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Northeast Portland bar showing only women’s sports on TV and makes a lot of new LGBTQ friends fast.

Portland’s {obj:62357:Sports Bra} is a sports bar showing only women’s sports. It’s been full since it opened April 1. Launched on a whim and a pun (and a crowd fund) by Jenny Nguyen, the Sports Bra already is proving popular with women, men and other genders.

Nguyen said Saturday, April 23, was its second busiest day, and the only thing on TV was golf. The locals are keen to support it, in person and online. So far, the Kickstarter has raised $105,000, beating the modest $40,000 Nguyen budgeted for.

With 15 years experience working in food service, Nguyen acted out of frustration as a bar patron. Anyone who has had to watch a Champions League or World Cup soccer game on mute while the locals blast Canadian arena football or disc golf will sympathize with her. She got the idea in 2018 when she and some friends watched the NCAA Women’s Division I Basketball Tournament championship game between Notre Dame and Mississippi State with the sound turned down. It didn’t matter that they had two tables and spent good money. They just weren’t that welcome in a sports bar.

She persisted

Nguyen also intended to turn the screens off when there are no women’s sports on. Not that everyone doesn’t come with their own personal TV — their phone — but it seemed a nice gesture toward encouraging conversation, as well as a subtle girlcott of all things excessively XY. With streaming services, however, she found any game can be replayed, so black screens haven’t been a big feature of the atmosphere so far.

Nguyen’s bio says, “The basketball court and the kitchen have been the only two places she has ever felt like she belonged. Later, she realized that both those places are very male-dominated and that she had struggled, endured and found success in her own way. She went on to work her way up in kitchens for another 15 years, with the last four years as an executive chef at Reed College for Bon Appétit Management Company.”

So this year she opened a small bar (with room for 50 including 10 staff), made sure the menu was real food, not just the usual frozen bar chow, decorated it with sports merch, kept the resin countertop from when it was an Argentine bar, and hooked up her iPad.

Thorns

The Portland Thorns soccer team should be an obvious draw at the Sports Bra. Although game tickets at Providence Park are not hard to come by, a nice budget option is to watch home games out of the rain with a pie and a pint. It’s a social sport, and it’s better to be surrounded by other fans, rather than home alone, texting reactions from the couch. The season opener April 30 is expected to be a milestone for the Sports Bra.

At 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 27, the bar was tuned in to PTFC For Peace, the charity soccer game between two blended teams of Portland Timbers and Portland Thorns players. Male and female pro athletes rarely play together (mixed doubles tennis? Pickleball?) so this had a whiff of the Battle of the Sexes tennis match of 1973, when Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs because he bet King couldn’t beat a man.

Q sent me

On that Wednesday evening, sitting at the bar were Tamara Werner and her wife, Morgan Fitz Gibbon. “We own a queer business, and we’re always up for supporting other queer businesses,” Werner said. The pair run a therapy center for LGBTQ youth in Portland called Rebel Heart Therapy. They know a thing or two about safe spaces.

“I walked in, and I was like, Uuuuuh,” said Fitz Gibbon, as Werner echoed her deep sigh. “Immediately you walk in and you’re like, Oh, this is OK. This is good,” Werner said.

Asked if they are sports fans, Werner said, “No, we’re just really gay.” She corrected herself and said, “We have kids in roller derby, and my wife used to play roller derby. We are sports fans for that one thing.”

They chatted to Nguyen for a long time as she bartended. They were at the Sports Bra for a drink before heading off to a soak at a spa. “I think lesbians have the hardest time in bars,” said Werner, talking about meeting new people. Fitz Gibbon described a podcast she is following, whose presenters are visiting the remaining 25 lesbian-identified bars in the U.S. What was the attraction of the Sports Bra so far, on their first visit?

“I think it’s about coming back to safe spaces, where you get to just show up and be queer and gender queer and not have it be a thing. You just get to interact like, apparently all the het couples do everywhere else,” Fitz Gibbon said.

Werner added, “If you’re a misogynist, and you’re homophobic and transphobic, you just wouldn’t come in here.”

Some dude

In a similarly cheery mood at the bar were work friends and Stumptown coffee baristas Molly Gosling and Anna Knight. “We didn’t know there was a game on,” Gosling said. “We came because it’s a queer bar centered around women’s sports. We’re part of that community, so it felt inviting and supportive.”

They both said there is nothing like this bar elsewhere in Portland and both were looking forward to another lesbian bar, Doc Marie’s, opening in a month, according to Instagram.

“It’s more intentional,” Knight said. “We can go to any bar, but we don’t know if it’s going to be friendly. Every bar is for straight people. There are so many sports bars that are just a bunch of dudes. So it’s cool to see a space where women can come and enjoy sports. I don’t even like sports. But women can enjoy sports without some dude making her feel (bad) about it.” She added “I mean, it’s not a personal problem, because I will never be in a position where I’m caring about what some guy thinks about what I do.”

Gosling summed up why they came, based on the buzz. “Even though we’re not big sports fans, it still felt like our community.”

Volleyball

As Portland Thorns season ticket holders, Sellwood couple Jennee Edwards and Natasha Nikolai were there to see the soccer game over dinner. They had tried to come to Sports Bra twice before on weekends, but the wait was too long. They couldn’t get in when the women’s Sweet Sixteen basketball was shown here, saying it was “wall-to-wall.” So they went back to Sellwood to a regular bar and had them find the game on TV.

Edwards played volleyball in college, Nikolai played lacrosse, and they know how invisible those sports are in the media. As for watching women’s sports, Nicolai said, “We always have to ask for it to be on, and sometimes it’s still not available. Oftentimes, the women’s games are on the third or fourth version of the channel, like ESPN+.”

The Sports Bra was working for them for a date night. “It’s really nice to see that it’s so big and diverse, you have a mix of people and how they identify. It’ s nice that they can come together and feel safe,” Nikolai said.

Catering to women

Asked why she was there, Pam Peterson lifted her hat to show her bald head and said, “I’m a dyke!” She has been having cancer treatment, hence no hair, not even eyebrows, but her eyes were smiling.

“We’re happy to be out, together and alive,” said Peterson, who stayed masked because she is immunosuppressed. Nicole Highlander came with her to the Sports Bra not for the mixed gender charity soccer but to celebrate her friend Peterson just getting the news that she was cancer free. Highlander said she’d heard about the bar “all over the place. I mean, there’s not a lot of bars that cater to women. The word got out pretty quickly.”

During the soccer match, the atmosphere was not raucous, but it was pleasant. The TV volume was modest. A few people clapped when some of the seven goals went in, but most were sitting at tables eating and talking. There was an hour wait for a table, but there were smiles all round, plus a lot of people checking everything out as if for the first time. There were no lone males or wingmen formations.

In the end the Timbers-Thorns gender mashup match for Ukraine was a huge success, with 50 smiling players on the field, playing like a teenage pick-up game. The rules went out the window and everyone in the bar took in the scenes.

Peterson, the cancer survivor, and Highlander, her friend, follow soccer, but not many other sports. They were having their own kind of fun.

“I’m happy women have a place to go and feel like they can watch other women playing sports and bring kids here. It’s a step in the right direction,” Peterson said.