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Once I took a few deep breaths after realizing we’re waving “so long” to yet another SF institution, I asked Lila for more details over email. So, yeah, Lila selling the Lex is a big deal - an emotional decision for her, and an enormous loss to the community the Lex has fostered. Lila went into it with this vision, and it paid off in nurturing the city’s ever-evolving queer movement and style. It was situated as a queer outpost in the Mission, then the city’s lesbian neighborhood, that acted as a hub for sex-positive and women’s rights activists, longtime cruisers and fresh-faced newbies, butches and femmes, the emerging transman community, and all manner of beautiful freaks who stretched the city’s queer boundaries beyond the Castro and SoMa.
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The queer revolution of the 1990s was still in full effect, but bars geared especially toward queer women were rare as two-headed unicorns.īut the Lex was more than just a place for dykes to get wild in the Mission - although, yes, its parties have always been rowdy blasts. And of course there’ll be a huge closing party.Įighteen years ago, a 25-year-old Lila opened the homey, punkish Lexington Club as a Mission neighborhood space for “the dykes, queers, artists, musicians and neighborhood folks who made up the community that surrounded it,” as she put it Thursday in a Facebook post announcing her decision. But the Lexington Club brand will live on in one-off events. Lila had pulled her car over to call me - and I hope my sudden wail of bereavement didn’t blow out her speakerphone.Īlas, it’s true: SF dyke institution the Lexington Club ( is being sold, and will probably close after New Year’s. OCTO“I’m selling the Lex,” Lila Thirkield told me, her no-nonsense voice tinged with a little disbelief at what she herself was saying. Regulars at The Lex: The iconic club is closing, another sign of the times