(Too far to walk to, Meow Mix, the East Village dyke redoubt that closed in 2004, was noted during the tour, as was Catty Shack, the two-story lez emporium in Park Slope owned by Meow Mix’s Brooke Webster that opened in 2006 and closed a few years later.) Winding our way through these downtown blocks, we were reminded of the absurdities of New York real estate, of the obscenities of Manhattan boutiques. Over the two-hour stroll, we visited the former addresses of some of the mighty Manhattan lavender fortresses that had fallen - the Duchess, Bonnie & Clyde’s, Crazy Nanny’s - many the victims, at least in part, of gentrification. Stormé DeLarverie greeting women outside the Cubby Hole in 1986. Although that number is puny - according to Alana Integlia, one of the founding members of Dyke Bar Takeover and the project’s researcher, in 2015 there were 53 LGBTQ (read: mostly gay-guy) bars, down from 86 in 1985 - several major cities, like Philadelphia and, astonishingly, San Francisco, now have no lez clubs at all. These bars, along with Ginger’s in Park Slope and the Bum Bum Bar in Woodside, Queens, are the only four nightspots in the city catering specifically to queer women year-round. We had assembled for the inaugural “Dyke Bar Walking Tour,” a psychogeographical, herstorical odyssey sponsored by Dyke Bar Takeover, which, per its Facebook page, “is a group of artists and activists dedicated to creating and supporting Queer space for self-identified women, transgender and gender non-conforming people of all races.” (Proceeds from the event, which charged $25, or $15 for pre-registrants, are going to the Trans Justice Funding Project and the New York City Dyke March.) We were there to drink and mingle at two sapphic boîtes: The tour, divided into two groups, kicked off at 2:30 at the Cubbyhole, at the corner of West 4th and West 12th streets, and concluded, after a short detour east, at Henrietta Hudson, about half a mile south. We were in search of the lost lesbian bar. On a recent hot Sunday afternoon in the West Village, roughly fifty daughters of Gomorrah - and some allies - gathered to go on a time quest of our own. It was a French gay male neurasthenic, nearly a century ago, who perhaps best expressed the particular paradox of lesbian recognition: “The daughters of Gomorrah are at once rare enough and numerous enough for one not to pass unnoticed by another in any given crowd,” wrote Marcel Proust in La Captive (1923), the fifth volume of In Search of Lost Time.