In case you have a “life” or a “job” and missed this crucial news, The Boston Globe has had their biggest day since the famous Spotlight investigation—by covering the drama that unfolded after a small-town lesbian bar in western Massachusetts removed their KN95 mask mandate for one day a week.
I tried to explain this story to a friend, my husband, and my father (my brother informed me he already knew about it “against his will”) and I’m not sure I did a very good job, so I will do my best to cover the basics for anyone who is somehow a CHH subscriber and yet out of the loop on this developing story.
A lesbian bar called Last Ditch in Greenfield, Massachusetts, who prided themselves on being a covid-conscious space for disabled and immunocompromised queer people, noted feedback from their customers that they did not want to wear a KN95 mask anymore. To “compromise,” the owners of the bar (where paying was reportedly optional) removed the mask mandate on Saturdays only, sparking backlash that was so galaxy-brain-woke that Opus 5.5 trained exclusively on Portlandia episodes and Tumblr beefs from 2015 still wouldn’t have been able to generate it. Terroristic threats abounded, along with accusations that the bar owners were committing eugenics, genocide, and hosting a “hate and discrimination day.”
(At this point my husband asked me how any of them were drinking if they were all wearing masks. As it turns out, they now make sippy-cup N95s, although I’m not convinced anyone at this bar was purchasing anything at all, let alone drinking.)
But what I found most fascinating about this story wasn’t the drama itself (although that was, of course, hilarious) but why it was so popular on liberal and leftist Twitter, despite sounding like a right-wing fever dream. But this probably resonated so well with the Left was because the people on the receiving end of wokescold “smol bean” bullies who used marginalized identities as an excuse to harass people in bad faith…were frequently other leftists and liberals. And the story of Last Ditch has seemingly activated core memories for many of these people.
