The Portland Bar That Screens Only Women’s Sports

When Jenny Nguyen was in her twenties, working as a chef in her home town of Portland, Oregon, she became a regular at pickup basketball games 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 of the women became her close friends, and one became a longtime girlfriend. When they weren’t playing, they got together to watch women’s games at sports bars—or tried to. Persuading a bartender or a manager to turn one on was a “constant situation,” Nguyen, who is now forty-five, recalled.

On April 1, 2018, the group got lucky when they met at a bar to watch the final of that year’s women’s N.C.A.A. tournament, in which Notre Dame defeated Mississippi State by just three points, with a player named Arike Ogunbowale—now a point guard for the Dallas Wings—hitting the game-winning jumper with 0.1 seconds left on the clock. As they were leaving, Nguyen remembered, “I hugged my friend, and I was, like, ‘That was the best game I’ve ever seen.’ And she goes, ‘Yeah, can you imagine if the sound was on?’ ” In the excitement, Nguyen had barely noticed that they’d been relegated to a small, silent TV in a corner. “I was really frustrated, not just with myself but with the whole situation,” she told me. “I said, ‘The only way we’re ever going to watch women’s sports the way it deserves is if we have our own place.’ ”

Exactly four years later, Nguyen opened the Sports Bra, a pub that exclusively screens women’s sports, in a storefront in Northeast Portland that was once occupied by a gay bar called Jocks. In the years before it opened, the concept was a running gag among Nguyen’s friends. “Whenever somebody would turn us down at the bar, we’d be, like, ‘Oh, at the Sports Bra they show volleyball,’ ” she said. Today, the Bra, as Nguyen calls it, is an institution imbued with that puckish idealism. Most of the twenty-odd beers on tap come from breweries that are owned or operated by women, and there are drinks named for the pioneering golfer Patty Berg (an Arnold Palmer with a cherry on top) and for Title IX. The homey space, panelled in dark wood, recalls a nineties coffeehouse, chockablock with sports memorabilia and flyers advertising community events: an adult L.G.B.T.Q.+ summer camp, an Asian climbers’ meetup called ElevAsian.

I planned my visit to the Bra to coincide with an Indiana Fever game, in the hope that the beloved point guard Caitlin Clark would draw a crowd. A few days before I arrived in Portland, Clark strained her left quad, an injury that would bench her for at least two weeks. Still, in the course of the day, a healthy stream of patrons showed up, some just to eat and drink: in addition to classics like burgers and fries, Nguyen offers a rack of ribs, adapted from her mother’s recipe for thit kho (pork braised in coconut soda), and wings dressed in “Aunt Tina’s Vietna-Glaze” (brown sugar and fish sauce) or a house-fermented buffalo sauce. Pretaped footage of women’s sailing, hockey, beach volleyball, and gymnastics played on the bar’s TVs until the Fever game aired live.

Jenna Dalton, an artist in her forties dressed in a tie-dyed tunic, with corkscrew curls cut in an asymmetrical bob, watched the game with her partner, George Kunz, a bespectacled, retired educator with a white ponytail. “I don’t like sports at all, and I have a rule that we don’t watch sports in my house,” Dalton told me. “But, I’ve got to tell you, I like watching the W.N.B.A.” Part of it is the pleasure of “watching women succeed in things,” she said. “But I also just like that it’s a little more scrappy. I find the N.B.A. to be very polished and boring.” Kunz added, “You feel like you’re not just watching a game—there’s a movement.”

Another couple, Katie Camarano and Brandon Fischer, on vacation from Champaign, Illinois, sat on a banquette, sharing a soft pretzel. “I’m a Fever fan,” Camarano said. “I like the pickups, I like the pace that they’re playing at. It’s just a lot more fun to watch. I mean, he can tell you”—she gestured at Fischer—“I used to not give a crap about basketball. It didn’t seem very important to me, men playing. Cool, you can dunk a ball—you’re seven feet tall, I don’t understand how that’s meant to be impressive!” Fischer winced. “I can feel myself getting under his skin a little bit,” Camarano said, then proceeded undeterred. “They miss a ton of their free throws. It’s a free point, how are you missing that? I feel like the women have to play a little bit more, physically, because no one that I’ve seen is tall enough to get in the air and dunk.”

At halftime, three young women wearing Fever gear got up and left, before the Washington Mystics won by six points. A trio of gray-haired women wandered in: a local married couple named Peggy Berroth and Sara Kirschenbaum, and their friend Lisa Hurtubise, who was visiting from Minneapolis. Kirschenbaum and Hurtubise met in 1984, in Columbus, Ohio, when they organized a women’s peace walk, trekking almost two hundred miles from Akron to Dayton in the course of ten days, protesting in front of nuclear-weapons facilities.

