![]() ![]() “People would be like, ‘Are you sure you don’t wanna be more inclusive? You can’t just play to the lesbian community.’” Yet there I’d been, sipping orange wine inside a standing-room-only bar with booths full of friend groups and first dates, walls painted shades of warm pink like the flesh of “the forbidden fruit,” as they call grapefruit in its country of origin, Barbados.īielagus and co-owner Mara Herbkersman have propped a copy of Brown’s iconic lesbian bildungsroman on a shelf behind the bar, the lavender flower on the paperback cover lit by a candle like an altar. “People warned us against being so explicitly for lesbians,” Ruby Fruit co-owner Emily Bielagus told me. ![]() The name, to those in the know, is an homage to Rita Mae Brown’s 1973 novel Rubyfruit Jungle, which turns 50 this year and continues to have intergenerational relevance-as do dyke bars, despite their highly publicized demise and the insistence that lesbians themselves are a dying breed. ![]() IF LESBIAN BARS are dead, then where did I spend $50 on a glass of orange wine and a hot dog?Īt the Ruby Fruit, a new Los Angeles “strip mall wine bar for the sapphically inclined,” which opened in February 2023. ![]()
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