The 6 new bars and clubs making Shaw D.C.’s hottest LGBTQ+ neighborhood (2024)

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Bunker, in a spot formerly occupied by world music venue Tropicalia, is a club in the truest sense: an underground dancehall off the corner of 14th Street, decorated as if it were an apocalyptic safe space with jagged rocklike walls, flashing lights, a caged-off seating section, bumping music and a flashing sign above the DJ booth that ticks down to spell out the word “Bunker” like a doomsday clock. As its name implies, the club will make you feel like you’re partying in the midst of an apocalypse — it’s equipped with prop gas masks, faux canned food, and plenty of inexpensive canned and mixed drinks.

The chandeliered club also hosts ticketed events including themed music nights, like “Neon Jungle,” and swimsuit parties, which sometimes include drag queens and other notable LGBTQ figures — its June 8 and 9 event “Unholy” will be hosted by “RuPaul’s Drag Race” alum Nina Flowers. On June 7, it will host a Latinx pride night called “Levantado Nuestras Voces,” with presale tickets on sale for $15 and door tickets for $20; all proceeds will benefit the Latinx History Project.

Make sure to hit the ATM before venturing down the stairs: Bunker has a cash cover that varies in price on Friday and after 10 p.m. on Saturday. With few exceptions, the bar does not charge a cover on Thursdays or Sundays and all prices are posted on its website and social media pages. Plus, it offers $5 drinks for its first hour open each night, so, while the dance floor may be less packed, you’ll have an incentive to get moving. Still, you’ll want to hit this spot later in the night if you’re hoping for a ton of bodies dancing till the world ends.

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The youngest spot on this list, Crush opened in April and features a two-story bar with several themed rooms on the second level. Its operators formerly ran Cobalt, a gay dance club in Dupont with a 20-year history before its sudden closure in 2019. One of Crush’s rooms, Studio A, is decorated with beloved pop records (think Britney Spears and Sam Cooke) and features a disco-style DJ booth, plus a small patio. Studio B is loungelike, with plush leather seating and disco balls suspended from the ceiling. It also has its own VIP room, the Starlight Lounge.

Amid its ’70s-inspired color palette, burnished wood and vinyl-record-heavy theme, you’ll find plenty of imagery of LGBTQ+ activists, artists and musicians. Photos of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s boxing match decorate the wall alongside an intricately engraved gramophone in the upstairs lounge. When we visited, the first floor was roped off for a private gathering, and there was no cover, though cover prices may vary depending on the time, night and whether the bar is hosting an event.

Crush offers 10 signature co*cktails, almost all of which are $15. Aside from its two grapefruit and orange “crushes,” which consist of fruit juice, triple sec, citrus soda and vodka, it has music-themed drinks like I Want to Break Tea! and Mez-call Me Maybe, though we’re still waiting for it to change the name of its espresso martini to That Me Espresso. Each drink we tried came with a heavy pour, especially the Dancing Queen’s Cup, a gin and sparkling wine co*cktail with strawberry-coriander syrup. Crush will also be pouring Pride Pils, a collaboration among Right Proper Brewing Company, D.C. Brau and Red Bear Brewing Company, all Pride Month long. All proceeds from those sales will go to LGBTQ-based nonprofits SMYAL and the Washington Blade Foundation. Be warned before you step through the matte black door: Because Crush is so new, its team is still workshopping its menu and events. For Pride Month, it will be hosting “RuPaul’s Drag Race” alum Gottmik on June 7 for a ticketed meet-and-greet and performance, as well as a handful of other performance and dance-based events over the month.

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It’s no coincidence that Kiki is a neighbor to fellow LGBTQ+ bar Dirty Goose. Kiki’s owner, Keaton Fedak, served as the Dirty Goose’s general manager for several years before and during his bar’s December 2021 opening in the former Velvet Lounge and Dodge City spaces. That proximity, Fedak contends, helped define the area as a hot spot for the city’s LGBTQ+ nightlife.

