‘I hope your venue gets firebombed’: The small-town lesbian bar left reeling after a ‘woke’ backlash

Greenfield, Massachusetts: Until last week, few people outside this sleepy US city had thought much about its lesbian bar, Last Ditch. Since it opened last year as a space for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers and their friends”, it had become popular with the local queer community, hosting drag shows, live-music karaoke, film screenings and other events. But a global news story it was not.

That all changed when The Boston Globe published a startling investigation into recent events at the bar that exposed a viper’s nest of woke grievances. The story went viral across the world, and the Globe reportedly gained more than 1000 new paying subscribers because of it. Suddenly, the Last Ditch is the most famous bar in America, a source of global amusement and a cautionary tale about what can happen when a so-called “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion) mindset is pursued to an absurd conclusion.

The trouble began on August 31, when the bar posted an announcement, decorated with rainbows, to its Instagram page. “It is with love we inform our immunocompromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional,” it said.

Until then the bar had operated a strict mask policy, harking back to the dark days of the pandemic. It may have only opened in 2025, years after COVID-19 subsided, but the spirit of that time was alive and well. All customers and staff were required to wear a well-fitted KN-95 mask “or better”. But business had slowed. Of the three founders – Jackie Matellian, Sage Territo and Asa Rosario– only Matellian was left. With loan repayments mounting, she hoped to increase business by relaxing the rules.

Customers reacted with fury to the relaxation of the rules. The post attracted hundreds of comments before they were turned off, most of which were highly critical, accusing Last Ditch of endangering its vulnerable clientele in the hope of attracting business from people who prefer not to wear a surgical mask when they are drinking with friends.

“Just say you’re being complicit in a mass disabling event and get it over with,” said one.

“I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists [sic],” said another.

No matter that Greenfield had not had a single reported case of COVID for months. These Last Ditch customers were adamant that the pandemic was still a deadly threat to them. Chastened, the bar issued an apology two days later.

“We are sorry for our passive and dismissive tone of our change to the norms and schedule impacting the most intersectional of us,” stated another Instagram post. “We understand everyone faces different intersections and we are always working to consider all needs fully.”

The second statement only made things worse. In that post, Last Ditch had committed a sin against wokeness almost as egregious as dropping the mask requirement – it had posted on social media without adding alternative text, which feeds screen-reader software that describes content aloud to the visually impaired.

“This is not an accessible post,” someone complained. “It indicates the lack of care or interest in disability intersectionality.”

The furore led to a crisis meeting on September 11, outlined in the Globe’s article. Ten people – all masked, and including two mediators there to keep the conversations productive – sat on the Last Ditch dance floor. Another 10 or 15 joined by Zoom. The meeting began with a calming breath exercise. Almost at once the online participants started a deluge of furious messages.

Trying to calm things down, one of the mediators, a licensed therapist, expressed hope that rather than just meeting online, the participants might get to a stage where they would know each other’s faces. She was immediately shouted down for “dismissing those attending virtually”, which was “not accessibility”.

A Black attendee called Soe Noire, who identifies as a “gender-expansive lesbian” and uses he/him pronouns, criticised the mediator, who was white, for “centring the feelings of a majority white and white adjacent staff”. Another said the mediator’s presence was “wildly unsafe” and wondered if, as a licensed therapist, she was tantamount to a member of the secret police who might have people hospitalised against their will.

Matellian wept as she shared her struggles as the remaining owner. She lived in her “truck” while she was trying to make the business work. Now that her co-founders had left the business, she was responsible for the $US50,000 ($72,000) loan they took out to open it. Noire was unmoved. “You chose to use your time to spill tears and centre your feelings,” he wrote in the Zoom chat. “This is incredibly racist and deflecting behaviour.” After 3½ hours the meeting ended without any meaningful conclusion.

“I thought it was overblown,” says LeiAnna Hamel, a 33-year-old academic visiting Last Ditch on Saturday night. The relaxation of the mask requirement was, according to Hamel, “very measured and very targeted at reviving their business. They announced it. It wasn’t a surprise. People weren’t going to show up being immunocompromised, and be exposed to something.”

