ARKANSAS TIMES | BEST OF ARKANSAS: Dropping Hairpins

Pop-up event series Hairpins may roam from venue to venue, but it’s making queer people in Arkansas feel right at home

July 2025

by Stephanie Smittle

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, said Shakespeare’s lovestruck Juliet. Turns out a lesbian bar without a permanent address, said the voters in our annual readers poll, is still a gay bar — the Best Gay Bar in Arkansas, in fact. 

Hairpins is, to borrow a term used within LGBTQ+ circles to describe a newcomer to the community, “a baby gay.” Founded only a year ago by Viktoria Capek and Whitney Butler as a series of pop-up events for queer women in Central Arkansas — lesbians, but also bisexual, trans and nonbinary people — the event series has included dance nights at tango hotspot Club 27, karaoke at beloved dive bar White Water Tavern, and daytime hangout sessions at queer-owned restaurants like Ciao Baci and El Sur. On July 13, Hairpins will host an all-ages game afternoon at a board game cafe in North Little Rock’s Argenta neighborhood called Caverns & Forests. 

By day, Butler works as a graphic designer for an Arkansas cannabis cultivator, having returned to her native Arkansas after working in press relations for the film industry in Los Angeles (on the likes of “Knives Out,” no less). Capek, previously a KATV host and reporter, is the communications and development manager for The Venture Center, an entrepreneur incubator in Little Rock’s Tech Park. The first time I saw Capek was on my TikTok feed, where her visibility as an openly queer news anchor (and her professorial knowledge of Taylor Swift’s catalogue — her book about literary intersections in Swift’s work comes out in September) was sparking conversation. 

The couple, who got married in May, conceived the idea for Hairpins after a visit to Cubbyhole, a beloved lesbian bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Craving something for their life back in Arkansas that was more sapphic-centered than “the occasional, seizure-inducing club night for queer women at one of the city’s many gay bars,” as Hairpins’ website puts it, they dreamed up something different — “a place where queer women, transgender, and non-binary people could … let their hair down, and find each other.” It would take its name, they decided, from the phrase “dropping hairpins,” used to describe ways in which queer people have used cultural signals to find each other, particularly in the era of the Stonewall demonstrations. Capek and Butler talked to some friends about the idea, and before they’d even left New York City for Little Rock, they had a venue for a Hairpins debut: the venerable White Water Tavern.

Word about a lesbian-centered gathering in Little Rock traveled fast, and that’s not entirely surprising. Despite a gay bar scene robust enough to support several gay nightclubs and a vibrant, award-winning drag community, Little Rock is part of a national trend: the disappearance of lesbian bars (R.I.P., The Aquarium and U.B.U., two ventures at 824 W. Capitol Ave. that were once favorites of the local lesbian community). According to an Emmy-winning documentary series called “The Lesbian Bar Project,” there were about 200 lesbian bars in the country in the 1980s. Now, there are 36, each logged and mapped by the project’s filmmakers, Erica Rose and Elina Street. Theories about the reasons for the decline range from gentrification and economic strain to the development of online communities that changed the ways queer women gather in person.

For that first Hairpins gathering in July 2024, Capek said, she and Butler had no idea whether anyone would show up. “We had no idea about ticket sales because we didn’t promote online ticket sales. We were telling people you could pay at the door.” When the night came, over 200 people showed up, filling the club to capacity with a line at the door. “We were like,‘How did people find out about this?’” Capek said. “What a fulfilling thing to see. Two hundred queer women being authentically themselves, singing ‘Pink Pony Club,’ singing Paramore. Like, scream-singing.”

The singing hasn’t stopped since. North Little Rock native Nakayla Pennington has been a regular at Hairpins events over its short history and, at that first event at White Water Tavern, “was blown away, honestly, by how many women and sapphics and queer folks in general that I saw there.” For once, Pennington said, she walked into a bar without the spike in anxiety she (and many of the rest of us) are accustomed to. “As a neurodivergent person, I do not typically love loud places. I don’t stay in loud places for long, but I’d say that night at Hairpins was the first time that I’d been in a place so loud and still felt so safe.” Since then, Pennington has sparked both friendships and romantic connections at Hairpins events. 

“It was even a community up at the bar,” she said, “where instead of going, ‘Oh, gosh, how am I going to get a drink?,’ you’d go up there and forget that you were getting a drink in the first place. You’d be making a connection by the time your drink was put on the counter.”

“Honestly, every single time we host an event, it’s the same,” Butler said. “I’m just like, ‘Wow, people came.’ We have a community and everything, but people are traveling from three hours away. … The outreach is crazy. And it’s organic.” 

Remaining inclusive while keeping Hairpins a queer-women-focused phenomenon has not been without its challenges. “The support is so great,” Butler said. “But also, when you are on this pedestal of safety and community, I feel like infighting starts happening. Like, ‘Why can’t you appeal to everyone? Why is it just queer women?’” 

To clarify: Hairpins events, its website says, “are intended for queer non-men. While we will not police who enters our event at the door, Hairpins was created as a space for lesbian/queer women, transgender individuals (MTF, FTM), and non-binary individuals.” 

“Trans people will always, always be welcome in Hairpins’ space,” Capek said. “Period, point blank.”

Since its inception, the organization has raised over $1,300 for three transgender community members’ gender-affirming care, and spoken out on social media against bills like HB1668, an anti-LGBTQ bill introduced in March by Rep. Mary Bentley (R-Perryville) that would have banned social transitioning for minors and permitted lawsuits against anyone assisting trans youth in such a transition. (The bill was later withdrawn.)

As for its second year, Butler said, Hairpins might pop up beyond Arkansas state lines. Until then, they’ll keep the calendar stacked and the Kelly Clarkson turned up to 11. Find them on Instagram: @droppinghairpins.