BETHEL, Vt. — On first glance, Babes Bar is a small-town dive. By 3 p.m. on a Wednesday in January, the parking lot was full despite knee-high piles of snow accumulating around the red brick. On the back porch of the former train station, patrons smoked cigarettes while overlooking the tracks that run along the White River. Inside, a varnished wood bartop has the feel of a family antique.
Look around, and you may notice signs of the establishment’s larger community. Rainbow pride flags and the pink, white and blue transgender flag hang on the mirror behind the bar. Upstairs, next to tables with a Nintendo 64 and board games, there’s a library full of queer and abolitionist reading.
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On any given night, people dressed in light-wash jeans and ball caps take their turns for karaoke after openly gender nonconforming people finish their songs. Artists in this former mill town of roughly 2,000 people rub elbows with men who work in construction, carpentry and concrete. About once a quarter, the bar stays open late, a disc jockey booth appears and the early crowd gives way to a larger, more excited group who has arrived for the Queer Dance Parties, or QDPs.
Babes co-owners Jesse Plotsky and Owen Daniel-McCarter have intentionally created a space that fulfills the purpose of both a blue-collar dive and a queer bar. In a state lacking for dedicated LGBTQ+ nightlife, the bar’s blue ox logo has become a calling card for Vermont’s queer and cool.
According to a study by the Williams Institute that combined two years of government survey data, an estimated 7.4 percent of Vermont’s population identifies as LGBT, one of the highest percentages in the country. Yet the state has very few venues, like Fox Market in East Montpelier, that are avowedly LGBTQ+.
Vermont is designated as a rural state, which means its LGBTQ+ population is spread out. There are a higher proportion of LGBTQ+ people in Vermont than in New York or Massachusetts, but Vermont does not have seasonal queer destinations like New York’s Fire Island or Provincetown, Mass. Vermont’s popular winter sports scene has only a smattering of events focused on the LGBTQ+ community, such as Stowe’s Winter Rendezvous, but they are often pricey and infrequent.
Kell Arbor, Health & Wellness director at the Pride Center of Vermont and music director of the QDPs, said the queer community was “over the moon” in 2018 when Babes opened in Bethel, about 30 minutes from Killington Ski Resort and Woodstock.
“There’s more and more community under the rainbow coming together, because we’re here, we just don’t have enough event spaces to be together,” Arbor said.
Daniel-McCarter’s and Plotsky’s experiences as queer people inform how they think about creating space for the community at large, applying principles of inclusion to all groups.
“It has been that cisgender spaces are trans-inclusive,” Arbor said. “Well, now we’re trans-led spaces that are cis-inclusive.”
Meet ‘the Babes’
Plotksy and Daniel-McCarter can often be found behind the bar at Babes. The married couple, originally from D.C. and Milwaukee, respectively, moved to Bethel from Chicago to be close to Plotsky’s brother after he had a son. Plotsky and Daniel-McCarter were looking for a change of pace in Bethel. For years, their friends told them they should open a bar.
“We had joked around in Chicago, whenever a cool bar that we really liked or queer bar closed, it was like, ‘Oh, we’re going to save this bar,’” Daniel-McCarter said. When they saw a bar called the Depot was listed for sale on a main drag, “we totally uprooted our lives” and moved to Bethel.
Hearing the couple talk to each other, the name of the bar feels obvious. Daniel-McCarter and Plotsky, who are trans, have been together for 14 years. They call each other “Babe.” Their friends call them “the Babes.” A year after eloping in 2017, they marked their nuptials with a flower-filled, three-day rock concert, Babefest.
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“If the marriage license had the option of babes as the identifier, that would make a lot more sense,” Daniel-McCarter said. “Because we are definitely babes.”
In Chicago, Daniel-McCarter had worked as a lawyer with a long record in transgender activism, including stints as the legal director of the Trans Life Center and at the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance. Daniel-McCarter was also an advocate for holistic defense, which encourages legal teams to help clients find assistance outside the courtroom, such as meaningful referrals for mental health support and housing. Plotsky had headed up the wine program at a local Trader Joe’s, bartended and played the drums in various “punky Americana” bands like Slop Sink, the Homoticons and a gay Alanis Morissette cover band.
The Babes had prioritized social support and community involvement in Chicago, and they wanted to bring the same approach to running a bar in Vermont. That meant listening to the communities they wanted at the bar to serve, including the regulars who supported the Depot.
The new bar owners hadn’t planned to host cribbage tournaments or serve vodka and Red Bull. Both are now standard. After the couple received feedback that the name “Babes” might make some women feel uncomfortable, they adopted a logo to make the bar appear more friendly. Plotsky’s brother, a graphic designer, created the bucking blue ox (like Paul Bunyan’s pet) that now hangs outside the bar.
David Sambor, a local community leader and owner of Bethel Village Sandwich Shop, has been impressed by the newcomers’ commitment to the community. Daniel-McCarter serves on the local zoning board. Sambor says the Babes greet locals by name and take an interest in everyone’s lives. The bar hosts community-led classes for “Bethel University,” a free pop-up curriculum.
“When it was called the Depot, I remember walking in and everybody at the bar just kind of turned and looked. … It was really just like, ‘Okay, I don’t belong here,’” Sambor said. “When you walk in there now, a lot of the same people who turned and looked at me are still in there, but there’s all kinds of other people. [Jesse and Owen] have transformed the place.”
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Of course, it helps that Babes has “put Bethel on the map,” as Sambor said, bringing an influx of business to the otherwise quiet town, especially during QDPs.
The biggest queer dance party in town
The QDPs happen about six times a year. Lines run out the door and late into the night; the cover charge is only $5. Tables that typically sit atop the original mid-19th-century hardwood floors are pushed to the sides, and the few dark wood pillars that frame the space mark out an ad hoc dance floor. A DJ booth set up in the back plays hits from every generation, mostly sung by women.
In 2023, I attended a QDP while living in Rutland, Vt., and teaching skiing at a resort. I ran into almost every queer person I knew: ski instructors well into their 60s, younger folks preparing for graduate school and, in classic queer fashion, a woman coming from New Hampshire who had gone on one date with me.
Plotsky and Daniel-McCarter began throwing QDPs in Chicago and knew from the beginning they wanted to continue them at Babes. As fun and as lucrative as they are, Arbor thinks of QDPs as part and parcel to their work in health and wellness.
They consider the parties “edu-tainment,” a mashup of education and entertainment. Attendees can exercise and build friendships. “Edge-tenders” subtly watch the dance floor, prepared to de-escalate any tension or help an attendee in need. Arbor brings naloxone and free HIV self-test kits to hand out to anyone who wants them.
Arbor said QDPs have inspired similar events around Vermont, including a few that use the same name. Sambor has heard people as far away as Woodbury, Vt., about an hour and a half from Bethel, wearing a hat with the bar’s logo and talking about how much they like going to Babes.
Almost no regulars — the early crowd — hang around for the QDPs. But no one who spoke on a visit in early January said they had a problem with them. A few, like Tony McCullough, have stayed for the QDPs’ early hours, but never late into the night.
McCullough has come to this building since his grandfather worked as the train station’s last station master. He calls the bar his “home away from home.”
“They’re just good people,” McCullough said of Plotsky and Daniel-McCarter. “They’re human beings,” he added, “and as human beings, they’re cool.”
Emily Carmichael is a writer based in Brooklyn. Find her on X: @ecarmichael19.
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