“It’s like the most minor thing, and I think they were just trying to keep their doors open,” says Luc, 21, who grew up in Greenfield visiting the bar. Those behind the backlash, he says, “aren’t in Greenfield. Those people are hearing it on the internet, and they have an opinion. They’re not even from here.” The owners “were just trying to make it so that this bar can stay alive”.

“The interesting thing was that by being a mask bar they had got in with this local constituency of people who seem very demanding,” says Alex Lockie, a 36-year-old from Vermont. “All the other bars around there don’t have a mask rule but nobody’s mad at them. And it just goes to show you that if you give a mouse a cookie, they’ll ask for a glass of milk.”

The story of Last Ditch resonated partly because it is funny but also because it speaks to a deeper anxiety about a DEI ideology that, taken to such extremes, becomes a kind of illiberal totalitarianism. Writing in The Free Press, Katie Herzog said the bar was the latest progressive institution to ultimately “collapse under the weight of staff or customers’ demands”.

On her program last Thursday, Megyn Kelly, the conservative US commentator, said: “They are the most vicious against their own, the super-woke, immunocompromised, intersectional, non-ableist. One toe out of line and they will crucify you.”

Back in Greenfield it is a “Saturday Club LD Goth Dance Night” at Last Ditch, which is illuminated by pink and yellow fairy lights. The event runs from 10pm to 2am and masks remain optional.

At 10pm a wheelchair user wearing all black and a mask arrives at the venue with a friend walking beside her in the rain. They are followed shortly by a separate group of three girls in black, sparkly jackets. A queue forms outside, which is, in itself, a rarity. “I have never seen people lined up,” Alva Valden, a 22-year-old from the nearby town of Springfield, says in disbelief.

The bar’s newfound fame has prompted a note on its Instagram account, posted shortly before the event starts: “Due to safety breaches/hacking/infiltration, tonight is NEED TO KNOW and a PRIVATE PARTY. Seeya next time.”

A bouncer on the door wearing a leather jacket and red lipstick asks bar-goers one by one whether they are local and if they know anyone inside. Many don’t make the cut.

Lockie had driven almost an hour to visit alone after reading about the story online. He had brought a mask especially for the night. “I was going to go and drink and give a huge tip and say: ‘I think these people are being mean to you’. But at the end of the day, the people who run that bar identify more with the people that are yelling at them than some stranger like me,” he says.

A man wearing a huge blow-up chicken outfit is also turned away. It’s unclear why he’s chosen this particular costume for Goth night but he says, “The bar’s had the mask policy forever and I never want to do that. So I was just going to support the no-mask thing.”

Locals who are let inside the bar are more positive. “I think it’s great that they lifted the mask mandate for one night because it just allows other people who are deaf, people who can’t read lips, that kind of thing. It gives them a chance to open up that space,” says Pearl Schatz-Allison, 21, a hair stylist who grew up in Greenfield.

“My mum and her partner, who are also lesbians, are immunocompromised. So I understand having a space that’s accessible to them. But also, I think that attendance has been low. So I think it’s great that they are opening it up to more of the community.”

The hazards of being accessible to the point of destruction are not lost on those standing outside. “If they close then it’s accessible to nobody,” says one.

A little after 11pm Matellian appears from downstairs wearing a mask. “We’re at full capacity,” she informs the bouncer before issuing a celebratory cheer and returning downstairs. When I ask to speak to her, Matellian replies: “Sorry, we have to consult our entire team and our community about speaking with anybody, so we can’t do one-offs like that.”

Despite the boom in business, the bouncer says the bar was unhappy with the media coverage it had received. “I’d say the article overall was received generally negatively, and that’s about it,” the bouncer says tersely. “It’s airing our dirty laundry, and we don’t need to make national news.”

Back on the streets of Greenfield, the Goths rejected from Last Ditch have found somewhere else to spend the evening. They have decamped to the only other bar open down the street, the Victoria.

The mood there is cheerful. “The Last Ditch doesn’t understand business,” says the barman as he pours pints for three girls. “We’re getting all their business.”

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