D.C.’s Little Gay Pub becomes a little bigger with a new location in Philly
Little Gay Pub, coming to 13th Street in Philadelphia's Gayborhood, is a celeb hangout and a hotspot for restroom selfies that celebrates gay life and history.
Three longtime Washington, D.C., bartenders plan to bring a branch of the District’s popular Little Gay Pub to Philadelphia’s Gayborhood. LGP has drawn a cadre of celebrity guests since opening in spring 2023, including Sen. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), who ordered a club soda and took a selfie in one of the well-appointed restrooms last fall.
Dito Sevilla, Dusty Martinez, and Benjamin Gander have leased 102 S. 13th St., at the corner of 13th and Drury Streets, down the alley from Philadelphia’s oldest tavern, McGillin’s Olde Ale House. The building, which has a rooftop deck, was previously home to Broth Thyme, a soup spot — and before that, the bars APO and the Corner. The trio told The Inquirer that their mission is to create a pub for the LGBTQ community “to be celebrated, more than just served.”
They hope to open by late December but would settle for next spring, ahead of Pride Month in 2025.
Sevilla said their decor and service “harken back to an older age in the community, when the bars were nicer, a little bit more leathery and darker, and the fixtures were better.”
The Philly and D.C. locations are both on corners and benefit from natural light, lending to a daytime drinking environment and not just a late-night scene. “We like to think it represents new frontier in gay bars. In the early days, the gay bar was like a hidden little place,” Sevilla said. “You can always see inside the bar from the street when you’re walking by with your friends.”
LBP’s restrooms have their own Instagram with the bio that reads, “Ya’ll holding up the line, make it good.” But the partners didn’t set out to be known for what Sevilla called “a crazy selfie trend.”
“One of the things we agreed on when we started was that we wanted to have over-the-top bathrooms, and there was really no specific reason,” Sevilla said. “I wish that we could go back and say that we brilliantly thought about it as a marketing strategy, but we made them crazy and kitschy—”
“— and so clean and nice,” Martinez said.
All three have decades in the D.C. bar business and still work behind the stick. They came up with the name after reviewing what they said were 10,000 possibilities.
Just as the original location is “very much a love letter to Washington, D.C., queer life,” the new pub will celebrate Philadelphia. A mural of the late city planner Ed Bacon overlooks their roof deck. “He’s Kevin Bacon’s father!” Sevilla said in a chat Thursday. “We’re two degrees from Kevin Bacon!”
That said, “the last thing we want to be are interlopers into a city that’s very tight-knit,” Martinez said. They intend to be involved with the community, sharing an apartment so that at least one of them is always in town.
During construction, Martinez said, “we plan to keep our doors open so the neighborhood can stop by pop in and ask us questions. We’re just a very friendly bunch of people that have brought greatness to D.C. and we hope to do so in Philadelphia.”