“Just after midnight, one patron is left at the bar, a regular who works at the Mexican restaurant next door. She wonders aloud about holding a Lady Gaga themed night, but Mixxy demurs. ‘Gaga is canceled,’ she says. ‘Gaga is Zionist.’”
“The DJ is still playing EDM, and Matellian is alone on the checkered dance floor, making pensive, graceful loops on the stripper pole, KN-95 mask in place.”
These words, which would be a perfect piece of satirical flash fiction on their own — do you really need to know any more to picture the kind of rank groupthink and poor life decisions that have led to this point, after all? — appear toward the end of a Boston Globe piece about the Last Ditch lesbian bar and art space, a safe haven for the wokest members in one of the wokest corners of America.
The piece, published on Tuesday, described how the bar lifted mask mandates for one night a week. Not in 2021, or even 2020, but in the late summer of 2026. There haven’t been any cases of COVID recorded in the Western Massachusetts town the bar is located in.
That nevertheless occasioned one of the most unintentionally hilarious sagas to appear in print media in recent years — a tale of how stopping everyone inside a queer nightclub with definite Marxist leanings in the Pioneer Valley from having to wear KN-95 masks at all times may be the last straw in a saga that’s already seen two of the three owners bow out, and one of them enter into clown school. The remaining owner, meanwhile, is basically forced into group therapy with rabid wokeistas via Zoom, and with a whole lot of very real debt they can’t pay.
The Boston Globe piece said that the bar, when it opened, “did fairly well.”
“Customers fondly remember a raucous opening night with a (clothed) simulation of a lesbian sex act – masks in place – on the dance floor.”
Does Noire really think everyone/everything is racist, or is that just their little trick to get a leg up?
Beautiful. However, the foot traffic didn’t last, and bills piled up. None of the founders could pay themselves or others. The cover fee was still waived for people who couldn’t pay. “Poor and unhoused people are welcome in the space” was part of their mission, after all. However, part of the problem in getting paying customers in, they thought, was the mask issue.
In an Aug. 31 Instagram post, they announced that for one night a week, they would relax the KN-95s.
“It is with love we inform our immunocompromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional,” the post read.
From the responses, you’d think they were acting like Hutus during the Rwandan genocide. Or worse, Zionists.
“Just say you’re being complicit in a mass disabling event and get it over with.” “people like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience.” “I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists.”
You’d think one maskless night a week in what’s described by the Globe as a small town where “men in ponytails and N-95s were ordering hibiscus tea from the coffee shop off the main square” still wouldn’t cause too much outrage. Or, if there was, a bar that describes itself as a place for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends,” could make amends with an apology.
“We are sorry for our passive and dismissive tone of our change to the norms and schedule impacting the most intersectional of us,” the Last Ditch management wrote in a follow-up two days later. “We understand everyone faces different intersections and we are always working to consider all needs fully.”
I wish this were a joke, as I do with so much in this piece:
Instead of defusing the situation, the apology seemed to make things worse. The bar had erred: it posted an Instagram card without providing alt-text for the visually impaired. This set off a fresh round of accusations of ableism.
“This is not an accessible post,” wrote one user. “It indicates the lack of care or interest in Disability intersectionality.”
It gets worse. Oh, somehow, it gets worse.
The three founders were individuals of indeterminate sex in their 20s. The Boston Globe being The Boston Globe and having progressive policies on pronouns and self-identification, it’s difficult to effectively discern what sex they are biologically.
What is clear, at least, is that the three founders — identified in the piece as housemates Sage, Asa Rosario, and Jackie Matellian — had to take out a $50,000 loan to start the bar, because even in Soviet Pioneer Valley, they do make you pay rent.
Sage and Asa quit. One went to clown school. (Honestly, another waste of money; given how much of a clown everyone involved in this dumpster fire sounds like, that’s akin to sending Paul McCartney to community college to earn his associate degree in music theory.) Jackie, meanwhile, was forced to live in her truck and pay the bills alone. She’s working four other jobs. Her credit score, quite predictably, is trashed.
The story moves on to Last Ditch’s most recent monthly community meeting, which involved a therapist acting as one of the two mediators.
Each person has two minutes to speak. It begins with a calming breath exercise.
Almost immediately, the proceedings are derailed.
One of Last Ditch’s most vocal critics, the head of another queer COVID-conscious collective in Western Massachusetts, a performer and artist who goes by Soe Noire, has been posting complaints about Last Ditch for days. Now, Noire joins the meeting on Zoom. He and other critics begin to flood the Zoom chat with irate messages, which are dutifully read aloud to the group.
I mean, really, this is like a description of Hell in a woke remake of Sartre’s “No Exit” being mediated as a group therapy session. L’enfer, c’est les autres genderfluid mask scolds with pronouns in bio.
Anyhow, when nasty comments begin appearing in the Zoom chat, the therapist facilitator says that “I love that you are here online” but that “these platforms alienate us from each other.”
“I would love to get to a place where we all know each other’s face, where we all know each other’s name,” she said.
The response: “It’s messed up that the mediator is dismissing those attending virtually. That’s not accessibility,” one writes. Noire was even worse: “A lot of people are calling for an acknowledgment of harm and I’m hearing a WHITE therapist… center[ing] the feelings of a majority white and white adjacent staff.”
During the meeting, Matellian cracks. “It was not my passion project,” she told the group. “My main goal was to support Sage and Asa.”
“I never really wanted to do this,” a crying Matellian said. “I don’t think I’m doing a very good job.” She then went through her list of laments: Homelessness, no credit, four jobs, the $50,000 loan, all of it.
The response? “You chose to use your time to spill tears and center your feelings,” Noire wrote in the chat. “This is incredibly racist and deflecting behavior.”
The meeting wraps up on a negative note, and when Noire is asked to come back, they refuse, citing the “emotional labor” that goes into ranting against a lesbian bar that took down mask mandates for one night a week. Noire then spent the next few hours of their very valuable time ranting on Instagram about how the owner was shedding “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS” and how the Last Ditch is not “a safe environment nor interested in revolutionary praxis.”
This sounds like great satire, but it’s reality — and back in reality, Last Ditch’s landlord wants $3,900 in back rent. And that leads us to the tableaux I described at the beginning, where Mixxy (a drag queen who works for tips because he has a job in the real world) talks about Lady Gaga being canceled because she’s Zionist as the sole owner, masked, dances aimlessly on a stripper pole.
Honestly, there’s a good chance the Last Ditch survives simply for the viral infamy. Who wouldn’t want to experience this kind of ridiculousness firsthand? If I were in the area, I’d put on a spraypainted suit of fake armor and masquerade as a nonbinary demisexual performance artist named GoldennEyye just to catch people’s reactions for my first (and last) ever Twitch stream. No doubt similar cultural rubberneckers will be drawn to the site like shipwreck enthusiasts are drawn to take submarine trips down to the Titanic.
One does feel genuinely bad for Matellian, in spite of the fact that she’s here because she’s living out a torturous existence in large part because she prefers this milieu to living by the standards God laid out for us to flourish.
Nevertheless, here’s someone who just wanted to help her woke friends. A few months later, her life was ruined, she was in tears, and she was hated by the “victims” she was trying to serve.
The Boston Globe story, an unintentional comedy throughout, ends like all great tragedies end: With the false hope some sort of lesson has been learned. “There’s conflict, but we just hope that there’s more repair than conflict,” Matellian said in the story’s final lines. “That’s the price you pay to be in community.”
Right. So she emotionally labors on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the why-aren’t-you-wearing-your-face-diaper-you-MAGA-troll? past. Good luck with that, honey.
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