. She has no idea what she’s going to do with her life. She's nice to me. Open. Friendly. Asks me about myself. A sweet, curious person. Wants to talk about everything. She invites me to visit the restaurant she works at for brunch tomorrow.

The thing about college bars is that sometimes, when you order a whiskey neat from a college kid, he doesn't understand that it's not supposed to be an entire glass full of whiskey. The guy serves me a rocks glass brimming with Blanton's, which I drink too quickly in my lonely wallflower state. I’d also flown in on a 6 a.m. flight to Boston, two hours away, that morning, so I’m buzzed. Outside, I smoke cigarettes with some street vagrants to sober up. They are ubiquitous in Northampton. I ask if they have anything to say about the culture here in the gaylands. Nada. Totally agnostic. They just want to smoke PCP and steal bikes. A black guy comes up and joins us, and says he’s from Africa. They laugh when I say I'm heading up to Greenfield to the Last Ditch. “Bro, you’re going to get jumped,” they say. I’ve heard this several times.

Much strategic thinking has gone into my getting into Last Ditch. Mask or no mask? Cover story or no cover story? How to infiltrate without setting off alarm buzzers? The trans podcaster described it as “more like a clubhouse than a bar,” and said even he was afraid of getting bounced out. The New York Times reported that all prior journalists (besides their own) were barred entry by militant queers saying “it’s a private party tonight.” An X anon from the area suggests I might pretend to be bar hopping and slip in. My gay friend Sean Monahan, whom I ask how best to cloak my intentions, says, “You're going to get assaulted.” He suggested affixing a trans pin to my shirt. I attempted to find one at one of the zillions of gay bookstores in the region—there are more rainbow bookstores than restaurants in Western Mass—but to no avail. I'd go in raw. No mask. No pin. No cover story.

Sufficiently sober, or so I thought, I drive up the 45 minutes to Greenfield and park on the empty streets. Nothing is going on. Totally dead. There’s no bar traffic at all; I’m a solo sojourner smoking and stalking the damp glistening streets. This destroys the bar-hopping excuse, as merely stumbling in from a nearby bar next door isn’t plausible. Fuck it. I walk down to the basement level where the entrance to Last Ditch stands in a little concrete courtyard, like the lunchtime atrium of a commercial building. It’s brightly lit and plain, not dank and dingy. An out-of-place purple door leads into the Last Ditch.

I stumble in and find it almost empty. It's about 11 p.m.; opened at 10, goes til two. There's a DJ at the racks, smoke, blacklights and redlights. It doesn’t feel anything like a gay bar, more the vibe of a sparsely attended house music afters in a warehouse in DTLA. Same powdery smoke machine smell. Same strangely dressed apparitions flitting at the sides of my vision. Like a pop up haunted house in a strip mall. I post myself at the bar. Behind it are a flamboyant Hispanic (I think) guy in a mask and a skinny Asian (I think) girl in a mask and mom jeans. She seems cute and feminine, definitely not a revolutionary, but then again none of those Red Guard college girls seemed like revolutionaries either.

I scan the simple cocktail menu. Nothing creative, nothing weird. House marg. House Old Fashioned. They sell a beef stick for $0.75, which I contemplate having either gay or Marxist meanings but come up empty.

The bartender comes over chipper, but guarded. I’m certainly out of place, a large 40-year-old white man in the mostly empty bar. I see a sort of dull recognition in her eyes, like she’s tolerating me. Not patronizing, there’s no eyeroll, not a scintilla of aggression. It’s just flat and polite, no nonsense, like how a barista gives a homeless guy a glass of water.

I order a whiskey.

“I can hear in your voice… It sounds like you’ve been drinking,” she says softly through her mask.

“Oh, does it?”

“Yes, I’m afraid I can’t serve you.”

Now, I should say here, I am certainly a drinker. I love drinking. I love drinking establishments. I love the taste of all alcohol varieties, with the sole exception of mezcal which I have a strong aversion to. I’m not saying I don’t get hammered on occasion, and those occasions are frequent. However, in this case I’d been careful to drink enough to be relaxed but sober enough to handle getting in. After even one drink, I do get a little mushy mouthed, especially if I haven’t spoken for an hour or so. In a normal situation I would’ve thrown a fit and demanded to be breathalyzed, but I was trying to raise as few red flags as possible.

“Oh I’m sorry about that,” I say. “I’ll just have a water please.” Nice as can be.

I sit on a barstool watching the scene on my absolute best behavior. I do everything I can to avoid drawing attention to myself. I don’t even open the phone. I don't want to look like I'm taking notes for a story. I just sit there staring. I certainly don't put on the Meta glasses burning a hole in my pocket.

