Thursday, April 30, 2015

Lips Ultra Lounge

Lips Ultra Lounge
Lips Ultra Lounge (aka M's Lip Lounge, Lip Bar, Lips)

Location: 510 North Stanton Street, El Paso, Texas, USA

Opened/Closed: 2010-2011?

From Clubfly:

Type: Lesbian Club

In a nutshell: El Paso's first lesbian ultra lounge and bar with live music, go-go dancers, happy hour and indoor/outdoor patio...

As is typical at clubfly, they note that the place is closed, but provide no date.

At yelp, the same address is referred to as M's Lip Lounge. There is one "official" customer review from October 2011. Scott W. was none to pleased with the place--and is pretty nastily anti-lesbian to boot: 

A sad excuse for a lesbian/gay bar.

The place looks as if it were painted by a couple of second graders.

They constantly have local bands playing here who are just as bad as their sound equipment (dear God it sounds like cats being raped!)

I always see this place while on my way to The Briar Patch and it always seems to be virtually empty.

So to the lesbians of El Paso, stick to your softball matches and volunteer hours at the local cat shelter....cause this ain't the place to be.


Can't help but wonder about Scott's little simile here. I sure hope he doesn't have a personal familiarity with cat raping, but when it comes to men who make a point of hanging around a lesbian bar, one can never be too sure. At any rate, we see here a great demonstration of the casual ease with which anti-lesbian stereotyping, animal torture, and sexual assault go together in the minds of certain cretinous males. And we want more of these guys in our spaces?

There are also three other "unofficial" reviews, all from 2010 and 2011. Here's a defense of the place by melissa m. (apparently the owner) in November 2011:

All we can say is some people just dont get it but those of you who do we love you.  We're not for everyone and we know that in fact we pride that.  If you dont like it you dont come in and thats that we enjoy the company of those that choose to spend their time with us and you know who you are ;). Lets keep rockin elpaso everyday till the day we die!!!!

An (all male) band called Patmos Vision performed there in July 2010. (I think this may be one of those "local bands" that Scott W. so vividly referred to.) Here's a short video if you're interested. That an ostensibly lesbian bar was granting this all-dude band a performance space already tells me we have a mission problem. Are all the lesbian musicians out there fully booked with big dollar contracts with the major record companies? If so, somebody forgot to tell me.

There's a Facebook page for a bar called Lips Bar at this location. One of the last postings is dated August 2014, and it's for...a drag queen show. Since drag queen shows are generally not a part of lesbian culture per se, I'm thinking that Lips is a substantially different place from Lips Ultra Lounge. Once again, it appears we have yet another case of a lesbian bar that was basically taken over by self-identified queers, gay men, drag queens, and/or trans women--probably sometime after 2011.

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