Asheville to get first women’s sports bar, lesbian bar Q-Hall

Downtown Asheville is getting a new nightlife bet at 81 Coxe Ave, where entrepreneur JJ Pope is turning the former Boomers space into Q-Hall, a women’s sports bar and self-described lesbian bar built around women’s athletics, LGBTQ+ community, and a different kind of game-day crowd.

The project lands at a moment when downtown is still trying to regain foot traffic after Helene. Asheville Downtown Association data showed June 2025 visitation was still below the same month a year earlier, even as the gap narrowed, and local reporting in that period said more than three dozen downtown businesses had closed after the storm and a long potable-water outage. Q-Hall is aiming to be more than another bar with TVs, betting that Asheville has room for a venue where women’s sports are the main attraction and where queer patrons do not have to adapt to someone else’s version of a sports bar.

Pope said she first encountered the concept in Portland, where she heard repeated praise for The Sports Bra. She spent about two and a half years testing demand through pop-ups and watch parties before settling on a permanent home in downtown Asheville. Q-Hall’s fundraising materials say the project has already hosted more than 15 women’s-sports and community pop-up events since 2024, drawing more than 600 total attendees, and that grassroots fundraising has brought in more than $7,000 from local supporters.

The planned build-out includes multiple television screens, a game room and a rooftop event space, all of which give the project a wider footprint than a standard neighborhood bar. Pope has also asked neighbors and supporters to help stock the walls with memorabilia tied to women’s and girls’ athletics, including jerseys, banners, team photos and clippings. Q-Hall’s own pitch says the venue is meant to center women’s sports every day while also serving lesbians, queer women, trans and non-binary people and allies.

The idea also taps into Asheville’s longer LGBTQ nightlife history. O.Henry’s says it was established in 1976 and is Asheville’s oldest gay bar, while local historical reporting has traced Malaprop’s in the 1980s to out lesbian owner Emöke B’Racz and a sober safe space for the LGBTQ+ community. Q-Hall is entering that lineage with a different commercial angle, treating inclusive space as a business model rather than an afterthought.

Pope has also lined up help from local institutions. Mountain BizWorks, founded in Asheville in 1989, provides business planning, coaching and financing in Western North Carolina, and the City of Asheville and Buncombe County’s Mountain Community Capital Fund offers loans from $5,000 to $70,000 for entrepreneurs in Asheville or Buncombe County who lack collateral. Q-Hall says precedents such as The Sports Bra in Portland and Rough & Tumble in Seattle reached profitability in their first year, a signal that the niche can function as a real market, not just a cultural statement.