For about 45 minutes, I watch groups filter in. Mostly tall, gawky trannies in masks. All MTF, I don’t see any FTMs at all. Some have a woman. Some have two. Almost all masked. There aren’t chatty gay men. There aren’t flannel lesbians. It’s radical genderqueer squadrons in long cotton print dresses and cable-knit shawls, sniffing at each other like curious lemurs. The DJ is insanely good. He's masked too, a roly-poly white guy getting very into his music. Harder house, maybe techno. Whatever it is, it's working on me.

The bartenders flitter around peppily, serving their simple little cocktails. It’s still relatively desolate, but it’s a good vibe. Finally, a woman who seems to know everybody starts talking to me. She’s one of the only other people not wearing a mask. She looks like a Saturday Night Live version of a female Patriots fan: short, chunky, with a Boston accent. Button down open with a t-shirt underneath, tight but masculine jeans. Definitely a more flannelly type of old school lesbian. She says she's from a blue-collar part of the Boston area. This is a big thing in Massachusetts; everybody tells you they’re from a blue-collar area. They use the words “blue collar” a lot. Oh, no, no, no, this is a blue-collar part of Mass. We’re not like those effete transplants.

She becomes my guide for the night. We buzz around to the three-queer groups (they travel in threes) who basically ignore me. They don't seem particularly interested, but they're not mean. Again: tolerant. The bartender keeps a close eye on me. Looks, not scowls, just passive surveillance. I obviously want more alcohol but I don’t try to get any. She doesn't kick me out, and I'm very careful not to give her a reason. My sherpa, pitying my dry plight, starts sneaking me beers. The Red Guard bartendress very apprehensively hands them over to her, barely sliding them across the bar, because she knows the game. We chain smoke together on the fluorescent concrete patio and talk about the world of radical queerness. She's a lesbian, she tells me, has absolutely no interest in dick. Absolutely none. She repeats this. Most of the other people here, she explains, are various degrees of gender-fluid queer, which is a completely different thing. She is, in her formulation, a straight lesbian. An anachronism.

It’s getting fuzzy with the cigarettes and the snuck beers. She decouples from me and I’m alone under the blazing gaze of the bartender. The music is so good. I feel her eyes beating down.

I love dancing to EDM and I figure this must be the place to dance to EDM by myself. Will probably throw the warden off my scent, she’ll think I’m an autist weirdo freak. Maybe she’ll think I’m an FTM. The DJ is really banging and going in himself, mask and all, so I dance it out for like a straight hour, watching as the shy lemur MTFs come onto the dance floor, do a couple half-assed moves, then skitter away. I’m just a hyper-dominant FTM owning the floor as he should.

Patriots girl forces me to promise that I will drive her home, because Ubers are very difficult to get around here.

“To be honest, you seem like the kind of douchebag white guy who is here to write some sort of Substack article about this,” she says at one point. “Everybody thinks that's what you're doing here.”

Wow. 100% correct. I appreciate that they allowed me in anyway. This tells me they’re serious about their revolution. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t tolerate me, because the point would be to argue with me. The Puritans didn’t argue, they tolerated, turned their eyes up towards God. Then they hung you. Or, if you were a native, they simply froze you out. Here, I was the native, the supposed owner of the land upon which their moral experiment is built. And in similar fashion they tolerated me, knowing I could never integrate. The queers of Last Ditch held their tongues and let me do my gay little project. They have bigger fish to fry.

Another girl in an N95 mask came in, identical vibes to the bartender. Seemingly pretty and toned, although of course I can’t see her face. Cute. Chipper. Tolerant. Excited to be there. Native American of some kind, or maybe Filipino. Barely masculine—a girl performing a man performing a woman. Patriots gets very excited to hit on this new woman, belle of the militant revolutionary ball. Finally, feeling like I’ve earned it after three hours of perfect behavior, I covertly pull out my Meta glasses to try to get one little video. Within 26 seconds of me taking them out, I know exactly because it was recorded, the bartender warden pops up out of nowhere.

"Are those Meta glasses?"

Unbelievable.

"No, no, no, they're not," I scrambled, fumbling with them to put them away. “They’re not what you think.” They’re a hearing aid for autism. For my fibromyalgia of the ears and eyes.

“Ok,” she says. Friendly as can be. Makes sure I’ve put them away.

I go back to dancing for a little while—just dancing crazily next to the DJ booth by myself. Patriots hits on the Mayan warrior princess. And finally I break my promise to drive her home and scoot out just before closure at 2 a.m. I don’t want to get caught in here with the lights on.

I drove home through the intricate, over-developed safety of Massachusetts. The rest-stop signs offer chowder and Emily Dickinson, the original Western Mass lesbian. Every route pathed, every forest cultivated. A cushion that has given birth to the golem that will slay it.

I get back to the Red Roof Inn Plus and I can hear the crickets and see the bits of red leaves on the wet asphalt. The best thing about this part of the world is the smells. It’s not just me saying it, they're somehow more intense and clean than other places. You hear boomers declaiming “the air smells so fresh!” in every brunch line. The dying forest doesn’t have that ash smell, like in California. Here it’s pure air freshener, Yankee Candle, but like the real version. Like the taste of a real strawberry compared to the Jolly Rancher.