Kiki has several outdoor spaces that lend themselves to sunset happy hours and cool escapes from sweaty dance floors, decorated with leafy walls and cheeky neon signage. Originally envisioned as a beer garden (and now carrying 11 tapped ales), the back patio continues up two staircases to an airy deck with string lights and barrel tables. Grab an espresso martini or margarita — the two ever-popular co*cktails available on draft — and watch the party unfold on the patio below. Inside, a wall divides Kiki top to bottom down the middle, leaving four distinct brick-walled spaces that vary from calm and seated to high-energy and dance-y. With three spots for DJs, four bars, a vape vending machine and many bowls of Jell-O shots, the club is a choose-your-own-adventure.

Fedak “won’t do an event unless [he has] the representation” on his staff, which means that the monthly “Sapphic social” nights and Black Pride events are run by bartenders with those identities. You can expect up to three drag shows per week, including the flagship event (Wednesday’s “Daddy Issues,” hosted by five D.C. queens). There are also tea dance parties outside once a month on Sundays, plus campy drag comedy pageants and a queer comedy showcase monthly. For Capital Pride, grab a fast pass ($30 for Saturday, $65 for the weekend) to skip the line and get a free co*cktail and/or T-shirt.

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Soaring over the entrance to the Little Gay Pub is a two-story mural of a classic red telephone box. But, as its three owners want customers to know, it’s not a replica of a classic British pub.

“Style-wise, we’re very old-school vintage,” says Benjamin Gander. “Half the things we find are while antiquing. So I feel like ‘pub’ has this association with, ‘It’s been around, it’s been lived in.’ We very much want people to walk in like, ‘Oh, this place has been here already,’ even though we’re brand new.”

“To speak to Ben's point, we're not an English pub,” says Dito Sevilla. “We are a place that may have been English when it was first built, and then we became gay and stayed gay for like 50 or 60 years.”

“The gays took over an abandoned pub, basically,” Gander jokes.

Dusty Martinez chimes in, referencing the moment “Little Gay Pub” was coined: “When we said ‘pub’ to Ben, he was like, ‘Oh, yeah, pub, like public house. It’s a watering hole, and everyone comes together, and it’s community.’” The word “pub,” Martinez says, “fits everything we want to do.”

Among them, Gander, Martinez and Sevilla had accumulated decades of experiences at bars including Trade, Number 9 and Dito’s Bar. They decided to strike out together during the pandemic, Sevilla says, because “we decided that we wanted something nicer, someplace where the community can feel celebrated, someplace that isn’t just the same rubber stamp of a gay bar. But I think that because we’re more mature, we ended up with a product that’s a little bit more sophisticated.”

The Little Gay Pub, which opened in March 2023, is a stylish spot, with a thick white marble bar surrounded by tiles, and caramel leather banquettes that snake along the walls and a large window, facing low tables. Images capturing moments of LGBTQ history hang in frames and in the beams overhead: magazine covers, publicity photos, and fliers for old D.C. bars and the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which came from the owners’ collections as well as friends in the community. It is, Martinez says, “a collection of D.C. queer history, but also our national history. We’re educating people about it, but not putting it in their faces.”

The pub, tucked between Logan Circle and Shaw, has already made a splashy impression. How many bars in Washington have an Instagram fan account solely dedicated to bathroom selfies? (How many bars in Washington offer a backdrop that compares with Little Gay Pub’s gilded mirrors and deep green tiles?) Nancy Pelosi made a memorable visit here, as have the queens of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars”; actor Billy Porter; designer Christian Siriano; and British Ambassador to the United States Karen Pierce, who dedicated the pub’s mural, which was sponsored by the British government. Hopefully, some of the guests got to enjoy the co*cktails — the floral Unicorn Tears, made with gin and Aperol and a touch of glitter; the L-G-Pimms Cup; and the signature espresso martini, with vanilla vodka, cold brew and coffee liqueur. They sold “a couple hundred” espresso martinis on opening day alone, Sevilla says, and numbers have only gone up from there.

Solid drinks and a laid-back vibe have won the bar many fans in its first year — enough that owners have already announced an expansion to Philadelphia. On sunny days, the patio buzzes as customers circle the tables, ducking under fringed umbrellas, looking for friends or a place to perch, since the inside doesn’t have a lot of standing room. But what do you expect? It’s just a little gay pub.

