A Little Rock-based pop-up lesbian bar is hosting an event on Sept. 13 at Pink House Alchemy in Fayetteville. Victoria Kapek and Whitney Butler are the co-founders of Hairpins, and they’ve hosted several of these pop-up events in Little Rock over the last year, even being named Arkansas’s best gay bar by the Arkansas Times despite not having a physical location.
The idea for these events came from a trip to New York City when the couple visited Cubbyhole, a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village. Butler said they visited on a night when it wasn’t super packed.
"But it was enough where it felt like a home and people were just—you could tell they would always be there on a Sunday night or a random weeknight," Butler said. "The bartender would make announcements like, 'Hey guys, we’re doing this fundraiser next weekend or next Thursday if you want to stop by.' It had this sense of full community and not just in a way of people who aren’t connected showing up."
Whitney and Victoria made friends with two other women while they were there, found community, and after they came home from New York City, Victoria looked at Whitney and said, “We need to have something like this in Little Rock.” Soon they began working with Whitewater Tavern to host their first event just a few months later.
The name Hairpins comes from the historical idea of women beginning to feel comfortable enough to let their hair down, or drop their hairpins, which meant they were willing to display their queerness more publicly. Victoria said the idea of a pop-up bar allows people to have a space where they can build community without feeling tied solely to one physical space.
“Technically 100 lesbians can walk into any given bar or establishment on any given night and all hang out with each other, and on the outside surface that could serve to be the exact same thing Hairpins is doing, right? But the difference is that we are curating the experience of these queer people—lesbians, queer individuals, trans and nonbinary people—getting together, and we really try our best to foster community within it,” Kapek said.
Victoria says there are fewer than 50 brick-and-mortar lesbian bars throughout the United States, and none in Arkansas or Missouri. So when they began hosting events in Little Rock, people would drive from Springdale and Rogers to attend.
“There were people that started saying, ‘Hey, we would really like to see this in our region. We don’t have anything up here.’ Who were like, ‘We drove two and a half hours because it was so important to us to find community that we would be willing to take the kind of time to do that. However, it would be much nicer if this were only 10, 20 or 30 minutes away from me, and a lot more accessible than having to make that drive,’” Kapek said.
Victoria has a significant social media following, especially within the Arkansas queer community. So when she suggested online they’d like to have a pop-up event in northwest Arkansas, it gained some traction. She said business owners in the region began reaching out, offering to host them.
“And one of those was Pink House Alchemy. One of the owners of Pink House Alchemy commented on my video, and I immediately reached out to her and said, ‘We would love to make this happen. We’ve just been waiting for the right host to do that, so thank you for being willing,’” Kapek said.
The duo says going into a new city or area comes with potential issues. They do their best to make sure they aren’t stepping on the toes of local groups doing similar work, and if there are those groups, they try to collaborate and partner instead of competing.
Another element of their work is setting up shop in places that are not spaces exclusively for queer women the other 364 days of the year. Victoria said that is part of their overall goal.
“I think when we first started this, we wanted to activate specifically more spaces that weren’t previously queer spaces, because we wanted to open up the community to having the ability to gather and find each other and build connection in those new spaces. There are gay bars in northwest Arkansas. There are gay bars in central Arkansas. There are over 800 gay bars in the entire country. But there is a sort of limiting factor to the fact that they were originally created for not queer women, I guess. And so the idea to kind of activate, like we said, these traditionally non-queer spaces and sort of make them the space for the lesbians or the space for the trans individuals was a big part of our goal. We wanted these individuals attending Hairpins events to really feel a sense of ownership and a real sense of purpose, and we wanted them to feel special when they walked into this space to know that at least for four hours, that was theirs and theirs alone, to build community and feel and experience this any way they needed to,” Kapek said.
Whitney said for her, having these events at places that are not historically gay bars allows patrons to return to these spaces afterward and feel like they belong, even if a Hairpins event is not happening.
“It serves the community as a whole in different spaces. Instead of saying, ‘Okay, here’s where you can be yourself and this is your little bubble for one night.’ It puts a bubble inside a bubble. But what we’re trying to do is put little bubbles everywhere where it’s like, ‘Okay, you can be yourself in all of these spaces,’ and it allows people to feel more confident about that,” Butler said.
Presale tickets for the event at Pink House Alchemy have sold out, but about 50 tickets will be available at the door the day of the event. And if you can’t make this event, Victoria and Whitney said northwest Arkansas should keep an eye out for another event in the region around Halloween.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
