“Chapstick was a totally selfish endeavor,” says Suppan. “I always wanted to have a bar to highlight women’s sports because there was no one even showing women’s sports. If you went to a sports bar, you had to beg to get them to put something on.”
The last time Condé Nast Traveler wrote about lesbian bars in 2024, we covered the prevailing narrative of their protracted decline. Then, American lesbian bars had dwindled to a small stock of 21 establishments across the entire US, and were struggling to keep their doors open amid the ballooning costs of running small businesses, the passage of anti-discrimination laws that opened up more of the world to queer patrons, and, then, the global pandemic that closed much of the world for everyone. But over the past two years, the LGBTQIA+ institution has entered a different era: One in which 16 more bars have joined the ranks, from Dani’s Queer Bar in Boston to the Boyfriend Co-op in Brooklyn, and historically beloved spots like East Nashville’s Lipstick Lounge are not only sustaining themselves, but also expanding into new territory.
Lesbian sports bars in particular have grown as a niche, with venues continuing to pop-up around the country’s well-known LGBTQIA+ hubs. There’s the new Babe’s in Chicago; and both Athena Keke’s in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and Blazers in nearby Williamsburg. The Sports Bra, which opened in Portland, Oregon, in 2022, has plans to expand to Boston, Las Vegas, St. Louis, and Indianapolis throughout 2026 and 2027.
Nashville may appear an unlikely city for a space like Chapstick. The main driver of the city’s billion-dollar party economy is downtown’s South of Broadway, or SoBro neighborhood: an infamous downtown corridor that has only grown honkier and tonkier in recent years with flashy new bars like Morgan Wallen’s This Bar & Tennessee Kitchen, a six-story, 30,000 square-foot temple to all things bro, and Luke Combs’s Category 10, an omnibus of a bar that houses a honky tonk, a sports bar, a bourbon lounge, two full rooftop bars, and the largest dance floor in the city. The neighborhood’s cross streets remain ever-clogged with Ubers and commuters weaving through the stream of open-air party buses and pedal taverns ferrying day-drinking bachelorettes. Chapstick, a little under 15 minutes away from the heart of SoBro, feels a world away from the downtown rowdiness that earned the city its “NashVegas” moniker. It sits at a cozy residential corner of an artsy neighborhood not known to the majority of tourists; dogwoods grow between neighboring houses, with small rainbow flags hanging off their porches.