Back at the motel, I’m met with a bevy of texts from Patriots trying to lure me to come back and pick her up. “I’m interested in giving a blowjob,” she texts, among other half-drunk blits and blobs, “Maybe sex.” I know what she’s up to. I’m a white straight man. There are no wrong reasons to manipulate me, for I am not sentient. I am not a human. Anything for the revolution. I demur and pass out.

The next morning, Sunday, I stroll through Northampton. A pair of post-racial, hoodie-wearing, sex-indeterminate college kids with mulatto perms shuffle stonedly down the street blasting trap music out of a speaker backpack. It seems performative. Their mood of a grey depressive 11 a.m. Xanax slopwalk pervades the town. The Unitarian Universalist church is doing a giveaway so the streets are crawling with methed-out homeless, the shock troops of the revolution filling up on coffee and bagels and fresh sweaters. Literally 50-60 blissed out zombies occupy the stairs of city hall, face tattoos and sleeping bags, pursing their purply lips in friendly conversations; the Antichrist of AA meetings. The UU church bears a trans flag and a climate-emergency sign and a BLM sign. We Are Called to Act. The digital sign of another church decked out in rainbows reads “Grace Goes Wild Here.” Rainbow bunting flags hang everywhere on grey stone. One bookstore has a huge three-story banner, baby blue, that says “Fighting Sameness since 1978” with a little peace bird flying. Even Urban Outfitters—in a former beautiful stone church—is covered in rainbow bunting flags. Where provincial liberal college towns like this used to feel cute, the doom has come to Northampton. The sky feels scorched. The streets feel heavy and ominous. A shirtless homeless man maintains a constant screamed dialogue with passersby, asking every woman if he can go home with her. A black woman addresses each pedestrian directly, “Can you buy me something?” I watch her get turned down by a grey-haired NPR woman and a shaved-head master’s student alike.

Hungover at the diner, I drink a coffee and a Bloody Mary and eat the house special, a caramelized onion scramble. The waitress is probably 22, shaved head, neck tattoo and clinging frump leggings, white girl, very pretty and skinny, but in full-on ugly mode. Won’t make even one second of eye contact. There are also straight men in the diner: boyfriends in bookish couples and groups of hungover lotharios. They wear varying forms of ear jewelry, but the glasses game is what it's really all about. For a straight man of the revolution, your glasses are everything; the thicker and more retro the better. The current form seems to be big ovals with golden rims, Walter White style. The kid next to me, one of the aforementioned bookish cisboyfriends, asks the waitress what brand of soy sauce is in his brown rice bowl. Morningstar, I believe.

I remember zooming in on the map of Western Mass. You zoom in and roads appear and zoom in and even more roads appear, almost infinitely, like a microscope revealing yet more structures of a cell. What that tells me is that Western Mass is oversettled. Oversocialized. And thus, over-safe. The whole state is propped up by the Higher Ed gravy train, and that has led to atrophy and political fermentation. Canes and hormone therapy. Coffee and Bloody Mary.

The oldest continuously operating church in America in Hingham, MA, once Puritan, is now also a rainbow-emblazoned Unitarian Universalist congregation, which doesn’t even believe in a holy Jesus. From the Puritans to the Congregationalists to the Transcendentalists to the Unitarian Universalists, Western Mass is all about unspooling the rules then obsessively following new ones. Decoupling from God, while maintaining the same fervent telos towards all-encompassing morality…only now you are God.

It’s not hard to imagine what happened to Last Ditch, out in the middle of nowhere, hosting maskless DJ nights 10-2 a.m. on Saturday nights just to stay afloat. What sort of business becomes the most famous of its kind and fails to turn a profit? Only the kind that hates itself. The UU rainbow church is to God what a communist bar is to capitalism. A reversal; an occupation. The Last Ditch’s pinned Instagram post bears a hammer and sickle, but bars are perhaps the most fundamental examples of capitalism in the world. The center simply could not hold. At least not yet.

Where the lesbian is an intellectual liberal, the genderqueer is a bodily Puritan. Western Massachusetts has become ground zero for their movement. These aren’t the PrEP gays of WeHo and Provincetown, nor are they any longer the flannel book store lesbians from whence they came. These are real-life revolutionary communists. During Trump/Covid, they somehow morphed from harmless “Women and Women First” dilettantes into actual militant rebels. They really are going to make an attempt to destroy the White Man’s World. They don’t want arguments, they want guillotines, and they’ll tolerate the capitalist pigs as long as they need to in order to get to the guillotine part. Gotta respect ‘em for the commitment. In criticizing the Last Ditch backlash, one trans podcaster said something like, “the thing that they don’t acknowledge is that we live in a capitalist society.” His queer guests went silent. Confused, perhaps appalled. But then he clarified, “at least for now. And for now, the landlord needs the rent.”