The Palms (West Hollywood Lesbian Bar/1967-2013/Graphic with Vintage Print Effect)

The Palms — West Hollywood Lesbian Bar Tee

The Palms. West Hollywood. Where the girls went to meet the girls.

Opened in 1967, The Palms was one of Los Angeles's longest-running lesbian bars, a wonderfully unpretentious institution on Santa Monica Boulevard that survived decades of changing fashions, changing neighborhoods, and changing ideas about what a gay bar was supposed to be.

While West Hollywood became famous for its flashy gay men's clubs, The Palms offered something different. It was a place for women to drink, dance, flirt, shoot pool, and find community without having to compete with the boys for space.

And it wasn't particularly interested in being glamorous. The Palms was a proper neighborhood dive, the kind of bar where the regulars knew one another, the drinks were straightforward, and nobody needed a velvet rope or a celebrity DJ to have a good time.

Over the decades, it welcomed generations of lesbians, from the women's liberation era through the AIDS crisis, the lesbian visibility of the 1990s, and the changing LGBTQ+ landscape of the 2000s. It was a rare constant in a city famous for tearing things down and starting over.

By the time The Palms closed in 2013, after 46 years, dedicated lesbian bars were becoming increasingly rare across America. Its disappearance marked the loss of more than another nightlife address. It meant losing a space that had given generations of women somewhere to belong, find each other, and occasionally make very questionable romantic decisions.