Who needs the apps? Boycott, a lesbian party turned iconic bar, marks 20 years in Phoenix

Audrey Corley isn’t one for online dating.

She prefers a more organic approach. Old school, one might say. The kind of encounter that starts with a woman sitting in a bar, wondering what the night will bring, when a beautiful woman walks in the door and immediately catches her eye.

“You don’t get that, necessarily, on swiping,” Corley said.

To be fair, she has an ulterior motive. As the owner of Boycott, the only lesbian bar in Phoenix, she wants to see people making these kinds of connections at her establishment.

But her view is heartfelt as well as economic, born from the same love of people that pulled her into the bar industry at 18 and has kept her there 31 years and counting.

It’s also part of her own story, as a proud lesbian born and raised in Phoenix.

Corley, 49, remembers the days before Tinder and Bumble and Hinge, where bars like hers were the only places queer women could reliably meet. Though times have changed, the need for those spaces hasn’t gone away.

For the past two decades, Corley has made it her mission to provide one. Boycott started as a party, held after hours at a central Phoenix restaurant, and grew into a regular night out for lesbians that moved around the city. Finally, it turned into a brick and mortar bar in the Melrose District, a stretch of Seventh Avenue where queer bars and businesses abound.

Boycott officially turned 20 on July 16 and celebrated the occasion on July 27.

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Bars and basketball and, finally, home

Corley’s two great loves are bars and basketball.

She started bartending at 18, and quickly fell in love with the industry. Working in a bar, she said, is to witness a broad spectrum of humanity, people out cheering their successes, drowning their sorrows, and feeling everything in between.

“You get people on their best days and their worst days,” she said. “Sometimes they're celebrating birthdays and big joyous moments in their life and other times they're grieving.”

“But that's what I love about it. You never know what you're gonna get.”

She credits basketball with saving her life. After being kicked out of high school her senior year, Corley said she was left at a crossroads, knowing she needed to change her direction. She went to Phoenix College, where she earned her GED and then a degree, and played college basketball, spending a year in practice before walking on the team.

After graduating, she became a coach, juggling basketball duties with bartending and hoping to own her own bar one day. But her journey to Boycott Bar, as it stands on Seventh Avenue, still had a way to run.

She had been in the industry about a decade when, in 2004, she decided to run an event for queer women. There were other lesbian bars in Phoenix at that point, but Corley wanted a more upscale vibe, where women could get dressed up and make a night of it.

She approached the owner of Blac-a-Zoli Grill on Seventh Street, which has since closed down, and told him about her idea. He was straight, but willing to give her a chance, and asked if she thought she’d get 100 people to attend.

“I don’t know,” Corley told him. “We’ll see.”

On July 16, the day of the party, the grill was serving dinner until 10 p.m., so it was a late, hectic bump-in. Corley and about 20 helpers quickly converted the space into a dance floor and private VIP room, set up the bar and patio, moved in borrowed couches for guests to sit on. They had dancers and bartenders and a valet.

“The DJ started to play and I'm like, 'OK, now here's the the real truth of the matter,’” Corley remembered. “And then people just started coming. Just coming and coming and coming.”

In all, 452 of them.

Corley’s mom had been so excited about the event that Corley had actually asked her to come by later, to let her get set up first. Her mom listened — kind of.

“She was secretly driving by to see how busy it was,” Corley said. “So the valet caught her, and brought her inside, and she came in, and she was just so proud of how many people were there.”

It was a major success. The Boycott events kept on going, held twice a month at venues around Phoenix. Corley and her friends spread the word through business cards and conversations and, to a much lesser extent, a MySpace account.

Corley hoped to turn it into a permanent bar one day. “It was always my goal to get to Melrose,” she said.

But before she landed there, she took some time away. In 2010, after losing someone close to her, she stepped away from the gay scene for a while, running a straight bar in Glendale.

Then in 2017, she was approached by Rhonda Walden, an icon of lesbian nightlife in Phoenix who died in 2023, and her partner Char Ortega. They had owned a lesbian bar in the Melrose District since the mid-1980s, and were looking for someone to take it over.

“I felt like it was where I supposed to be,” Corley said.

It opened as Boycott in 2017, a new chapter for Corley and her events.

Now, she said, “this is home”.

Open to all, 'a place for everyone'

The name Boycott was, ironically, suggested by a man.

It was one of Corley’s fellow college athletes, a guy who played for the men’s basketball team. One day, he said to her: “Hey, you know what would be a funny name for a bar?”

