Sabina Palermo spent months tending bar and planning events at The Pearl before Denver's only lesbian bar collapsed in April under a mountain of unpaid taxes. Now she's trying again, this time as the sole owner of a new sapphic bar called Wild Tulips, set to open in Capitol Hill at 1202 E. 13th Ave. between Thump Coffee and Wild Corgi Pub.
Palermo hopes to hold a soft opening on October 11 with a grand opening slated for October 17, according to Westword. She told the outlet that Denver has plenty of gay bars but nothing built specifically around the people she feels get overlooked even within queer spaces: “Denver has gay spaces but none center bipoc, trans and nonbinary people,” Palermo said, per the report. The bar will lean into a 1970s aesthetic, with vintage decor, velvet furniture, and dark, moody lighting setting the tone.
A Familiar Address for Denver's Sapphic Scene
The location is notable for more than proximity to good coffee. It sits near the original home of Pearl Divers, the sapphic pop-up that Ashlee Cassity and Dom Garcia opened on 13th Street in 2024 before later relocating to the former Mercury Cafe building, according to the same Westword account. That relocation eventually became The Pearl, the bar where Palermo worked as a bartender and event planner and where she, alongside other former staff, organized parties for Denver's sapphic community even as the venue's finances grew shaky.
The Pearl shut down for good in April 2026 after mounting debt, unpaid property taxes, and unresolved questions about financial transparency, the Westword report notes. The City of Denver seized the physical property and locked its doors that same month after co-owners Cassity and Garcia racked up more than $56,000 in unpaid back taxes, according to the Denver Gazette. Hoodline previously covered the venue's abrupt closure, reporting that the building's landlord said property-tax increases at 2199 California Street had escalated operating costs there by roughly $60,000 during The Pearl's single year of operation.
A GoFundMe That Fell Apart
The Pearl's collapse got messier before it got final. Cassity created a GoFundMe with a $50,000 goal to try to keep the bar open, and the campaign raised more than $50,000 within 48 hours, according to Westword's reporting cited in the seed article. But the corporate entity dissolved on April 14, and all the donations were ultimately refunded after employees publicly urged donors to flag the campaign for fraud, according to Denver Westword. Thirty employees were left without jobs when the bar suddenly folded.
Palermo's own account of The Pearl's internal culture, relayed to Westword, points to another source of strain: the bar's ownership model once included five people, and its owners reportedly shared excessive financial information with staff and community members. The Pearl's bartenders, according to the report, at times paid performers out of their own pockets just to make sure they were paid on time. Wild Tulips general manager Emma Rosenfeld told Westword she wants the new bar to maintain transparency without overburdening staff, adding that employees should not have to worry about the job when they're not at work.
Learning From Blush & Blu's Turbulent Run
Palermo isn't just working in the shadow of The Pearl. She's also navigating the legacy of Blush & Blu, the lesbian bar that operated for 12 years before closing in 2024 following three years of public scuffles and a boycott, per the Westword report. In November 2021, three former Blush & Blu employees sued the bar and its owner, alleging systemic racial discrimination against Black staff and habitual non-payment of minimum wages, according to Towards Justice, the nonprofit legal group that brought the case; it was eventually settled out of court. A prominent Blush & Blu bartender also complained of similar behaviors on social media in 2024.
Against that backdrop, Palermo says she wants Wild Tulips to be different from the start, with herself as sole owner rather than a shifting ownership group. She's staffing up accordingly: Lennon Dogget will serve as kitchen and operations manager, while a Saturday party series will be organized by someone known as Lexy, or sailorkrat0m, per Westword. An anonymous angel investor reached out to Palermo over Instagram and offered to invest in a new sapphic space, giving her the financial push to search for an available venue after The Pearl closed.
Part of a Fragile National Landscape
If Wild Tulips opens as planned, it will be Denver's newest and only sapphic bar and, by Palermo's telling to Westword, the only designed lesbian bar in Colorado. Nationally, that scarcity is the norm rather than the exception. Tracking by the Lesbian Bar Project in 2026 identified roughly 36 to 37 operating lesbian bars across the United States, according to Parade — a modest rebound from a historic low of 15 to 20 in 2020, but still far below the more than 200 such venues that existed in the late 1980s. Palermo has said she welcomes more sapphic spaces opening in Denver and views them as potential partners rather than competitors, wanting Wild Tulips to be a space for sapphic people, trans people, and BIPOC community members alike.
Denver's lesbian bar history stretches back decades before any of this recent turbulence. The city's first lesbian-owned and operated bar, The Three Sisters, opened in 1973 in Highland and became a major regional hub, drawing patrons who traveled hundreds of miles from neighboring states during the 1970s and 1980s before it closed in 1996, according to The Center on Colfax. Whether Wild Tulips can avoid the financial fate of its immediate predecessors remains to be seen, especially with Denver's municipal minimum wage now at $19.29 per hour and tipped minimum wage at $16.27, a cost structure Hoodline has reported creates real hurdles for newly launched independent venues in Capitol Hill.