“I’m a sports fanatic,” Berroth, a retired labor-and-delivery nurse with a pronounced Boston accent, told me. Title IX was passed when she was in high school, in Massachusetts, but she found that female athletes were still given short shrift. “I was on the track team,” she said. “I was a miler, I ran the eight hundred for the relay, and I also threw the discus. There was no coach, there was no uniform. I went to the school board and I said, ‘How come the boys have two pairs of shoes, and we don’t have any shoes?’ They didn’t give us the time of day.” Berroth is a season-ticket holder for the Portland Thorns, the city’s pro women’s soccer team, and likes to watch away games at the Bra, when she can get a seat. “When I see twenty-six thousand people sitting in those stands, it just makes my heart sing,” she said.

As a prerecorded rock-climbing competition played on the TV nearest their table, Hurtubise, whose two daughters played hockey in Minneapolis, approached a bartender and asked whether they might consider putting on an N.B.A. game instead—the Minnesota Timberwolves were playing the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference finals. She shrugged agreeably when the bartender declined.

When Nguyen told her parents, who immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in the seventies, about her plan for the Bra, they were skeptical. “The very first thing my mom said was ‘Do you think right now is a good time to open a lesbian bar?’ ” Nguyen said, laughing. “At no point in the conversation did I say I was opening a lesbian bar, but Mom knew that that Venn diagram looks very much like a circle.” The moment proved to be the right one. Not only was there a dearth of places to watch women’s sports—as far as Nguyen could tell, hers would be the first bar in the U.S. devoted to screening them—there was also a lack of queer and specifically lesbian spaces, even in a city as progressive as Portland.

The Bra was met with some hostility—Nguyen said that she received death threats, and that vandals broke windows—but it was also an immediate success. Hundreds of people showed up to the opening, which was the day after Portland lifted its indoor mask mandate, and in the middle of the N.C.A.A. tournament. “It was mayhem, hugging and crying,” Nguyen said. “There was lots of exchange of fluids.” The place was buoyed, too, by a groundswell of support from “the lesbian network”: friends of friends who were eager to help with accounting, general contracting, washing dishes. The Bra stirred strong emotions among both patrons and staff. “When I was a server those first couple years, I had a bruise here,” the general manager, Katie Leedy, remembered, showing me how she would pinch the skin between her thumb and pointer fingers. “Because I would just be, like, ‘I can’t cry every time I talk to a table.’ ”

Earlier this month, Nguyen announced that the Bra was franchising and expanding into four new cities—Indianapolis, Boston, Las Vegas, and St. Louis—with the help of an investment from Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit, better known to some as Serena Williams’s husband. In 2019, after he learned that Megan Rapinoe’s team, the Seattle Reign, sold for just three and a half million dollars, Ohanian “rage-tweeted” about women’s sports being undervalued, and vowed to buy or start a team. (He’s the founding control owner of Angel City F.C., L.A.’s pro women’s soccer team.) Some commenters called him an idiot. He felt a kinship with Nguyen when he saw people ridiculing the Bra online. “If you’re polarizing people this early with an idea, it means you’re really on to something,” he told me. “People are not going to waste their time hating unless they feel very threatened.”

By the end of the year, there will be more than two dozen women’s sports bars open across the country. Jax Diener, who opened Watch Me! Sports Bar, in Long Beach, California, last year with her wife, told me that she and Nguyen are members of a Slack chat with the owners of similar establishments, including A Bar of Their Own, in Minneapolis, and Rikki’s, in San Francisco. “The founding mothers,” Diener said, are a tight-knit group, generous with advice and emotional support.

“I think lesbians are always searching for more community spaces,” the comedian and “Daily Show” correspondent Grace Kuhlenschmidt told me recently. Kuhlenschmidt, who grew up in L.A., was not much of a sports fan until she went to her first New York Liberty game, in 2021, and found the Barclays Center filled with “almost exclusively women and older lesbians,” she said. “I was, like, ‘I’m in Heaven.’ ” Now she hosts Liberty watch parties—complete with seafoam-green Gatorade-and-Midori slushies—at Singers, a campy Bed-Stuy queer bar. When I mentioned Watch Me!, Kuhlenschmidt told me that she had family in Long Beach and spent many holidays there. “One time, my mom called me out of the blue and was, like, ‘Grace, guess what? There’s a huge lesbian community in Long Beach!’ And I was, like, ‘That is awesome. Is that the only reason you called?’ ” ♦