Ethel's

Introduction

IntroductionEthel’s is a bar in Manhattan’s West Village, just off Hudson Street. It sits on a corner. When you enter there are tables to the right—the ones in front are at the corner—and up the wall as well as some on the left towards the front. The bar itself extends along the left wall, with the entrance to the kitchen in the left-rear corner. The restaurant offers typical pub-fare, well prepared, and top-notch desserts (and fresh bread) from a bakery around the corner, and the bar offers a surprisingly large selection of vintage wines. Ethel’s is subtly but tastefully lit. The music tends to get loud on Friday and Saturday nights but it is softer the rest of the time, the playlist leaning towards guitar-centric alternative, often in the Brandi Carlile vein—a picture of her taken when she was at the bar hangs, signed, in a place-of-honor—but always including songs people can dance to.

The bathrooms are at the back to the right and though it is infrequently used there is a men’s room. The ladies’ room has three stalls—there are certain “understandings” about their use—and three sinks. It is clean and regularly and discretely checked by a staffer.

In the restaurant/bar, there is a small dancefloor to the rear and a small stage, capable of holding two guitars and a bass but not much else. In winter, a small foyer is created so that one needs to open two doors to get in, protecting everyone from the invasion of frigid air.

When Alice Johnson, who you’ll meet shortly, walks into Ethel’s for the first time, it was well after the early-Fall-semester rush. That’s when groups of four, five, or six grad students just starting at Columbia or NYU come down on Friday or Saturday nights for a “taste.” Invariably these groups are a mix of women, often in the Big City for the first time, who fall into three categories. There are those who, as the Brits say, are taking the piss and it is a lark. There are women genuinely and honestly “curious,” who may later come back without the piss-takers. And there are the women who are more than curious and hopeful of finding a place where and, better, a person with whom they can feel themselves. The regulars are always on the look-out for this last type (although some of the pretend-piss-takers are of this type), always discrete in their approaches (one of the “understandings” about the ladies’ room being its use as a safe-space). Many were in the same boat in the same place themselves and they sometimes develop Big-Sister relationships, providing guidance and protection—Ethel’s is not free of predators—and in three or four cases those relationships have evolved into marriages.

There was no “Ethel.” There are varying stories, legends really, but the one with the greatest currency is that Alice Jenkins and Shirley Evans founded the place in 1990 and named it for a “Cheers” episode involving Sam Malone boasting of having danced with Carla like a modern-day “Fred and Ethel.” Whether this is true will never be known, Alice and Shirley both having gone to the Open Lesbian Bar in the Sky, Shirley shortly after she was able to marry the woman she loved for 45 years.

The place is now run by Alice’s niece, a Smith BA/Columbia MBA butch called Maggie Owens, named after Alice’s long-time lover and partner in a tacit bit of solidarity between Alice and her sister, Maggie’s mother, who told everyone (including for a time her husband and parents but never Maggie) that it was and still tells everyone that it is “simply a name I liked the ring of.”

Maggie and the staff make quick but polite work of gawkers who enter or stand with their noses against the windows hoping to see…something and ultimately Ethel’s is itself a safe space for everyone who comes in. The stage is used on Tuesdays for an open-mic for the local LGBTQIA+ Community. And LGBTQIA+ Karaoke Thursdays!

Part 1: Angela & Nicole