Philadelphia’s new Little Gay Pub is making it big

On a dreary Wednesday night, where would friends James Yzkanin, Kyle Jackson, and Nikhil Mukherjee have been, if not sharing food, drinks, and stories at the new Little Gay Pub in Center City?

“Home,” Yzkanin said, as the men, all in their 20s, laughed in agreement. The packed bar buzzed as servers scurried past with espresso martinis and plates of cocktail wieners and warm pretzels. The banquettes and tables in the richly appointed front room — fireplace, check; mustachioed rendering of Mona Lisa, also check — were full. Upstairs, it was standing room only at a second bar. On the roof deck, people enjoyed drinks in the light rain.

“This neighborhood needed something like this,” Mukherjee said, referring to 13th Street in a section of Washington Square West dubbed the Gayborhood. Last year, two gay bars — Level Up and Cockatoo — closed.

The Little Gay Pub is an import from D.C., where in only two years it has drawn celebrity guests, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), who ordered a club soda and took a selfie in one of the restrooms. The Philadelphia location, at 13th and Drury Streets (down the alley from Philadelphia’s oldest bar, McGillin’s Olde Ale House), saw crowds from its 4 p.m. opening on Tuesday night.

Partners Dusty Martinez, Benjamin Gander, and Dito Sevilla did their Philadelphia research long before they agreed to open at 102 S. 13th St.

They scoured flea markets, estate sales, and antiques shops for the furnishings, much of which reflect Philadelphia gay history. The look is intentionally over-the-top — one Google reviewer called it “Gay Pinterest in the best possible way possible.”

The bar is at the rear of the ground floor, whose aesthetic is reminiscent of the Washington location — “kind of like an old pub or a hotel that was abandoned, and it was taken over by gays who gay-ified it,” Sevilla said. “It looks like it’s been there awhile, but it’s super-fresh and new.”

Every bit of wall space is occupied, by gilded mirrors; photos of 1960s gay-rights marches; a framed Playbill from Steel Magnolia’s run on Broadway in 2005; the iconic photo of Princess Diana wearing an Eagles jacket; autographed photos of gay icons like Queen’s Freddie Mercury, Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, and Robin Williams in a publicity still from the comedy film The Birdcage; and no fewer than three glossies of Billie Jean King. Across from the bar is a red London telephone booth — the mop closet, as there was no other place for it.

Upstairs, the bar feels more like an English garden, with pink and orange lighting and bold floral wallpaper. On Wednesday night, Sister Act — the 1992 Whoopi Goldberg film — was playing on a TV hanging near the sliding door to the roof deck, which sits under the gaze of city planner Ed Bacon, depicted by the muralist Gaia. In the middle of the roof, there‘s an antique Washington streetlight, donated by a neighbor.

So why Philly?

“Oh, why not Philly,” Gander said. “Philly is amazing. Philly has an amazing nightlife scene. It has a great LGBT community scene.”

“It has a great college scene, a postgrad place,” Martinez continued. “It’s super-historic.”

“It’s another East Coast city that we really identify with,” Sevilla said. “We‘ve been coming up here for years. The history here is so much more vast, too. Both pubs are about collecting queer history.”

“Washington’s gay scene has spread out,” Gander said, “while the Gayborhood here is just still so tight-knit and adorable.”

How did they become part of the community? “That question is reminiscent of every warning we got — ‘Philly is tight-knit, it’s working-class, you’re new, you’re interlopers, you’re coming from D.C.’ — and you know what?” Sevilla said. “I have had absolutely nothing but the most amazing experience with the people here, between the welcome we‘ve gotten, the contractors that have come in, these old men that are doing the awnings that you think would be the most homophobic of all time. They’re so excited because they have a gay niece or a nephew.”

As soon as they signed the lease last year, Martinez, Sevilla, and Gander rented an apartment nearby; they shuttle between the two cities, keeping one owner on-site at all times.

Martinez reached out to local organizations, which in turn have donated artwork and items to become part of the decor. “We didn’t want to buy things that were just online,” Sevilla said. During construction, they left the doors open to allow neighbors to peek at the work in progress.

When they posted jobs online (and in the bar window), Sevilla said they got about 1,000 applications, did about 80 interviews, and hired 40 workers.

Flowers arrived on opening day from landlord Goldman Properties (the card read, “We are so excited, we can’t even think straight”) and the owners of the nearby Woody’s Bar, the oldest gay bar in the neighborhood.

It is very early, of course, but a spot-check Wednesday found a diverse crowd — “older to younger, men, women, they/them, nonbinary,” Sevilla said. “We said we wanted a place where we could all sit down, but a place where our parents could go and it feels like, ‘Yeah, we should be here.’”

Wyatt Masciantonio, a bartender who was working their first shift Wednesday, found the crowd “upbeat and happy being here. There‘s nothing but good energy.”

The food and drink have a “highbrow/middlebrow, casual, fun thing going on,” Sevilla said. The food is bar bites: beef hot dogs in puff pastry served with apricot honey mustard, warm pretzels with pimento cheese, dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, ham-and-Swiss sliders, and tater tots.

Among the nine cocktails ($15.50) are a spritz, a Big Gay Margarita, a classic old-fashioned, and something called a Ben’s Big Banana, which mixes Rhum Barbancourt 4 Year, banana liqueur, demerara syrup, and lime juice, and is garnished with a banana chip.

Martinez, 38, Gander, 43, and Sevilla, 46, were longtime managers of gay bars in Washington. “Then the pandemic happened and we decided that we wanted to do our own thing,” Sevilla said. “We loved the people we worked for, but it was time for us to get together.”

When it came time to name their bar, “we went through a couple hundred names every night, texting each other back and forth, fighting, Googling, checking trademarks,” Sevilla said. “Eventually, we all sat down in a bar and we all said, ‘We need a name for a little gay tavern.’ And then I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds a little like ‘LGBT,’ and then Dusty just out of nowhere says, ‘Little Gay Pub.’” (It is not to be confused with Big Gay Ice Cream, an unrelated New York company that operated a parlor in Philadelphia for nearly six years until the pandemic.)

The idea of gay bars has morphed over the decades. “When they first opened, they were a haven, a safe place, a very hidden-away nook, a place where you could feel at home with your own kind,” Sevilla said. “As a result of the progress we‘ve all made as a community … we‘re acceptable to grandma. Nowadays, in this context, it’s a place to be celebrated. That’s why we open our windows up.”

Still, gay bars are “very necessary,” Sevilla said. “For all the big-city acceptance that we see, there are small towns and communities where that isn’t the case, and there‘s the trans community and others who don’t feel safe anywhere else. That’s why they’re vital.”

Little Gay Pub, 102 S. 13th St. Hours: 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday to Thursday, 1 p.m. to 2 a.m. Friday and Saturday.