This is part of a collection of stories celebrating lesbian bars across the US and other parts of the world. Read more here.
It’s nearly 8 p.m., and a mix of regulars and newcomers, friends and strangers spill onto the sidewalk and into the parking lot in front of The Ruby Fruit. The music is turned up just enough to feel like a party, and the small room is packed—the crowd squeezed around the bar and shared counter, glasses of orange wine, nonalcoholic drinks, fried gigante beans, and bottles of Miller Low Life between them. This energetic shift from happy hour to evening happens, without fail, six days a week at The Ruby Fruit (they’re closed on Sundays). All day long, in fact, the space flows seamlessly from morning coffee and coworking through lunch and dinner to this fever pitch that lasts until the end of the night—which, for The Ruby Fruit at least, is 10 p.m. on weeknights; 11 p.m. on weekends.
It’s a mutable energy unique to The Ruby Fruit, says Jacqueline Toboni, a Los Angeles-based actor and regular who often takes work meetings there during the day. “You can show up as you are. Not just in terms of identity but you see people having a hot dog and a glass of wine at the bar by themselves and ending up talking to people and then you see a couple with their kid,” she says. “And you can meet people in terms of a singles party vibe a little bit later on. I don’t think there’s a space like it.”
The Ruby Fruit brings colorful interiors to a strip mall on Sunset Boulevard.
Natural wine and cocktails like botanical tonics (above) fuel the party at The Ruby Fruit.
Indeed, when The Ruby Fruit opened in a strip mall on Silverlake’s Sunset Boulevard in February of last year, it was the first permanent lesbian bar to have opened in LA since 2017—and the only in the city at that time. (West Hollywood’s The Palms shuttered in 2013 and The Oxwood Inn in the San Fernando Valley closed in 2017; then, the same month that The Ruby Fruit opened, LA got its second lesbian-owned bar, Honey’s at Star Love.)
The Ruby Fruit’s name is in direct homage to Rita Mae Brown’s 1973 coming-of-age lesbian novel The Rubyfruit Jungle and co-owners Emily Bielagus and Mara Herbkersman describe the now little-over-a-year old space as “a restaurant and wine bar for the sapphically-inclined.” From the onset, they focused on creating a safe space for not only lesbians but nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and trans people, as well as those who are still sorting it out. “There’s a positive spin on our inclusivity policy,” Bielagus says. “We’re inviting people in, not excluding people. We want people to say ‘oh, that’s me, that’s me, that’s me.’”
“Personally, for me it’s important to give people the opportunity to self-determine,”
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Back in 2021, a 22-year-old from Arkansas named Trevor Rainbolt shuttered himself in his Los Angeles apartment to memorize the world. For months, he spent his time studying Google Street View from his desk chair. Delivery drivers handed over his meals; a barber came to style his hair. After a while, his memory grew planetary. When you see cabbage-like plants thriving along the sides of a Russian country road, he learned, you’re most likely looking at Sakhalin Island. On a bridge lined with pea-green pavement? You’re above a river in Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan province. If your vista, but for the sweep of golden grasslands, screams South Africa, you’ll be in Eswatini.
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