She stashed the idea away, determined to use it in the future.

It had worked for the events, but she hesitated about giving the bar the same name. It was hard enough to keep a place open, and she worried the bold name might put people off.

To be clear, boys are allowed at Boycott. Welcomed, in fact — as are transgender and nonbinary people, those who identify as queer or bisexual, and even straight allies.

“We are a lesbian bar. That’s true,” Corley said. “But we’re a place for everyone.”

The first couple of years they were open, Corley would literally stand outside and call to passersby, inviting them in, making sure they knew they were welcome. It’s about energy, she said, wanting the life of the space to be defined by who is welcome, rather than who isn’t.

So what makes it a lesbian bar?

History, for one. Before the space was Boycott, it was zGirl Club, Misty’s, and a number of other iterations, all aimed at lesbians. Decor is another. The space is loud and proud, with photographs of powerful women on the walls — including one of Corley’s mother and sister behind the bar — and the lights tinged with pink.

Programming is important too. Boycott embraces lesbian culture through screenings of WNBA games and U-Haul parties, where guests wear bracelets to indicate their relationship status and what they’re looking for. (The name is a reference to a jokey stereotype about how quickly lesbians move in with one another.)

It’s also about Corley’s identity as a lesbian, and her intentions for the space.

Lesbian bars are few and far between, with an estimated 32 open across the United States. Many have come and gone in Phoenix over the years — Ain’t Nobody’s Biz, the Cash Inn Country and E-Lounge, to name a few — but Boycott is the only one remaining in the state.

In 2022, Boycott was featured in The Lesbian Bar Project, a documentary series and campaign dedicated to chronicling and supporting the bars open across the country.

Corley said several factors make lesbian bars hard to keep open. The rise of dating apps and online queer communities. Women, on average, earn less than men. And sometimes, when lesbians get into relationships, they stop going out.

“When they break up, they come out, they’re like ‘Oh my god, there’s no lesbian bar,’” Corley joked. “Well, you haven’t been out in seven years!”

Boycott has had its financially challenging moments, Corley said. “I think you always find a way until you can't. And that's how I look at it. My goal is to be here as long as I'm alive.”

Like every establishment, particularly one that serves a specific community, the bar has its critics. Corley knows she will never make everybody happy. But she stressed the importance of supporting bars if you want them to stay open.

“Boycott's a whole vibe,” she said. “You come in here, you're gonna have a good time. And if you don't? Come again. Maybe it wasn't your night.”

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A coach at heart

If you ask a lesbian in Phoenix where to find community, you’ll likely hear one of two answers: Phoenix Mercury games and Boycott Bar.

It’s fitting that Corley, with her two great loves, is a fixture at both. She can be found courtside in the Footprint Center for Mercury home games, and behind the bar at Boycott, or talking with patrons, or fixing something, or taking in the vibe.

In 2023, she also opened a restaurant, Dahlia, which is on Seventh Street and serves tapas, tequila and wine. She still loves the nightclub life, but it takes a toll on the body.

“I can’t be 60 in the club,” she said, laughing. “It’s a little different.”

She no longer coaches basketball — after five surgeries, her knee is shot — but it’s a mindset she brings to the bar every day.

Over 20 years at Boycott, DJs and drag kings have gotten their start. Countless women have met other women who became one-night stands, situationships, girlfriends and wives. There have been Boycott babies born from these relationships, weddings and end of life celebrations held at the bar.

“I've seen people get married, I’ve seen people break up. I can't explain, I guess, how it makes me feel,” Corley said. “You know, I guess it's like winning. How I used to feel when we win a basketball game or watching our players develop.”

“I've seen so many people come through here,” she added. “I've watched people grow up in here.”

It doesn’t feel like it’s been two decades. To butcher a common parenting adage, the nights are long, but the years are short. Corley said she just kept working, kept working, and then one day she realized she had put 10 years into Boycott. She put her head down again, and all of a sudden, it turned into 20.

It has been hard, she said, and she has been supported by a great network of people. It wasn’t until she was featured on The Lesbian Bar Project that her impact began to sink in.

People approached her in the aftermath to thank her for creating the space she had, for keeping the place open. It was a lightbulb moment for Corley, one that increased her sense of pride.

“It just feels good,” she said, “to do what you love.”

Her next plan for Boycott is a new patio. Then it’s on to the next 20 years.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix lesbian bar Boycott celebrates 20 year anniversary