When Jenny Nguyen was in her twenties, working as a chief in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, she became a regular at basketball matches organized by a group of “lawyers, plumbers, women from all walks of life,” she told me recently. “The only thing we had in common was basketball.” Some women have become her close friends, and we have become a longtime girlfriend. When they did not play, they got together to watch the female matches in sports bars – or tried. Persuading a bartender or a manager to have a “constant situation”, Nguyen, who is now forty-five, recalled.
On April 1, 2018, the group was lucky when they met in a bar to watch the final of the NCAA female tournament of this year, in which Notre -Dame beat the Mississippi State by only three points, with a player named Arike Ogunbowale – now a leader for the Dallas wings – shooting the Jœut winner with 0.1 seconds on the counter. Leaving, Nguyen remembers: “I tightened my friend in his arms, and I was, as” it was the best game I have ever seen “. And she says, “Yeah, can you imagine if the sound was on?” “In the excitement, Nguyen had barely noticed that they had been relegated to a small silent television in a corner. “I was really frustrated, not only with myself, but with the whole situation,” she told me. “I said,” The only way to look at female sports as it deserves is if we have our own place. “”
Exactly four years later, Nguyen opened Sports Bra, an advertising that projects female sports exclusively, in a window in the northeast of Portland which was once occupied by a gay bar called Jocks. In the years preceding its opening, the concept was a racing gag among the friends of Nguyen. “Whenever someone refuses us at the bar, we would be, like” Oh, in the sports bra, he shows volleyball “, she said. Today, the bra, as Nguyen calls it, is an institution imbued with this sparkling idealism. Most of the twenty pressure beers come from breweries who are held or exploited by women, and there are drinks named for the golfer pioneer Patty Berg (a Arnold Palmer with a cherry on top) and for title IX. The intimate space, paneled in dark wood, recalls a coffee from the 90s, the hunter with sporting memories and advertising leaflets of community events: an LGBTQ + adult summer camp, a meeting of Asian climbers called Elevasian.
I planned my visit to the bra to coincide with a game of Indiana fever, in the hope that the beloved leader Caitlin Clark will attract a crowd. A few days before my arrival in Portland, Clark stretched out the left quad, an injury that would put it on the bench for at least two weeks. However, during the day, a healthy flow of customers appeared, some just eating and drinking: in addition to classics like burgers and fries, Nguyen offers a rib grid, suitable for her mother’s recipe for Thit Kho (pork braised in coconut) and wings dressed in “Vietna’s glaze from Auntna Tina” (brown sugar and fish sauce) or a fermented buffalo sauce at home. Prior images of female sailing, hockey, beach volleyball and gymnastics played on the bar televisions until the fever game was broadcast live.
Jenna Dalton, an artist in his forties dressed in a teirie tunic, with corkscrew cuts cut in an asymmetrical bob, watched the match with her partner, George Kunz, a retired educator with glasses with a white ponytail. “I don’t like sport at all, and I have a rule that we don’t look at sport in my house,” said Dalton. “But, I must tell you that I like to look at the WNBA” is the pleasure of “looking at women to succeed in things,” she said. “But I’m also like that, it’s a little more disjointed. I find that the NBA is very polite and boring. ” Kunz added: “You feel like you are not watching a match – there is a movement.”
Another couple, Katie Camarano and Brandon Fischer, on Vacances de Champaign, Illinois, sat on a bench, sharing a sweet Bretzel. “I’m a fan of fever,” said Camarano. “I like the microphones, I like the rhythm they play. It’s just much more fun to watch. I mean, he can tell you” – She made a gesture to Fischer – “I did not do shit on basketball. It didn’t seem very important to me, the men playing. Cool, you can dip a ball – you are seven feet high, I don’t understand how it was printed!” Fischer grima. “I can feel a little under his skin,” said Camarano, then went without being discouraged. “They miss a ton of their free throws. It’s a free point, how do you miss it? I feel like women must play a little more, physically, because no one I saw is big enough to enter the air and the dunk.”
At halftime, three young women wearing fever equipment got up and left, before Washington’s mystics won six points. A trio of women with gray hair wandered: a local married couple named Peggy Beroth and Sara Kirschenbaum, and their friend Lisa Hurtubise, who was visiting Minneapolis. Kirschenbaum and Hurtubise met in 1984, in Columbus, Ohio, when they organized a walk for women, traveling nearly two hundred miles of Akron in Dayton in ten days, Protestant in front of nuclear weapons facilities.
