DC has a long, significant history of gay-rights advocacy, and a new bar that’s coming to Arlington next year will celebrate one important figure in that effort: Lilli Vincenz.
Vincenz, who moved to Arlington after joining the Women’s Army Corps in 1963, was outed as a lesbian and medically discharged from the military. She turned to activism, and was the first woman to be photographed picketing in front of the White House for gay rights. She was also the first lesbian member of the Mattachine Society, a national LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. She later went on to co-found the Washington Blade, having previously edited the Mattachine Society’s monthly journal, Homosexual Citizen, under a pseudonym.
Now Arlington native and queer therapist SC Nealy plans to honor Vincenz’s contributions to the gay-rights movement. Nealy is working to open a lesbian bar in Arlington, named Lilli’s Bar, in 2027. There are only 36 lesbian bars in the country, and Nealy says she’s keenly aware of the challenges that come with starting a new business. She’s talked to several queer business owners in the area since announcing Lilli’s Bar.
Nealy says that she learned about Vincenz during a Pride Month panel and connected to her story personally and professionally. “She became a psychotherapist later in life and I run a counseling practice for queer people,” Nealy says. “It just felt very apt.” Opening a bar also has historic symbolism, since Vincenz held a Gay Women’s Open House in her Arlington home from 1971 to 1977. Nealy hopes that Lilli’s Bar will carry on the tradition of hosting a social gathering space for queer women. She imagines it as an upscale cocktail bar with displays dedicated to both Vincenz’s life and other local queer history.
In the next month, Nealy is working to raise money for the project and find the right space in Arlington. She’s holding a fundraising event in October at the National Landing Water Park, which will feature history displays about Vincenz’s life, drag performances, and local vendors. Drag performer and community fixture Cake Pop is among the queens who are helping support the event. “There’s obviously a lot of spaces that serve a certain kind of individual in our city,” Cake Pop says. “So it’s nice to see a place like this open up for the sapphic community.”
In 2013, ten years before Vincenz’s death, she and her partner donated a vast collection of documents, diaries, films, and artifacts to the Library of Congress. Included were two documentaries that Vincenz made of early picketing protests and the Christopher Street Liberation Parade. Sherri Sheu, an archivist with the library who handles their LGBTQ collections, says films like these would have been shown at gay bars in parts of the country further away from growing protest movement.
The Lilli Vincenz papers paint a picture of the gay rights movement that is vital for the historical record, according to Sheu. She adds that Vincenz has a unique perspective, having been a part of so many activist organizations and surviving the AIDS epidemic to old age. “It’s just an extraordinary contribution to how we understand gay history,” Sheu says. “When somebody has seen basically everything, it makes an incredible collection and an incredible resource for researchers.”
Shue says Lilli’s Bar is a great opportunity to pay tribute to the DC-area’s contribution to queer history—noting that the famous photos of queer couples in Lafayette Park when gay marriage was legalized were taken in the same place Lilli Vincenz had picketed decades earlier. “Not only can you not tell gay history without her, I don’t think you can tell DC history without her,” Sheu says.
When Vincenz died in 2023, her long-time compatriot in the Mattachine Society, Charles Francis, published a piece in appreciation of her with the DC History Center. Within it, Francis included a poem from one of Vincenz’s close friends. “She embodied the truth that a warrior can be gentle,” the poem reads, “And with dignity and grace as her weapons, met those who would diminish her.”
