Cattyshack Heir Mission Dolores Attracts The Only Queers Left in Park Slope: Women, Says Host Emily Hall Smith

(Dogs on the dancefloor at Mission Dolores)
 
Drinks, dogs, lesbians and a laid-back vibe. That's what we found at 10pm in a Monday night at Confession, Park Slope's Mission Dolores' Monday night party. A dozen lesbians sipping beer at wooden tables, a friendly dog wagging its tail at passers-by and DJ TRx spinning tunes that slipped from 50 Cent to the Jackson 5 to Christina Aguilera. "It's early yet, so I'm not worried about it," says party organizer Emily Hall Smith upon our arival. Besides, Confession always has a laid-back vibe. "This is a chill, talk-to-people kind of place," she says.
 
Billed as "righteous beers, sinful queers," Confession takes place at the famously dog-friendly bar. Hall started the monthly event almost a year ago, choosing Mission Dolores on the grounds that "I try to only throw parties in places that are awesome: places that you would want to go anyway." Confession starts early and ends late, she says, so that people can stop by whenever they want, and still go to work in the morning.
 
The party features a Confession Box, where visitors can confess their sins, which are then read out loud by DJ TRx (pronounced like the dinosaur: "T. Rex"). This process, TRx explained, provides absolution for the writer. Among the confessions this evening: "When I was 17, I stole a car from the church parking lot," and "I'm going to steal a glass from this bar when I leave."
 
"Matt (the bartender) is watching you," warned TRx, who is the regular DJ at Confession "I can play all my guilty pleasures here. I can play Kelly Clarkson. At the end of the night, people will dance to all of the cheesy stuff they loved in high school. In Manhattan or Williamsburg, people tend to be a little too cool for school," she says.
 
Mission Dolores is located right night to the former lesbian club Cattyshack. Once that bar closed, says Hall, "it seemed like there was an exodus of queer people from Park Slope. So I thought: Why not do something cheap and fun, and that's open to everyone?" 
 
She wants the party to appeal to all parts of the queer community, but for now the crowd is almost entirely women."I didn't intend for it to be all women, but that's all that's left [in Park Slope]," she laments. But her weekly party Hot Rabbit, at the Nowhere Bar in the East Village, started with mostly women and gradually became more mixed, which she hopes will also happen here.
 
Michael, one of the few gay men in the bar, moved to Park Slope two weeks before and showed up because it's the closest spot to his new apartment. "The music is great," he said, "I just wish there were more dancing. But if there were dancing—I'd probably dance all night and not make it to work in the morning."
 
By midnight, though, every seat is taken and the bar is surrounded by ladies ordering drinks, talking and flirting. And the confessions get raunchier, too: "I banged two siblings at once." —Bill Roundy