By 8 PM on any given weekend, a familiar ritual begins unfolding: Gays in cropped baby tees, scuffed Converse, and suspiciously tiny shorts spill out of Ubers and into the Little Gay Pub, a Logan Circle bar that has quietly become one of the city’s most photographed nightlife destinations. Not because of the drinks. Not because of the dance floor—there isn’t one. But because of the bathroom.
Before ordering a vodka soda, patrons make a beeline toward the pub’s cramped, dimly lit restroom, where the mirrors have somehow become the backdrop for one of DC gay culture’s most viral ongoing photo ops. Some slip inside alone, carefully angling their phones for the perfect thirst trap while wearing nothing but a jockstrap, their jeans pooled around their ankles. Others crowd shoulder to shoulder in packs of eight or ten, taking flash photos as if documenting the final hours of a holiday weekend on Fire Island.
The phenomenon has become so widespread that the unofficial Instagram account @royal_flush_lgp—dedicated entirely to bathroom-mirror selfies in LGP—has amassed thousands of followers and nearly a thousand tagged posts. Scroll long enough and the spot begins to resemble a living archive of gay nightlife: first dates, birthday parties, post-breakup revenge bodies, situationships, and at least one appearance from Nancy Pelosi.
At this point, getting a photo inside the LGP bathroom has become less of a spontaneous drunk decision and more of a social ritual—proof you were there, looked hot, and survived the often long wait for your turn in front of the mirror.
The restroom is small but luxurious—“without a doubt the most expensive portion of the decor,” says co-owner Dito Sevilla, who describes the aesthetic as “crazy Hollywood Regency meets Palm Beach extravaganza.” Emerald subway tiles line jungle-print wallpaper. Brass fixtures meet marble countertops, and an antique swan-neck faucet spills into the basin below. Even the lighting is customizable, allowing patrons to dim or brighten the room depending on the kind of photo they’re taking.
“No expense was spared,” says Sevilla, who opened LGP in 2023 with fellow nightlife veterans Dusty Martinez and Benjamin Gander. “You can always judge a place by its bathroom.” The vision, he says, was to create the feeling of a classic gentlemen’s club, just “very, very gay.”
When I ask Sevilla what it’s like watching an Instagram account dedicated not to his bar, but specifically to his bathroom, go viral, he laughs. “It’s extremely charming,” he says. “It’s heartwarming, and a reminder of how well tiny ideas and all the details you put into a space are rewarded.” He adds that he often sees the LGP bathroom in profile photos online—even if nobody explicitly says where they were taken. He’s right: Later that night, I open Grindr to find three separate shirtless-torso photos taken in the restroom Sevilla and I just spent the previous hour discussing. Of course, like any bathroom that’s become this central to gay nightlife culture, the stories don’t end at selfies. Sevilla admits there has “absolutely” been sex there. “There’s always a hint of random romance in the air,” he says.
Want to get in on the trend? The owners do have some advice for amateur restroom photographers: Dim the lights. Be yourself and smile. Know your best angle. And most of all, says Gander, “you look better without the flash.”
This article appears in the July 2026 issue of Washingtonian.
Tristan Espinoza joined Washingtonian as an Editorial Fellow in 2026. A proud Osage Native from Dallas, Texas, he is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Nonfiction) at American University. He is a graduate of Columbia University and the London School of Economics. He lives in Mount Pleasant.