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Justin Parker and Daniel Honeycutt, the owners of the Dirty Goose on U Street, had no intention of opening another bar last year. “We had a child in 2022, so we were like, ‘We will make 2023 an easy year, we won’t really do anything new,’” Parker says, laughing. Then came a cascade of changes at Ninth and U streets in early 2023: The Brixton, which Eric and Ian Hilton had run for a decade, closed. Whitlow’s, which was then operating a few doors up Ninth Street in a space that had previously been a Hilton brothers bar called Echo Park, agreed to take over the Brixton. The Hiltons, who’d become friends with the Dirty Goose owners during the pandemic, reached out to Parker and Honeycutt to see whether they’d be interested in the former Whitlow’s, just around the corner from their current bar.

“When we saw the layout of the space, and the atrium that has the skylights, we just fell in love with the idea of filling that space with something LGBTQ,” Parker says.

The Dirty Goose, which opened in summer 2016, is known for happy hours on its roof deck and a focus on late-night dance parties. At Shakers, Parker says he was drawn to the potential of the wide front room, which spans one floor of two adjacent rowhouses, and installed a stage for drag shows and live events, which are difficult to host at the Dirty Goose. It’s become the main room for the space: Fridays are given over to “RuPaul’s Drag Race” viewing, followed by drag performances, when there are no empty seats in the house, while other nights bring karaoke, drag, dance parties and movie screenings, creating a community clubhouse vibe.

Before dark, though, it’s more fun to venture through the building, to either the sunroom, where skylights and glass walls make a bright, engaging place for a drink, or to the flagstone patio, trimmed with plants. There are only a handful of tables outside, and plenty of room for standing. Shakers recently launched its first dog-friendly Yappy Hour on the patio, which Parker expects to be a regular event.

One of Shakers’ more interesting additions, though, is a happy hour called the Shakers Seven. (“I love anything that rolls off the tongue like that,” Parker says.) Shakers’ offerings are co*cktail focused, ranging from classics to espresso martinis made with coffee pods. But the menu of seven $7 drinks, offered from 5 to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, includes well-made martinis with Tanqueray or Tito’s and an Aperol spritz, in addition to wine, beer and seltzer. For happy hour, “we just wanted to get some staples that I think sometimes are normally more expensive,” Parker says. “One of the biggest hits on there has been the martini. A lot of times, you go out for a martini, it’s $13, $14, so for it to be $7 for happy hour — they’re making a lot of martinis.”

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Thurst may seem like a fitting name for a place that, well, serves drinks and opportunities to meet someone interesting, but there’s more behind the title of D.C.’s only Black-owned LGBTQ+ bar. For one, it references what co-owner Brandon Burke calls “quenching the need of the community for a space like ours.” It’s also a cheeky throwback to Thursday Bliss — the open mic event he used to host at rotating bars with co-owner Shaun Mykals — that was his introduction to D.C.’s nightlife scene. And, of course, the pair’s first physical venue is just off U Street NW, a historically Black corridor.

The nightclub stretches up two floors of a building that was, coincidentally, once owned by Odessa Madre, a Black, openly queer kingpin of Washington’s criminal underworld in the middle decades of the last century. The figures the club celebrates in photos hung along its staircase are less felonious, more political and often more fabulous: James Baldwin, Lori Lightfoot, Marsha P. Johnson and Audre Lorde, plus pop icons like Beyoncé and Rihanna. Patrons, like those who lined up around the block for a spot during Washington’s Black Pride Weekend (celebrated around Memorial Day), are greeted upon entry by a mural of an Afro-crowned woman behind a rainbow flag, head lifted as if in song. A long bar covers much of the first floor, save for a small but often fully packed dance floor under a disco ball. Find gold-accented black furniture and neon signs with phrases like “Are you thursty for more?” and “Quench me, I’m cute.” The upper level is a rooftop deck with plenty more seating and room for the party to overflow.

Burke and Mykals’s open mic event lives on at their new home, where performers can sing R&B backed by a live band of drums, bass and keys, or show off talents in dance, comedy or poetry. Events here aren’t limited to themed parties or identity-specific nights (though there are monthly femme-focused happenings by lesbian promoters) — Thurst also offers occasional health-related activities like HIV screenings, book releases, game nights and educational talks. It also has menus for food (think fried shrimp, bone-in wings and Philly cheesesteaks), hookah and happy hour (5 to 7 p.m. weekdays; 2 to 4 p.m. weekends). For under $7, try the fruity rum drink Burke cites as his bestseller: the Thurst Quencher.