“I am a fanatic of sport,” said Berroth, a retirement nurse for labor and delivery with a pronounced Boston accent. The title IX was died when it was in high school, in the Massachusetts, but it found that female athletes were still in the short term. “I was in the track team,” she said. “I was a miler, I ran the eight cents for the relay, and I also launched the disc. There was no coach, there was no uniform. I went to the school board and said, “How is it that the boys have two pairs of shoes, and we have no shoes? They did not give us the time of the day. Berroth holds the season for Portland thorns, the city’s professional women’s football team, and likes to watch matches in the bra, when she can take a seat. “When I see twenty-six thousand people sitting in these stands, that makes my heart sing,” she said.
While a pre -recorded competition on climbing played on the television closest to their table, Hurtubise, whose two girls played hockey in Minneapolis, approached a bartender and asked if they could consider putting a game from the NBA instead – the Timberwolves of Minnesota played Oklahoma City Thunder Western. She raised her shoulders pleasantly when the bartender declined.
When Nguyen told his parents, who immigrated to the United States of Vietnam in the 1970s, about his plan for the bra, they were skeptical. “The very first thing my mother said was” Do you think right now is the right time to open a lesbian bar? ” Said Nguyen laughing. “At no time of the conversation, I said that I opened a lesbian bar, but mom only knew this Venn diagram looks very much like a circle.” The moment turned out to be the right one. Not only was there a shortage of places to look at female sports – as long as Nguyen could say it, but hers would be the first bar in the United States dedicated to detecting them – there was also a lack of strange and specifically lesbian spaces, even in a city as progressive as Portland.
The bra has met with a certain hostility – Nguyen said that she had received death threats and that the vandals broke the windows – but it was also an immediate success. Hundreds of people showed up at the opening, which was the day after the lifting of Portland its interior mask mandate and in the middle of the NCAA tournament. “It was chaos, embraces and crying,” said Nguyen. “There was a lot of exchange of liquids.” The place was also supported by a wave of support from the “lesbian network”: friends of friends who were eager to help accounting, general contracts, to wash dishes. The bra has aroused strong emotions among customers and staff. “When I was a server for these first two years, I had a bruise here,” recalls the director general, Katie Leedy, showing me how she would pinch her skin between her thumb and pointer. “Because I would just be, like,” I can’t cry every time I speak to a table. “”
Earlier this month, Nguyen announced that the bra overwhelming and turned into four new cities-Indianapolis, Boston, Las Vegas and St. Louis-with the help of an investment by Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, better known to certain under the name of Serena Williams husband. In 2019, after learning that the Megan Rapinoe team, the reign of Seattle, sold for only three and a half million dollars, Ohanien “tweeted” in the fact that female sports are undervalued and swore to buy or create a team. (He is the owner of the founding control of Angel City FC, the professional women’s football team.) Some commentators called him an idiot. He felt a kinship with Nguyen when he saw people ridicule the online bra. “If you polarize people so early with an idea, it means you are really on something,” he told me. “People are not going to waste their time hating unless they feel very threatened.”
At the end of the year, there will be more than two dozen female sports bars open across the country. Jax Diener, who opened Watch me! Sports Bar, in Long Beach, California, last year with his wife, told me that she and Nguyen were members of a Slack conversation with the owners of similar establishments, including a bar in Minneapolis and Rikki’s, in San Francisco. “Founding mothers,” said Diener, is a united group, generous with advice and emotional support.
“I think lesbians are looking for more community spaces,” said the actor and the “Daily Show” correspondent, Grace Kuhlenschmidt. Kuhlenschmidt, who grew up in Los Angeles, was not really a sports fan until she went to her first New York Liberty match in 2021, and found the Barclays Center filled with “almost exclusively women and older lesbians,” she said. “I was, like” I am in paradise “. “Now, she organizes Liberty Watch – Complete evenings with Gatorade and Midori Seafoam -Green Slushies – to singers, a Campy’s Campy Campy bar. When I mentioned Watch me!, Kuhlenschmidt told me that she had family in Long Beach and spent a lot of holidays. “Once, my mother called me unexpectedly and was, like” thanks, guess what? ” There is a huge lesbian community in Long Beach! And I was, like “it’s great.” ♦