Liberty Hall is looking to build a sapphic Eden with Girl Bar — a monthly night “for gurls and gals and nonbinary pals” — and this month, folks can catch the 1994 lesbian romcom that inspired it all. 

Kalie McAlexander, the cinema manager at Liberty Hall, said she’s long noticed that gaggles of girlfriends frequent the independent movie theater.

“In a lot of my movie programming, I’ve noticed that women are the biggest demographic of people coming to the movies and to Liberty Hall,” she said. “And beyond that, it seems like groups of women with, you know, their partners, or with their girlfriends, like in the ‘90s way. In the ‘90s way and in the real way, people are bringing their girlfriend to Liberty Hall.”

The broader film industry has also taken notice.

A24, a juggernaut of indie movie and television production, requested that Liberty Hall show “Love Lies Bleeding,” directed by Rose Glass, when it released spring 2024. An erotic thriller, the movie gained hype for the smutty lesbian romance between Kristen Stewart and Katy M. O’Brian’s characters, and earned fans for the gritty, surrealist story about bodybuilding in the 1980s.

“We didn’t reach out to them. They reached out to us. And I was like, wow, they know that we’re the lesbian theater,” she said.

There are many intentional queer spaces throughout town, but McAlexander said she’s not aware of events tailored primarily to sapphics.

“Sapphic” is an umbrella term for queer people who are romantically or sexually attracted to women, as opposed to “lesbian,” which is generally used to refer to women who are attracted exclusively to women. However, this language is fluid for some in the community and may be used interchangeably.

There are some noted, if unofficial, sapphic haunts in Kansas City, but the drive can be prohibitive for Lawrencians. When McAlexander collaborated with Lawrence PRIDE to host the first Girl Bar in October, she wanted to plant an official pink, orange and purple flag at the theatre.

Girl Bar took its maiden voyage in the theater’s basement with a screening of “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge,” which has extensive queer subtext, according to McAlexander.

“I was worried, you know, initially,” she said. “I was like, well, ‘Will trans girls know that they can come, will trans men know that they can come? Does everybody know that they’re welcome and that we want them to come?’”

She was delighted to see the basement fill up with a diversity of queer identities and ages. She was approached by a woman in her 70s who said Lawrence hadn’t had a space like Girl Bar in a long time.

“I was really touched by that because it’s really rare to get to talk to your queer elders,” she said. “There’s not a lot of them, so I was really floored by that.”

The sense of safety not only benefitted the patrons, but the employees. McAlexander said that the gay bartender who worked that night said she made a “Blue is the Warmest Color” drink special and everyone understood it. She asked to be scheduled for the next Girl Bar.

“I thought it was great for her to see a bunch of customers that she knew she was going to feel safe with,” McAlexander said. “So it was like, it worked both ways.”

January’s Girl Bar will feature a screening of the movie that inspired it all — 1994’s “Bar Girls” directed by Marita Giovanni — with a hang afterwards. McAlexander fished the film from the old video store’s VHS vault.

She said when the physical store closed, staff cleared out the vault for space. She ended up taking home about 1,000 tapes, and she pulls out a carton when time allows to peruse for gems. That’s how she found “Bar Girls,” which she converted to a digitized format using an at-home rig.

The movie was part of the ‘90s boom of gay media, featuring a group of lesbian in Los Angeles who socialize at their local queer watering hole — Girl Bar. McAlexander’s hunt for the film online showed that it isn’t available for streaming.

“There are four copies left that you can buy on DVD,” she said. “And so it’s not a lost film, but it will be four purchases from now.”

McAlexander turned to Letterboxd, where there were only a few dozen reviews for the film.

“There is a very finite amount of people that have seen this movie, but they all were really sweet, wholesome reviews about how young people had found this in their video store and realized that they were queer while watching it,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, this was a video store movie.’”

McAlexander said the January screening will “look like a VHS” because she’s showing her digitization of the old video store copy.

“I think it’s kind of sweet,” McAlexander said. “It makes me miss the video store, and know that I also still have it.”

This month’s Girl Bar will run from 7 to 11:30 p.m. Friday, Jan 23 in the main theater of Liberty Hall, 644 Massachusetts St. “Bar Girls” will show at 7 p.m. with a hangout to follow. Tickets are $12.50 at this link.

The event is open to people ages 18 and older. Attendees will need to show their IDs, and Liberty Hall will “x” the hands of anyone under the age of 21.

Folks can still browse the video store library and check out movies at the theatre’s ticketing desk.

Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at wulfe@lawrencekstimes.com.

Read their complete bio here. Read their work for the Times here.

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