About Heidi
Heidi Briones is a writer and humorist based in Portland, Oregon. She writes humor and essays about personal liberty, free speech, media, and what it’s like to think for yourself in a polarized world. She’s a moderate independent with libertarian leanings and belongs to no party. She has appeared as a guest on Timcast IRL and Prime Time with Alex Stein. She also works in sales, where one of her cold calls was featured in an interview with sales trainer Josh Braun and went viral on LinkedIn. She speaks up for women’s and lesbian rights, especially single-sex spaces for lesbians and the bars and community spaces that are disappearing.
She ran for Congress in Oregon in 2020 and has since left party politics behind. Before that she taught English in Taiwan, South Korea, and at Northern Arizona University. She holds a B.A. in Politics from UC Santa Cruz and an M.A. in English (TESL) from Cal State Dominguez Hills. She’s also a big fan of Grok Bot and has published a couple of her own bots. She lives with her wife, makes liquid drum and bass in her spare time, and is a big fan of women’s sports, especially the Portland Fire and the Portland Thorns.
Women’s and lesbian rights
I’m a lesbian, and I care a lot about women having spaces of their own. Lesbian bars used to be where we found each other. In the 1980s there were around 200 of them in the U.S.; the Lesbian Bar Project now counts about 32.
I’ve seen that loss up close. Years ago I volunteered to help save The Lexington Club, the last lesbian bar in San Francisco, collecting emails for their mailing list at a fundraiser night. It closed in 2014. The best lesbian bar I ever went to was a women-only club in Seoul called The Pink Hole, and I still think about what a place like that gives young lesbians.
I write and talk about keeping single-sex spaces for lesbians, supporting women-only events, and rebuilding community. In 2023 I contributed to a Newsweek piece responding to Johns Hopkins defining “lesbian” as a “non-man attracted to non-men,” and in 2024 I discussed the decline of lesbian bars on The Kim Iversen Show.
Read more in my essay Where did the lesbian bars go?
