An opening date is on the horizon for a queer-owned, family-oriented café hoping to establish itself near Alexandria.
Friends of Dorothy Cafe founder Dorothy Edwards has raised about $25,000 for the café’s creation since launching a crowdfunding campaign last June. As the campaign’s first anniversary and Pride Month approach this June, Edwards told ALXnow the new business is aiming to open sometime next year.
Edwards is still scouting locations but hopes to open somewhere in Huntington, where she lives with her wife and 2-year-old son. She envisions a daytime café and gathering spot for the local LGBTQ+ community, with coffee sourced from Rustic Route Coffee Co., a lesbian-owned roaster in Maryland.
Edwards said the café would provide a much-needed service in Northern Virginia. As the creator of the ALX Queer Moms social group, she said she has seen LGBTQ+ families drive for hours to attend community events that aren’t geared toward the nightlife scene. And despite Alexandria’s six consecutive years of perfect Human Rights Campaign scorecards, Edwards said there is still much work to do to cultivate spaces where the region’s LGBTQ+ youth feel safe to be themselves.
“I can imagine a regular Tuesday, we’ve been open for a while. People come get their coffee on the way to work,” Edwards said. “A crew of queer and trans babies come from school and do their homework together, and then maybe a bunch of queer parents have a playdate. Then we have drag storytime … as soon as I get the money I need to start it, we’re hitting the ground running.”
While the business’ crowdfunding campaign last fall set a goal of $180,000, Edwards said Friends of Dorothy could get to opening day with a minimum of $80,000 — an amount her advisors say could be achievable by 2027.
For the past year, the café founder’s efforts have included assembling a fundraising board of directors, scoping out donors and hosting local fundraising events, including Living History — a series of intergenerational storytelling panels that Edwards is coordinating this spring.
The series features LGBTQ+ elders and activists speaking on panels at venues across the region. The next installment, “Who Was Left Out,” is scheduled tomorrow (Thursday) at Freddie’s Beach Bar, a longtime LGBTQ+ haven in Arlington’s Crystal City neighborhood.
Tickets cost $20 and benefit the café’s startup funds as well as honorariums for the panelists. It’s a meaningful event for Edwards, who said the series is inspired by her family and childhood in Kentucky, where she was raised by two moms.
She said her experience as a queer wife and mother differs vastly from her parents’ experience — something she wants to honor and shed light on through the panels. Her mother, Dorothy J. Edwards, is slated to speak during one of the panels next month.
“My extended family embraced me, all came to my wedding,” Edwards said. “My mom had the opposite experience. It’s like my mom walked through the fire so that I could have it easy. That’s such a micro-example of our queer history … The fighting and the walking through fire, so that we could live the way we’re living now.”
Today, her moms live in the Woodbridge area, and Edwards said they are among her biggest supporters.
Outside her family, Edwards said the the community response to Friends of Dorothy has also been positive. She recalled an encounter at a holiday market in December, after a father purchased a bag of coffee beans with the business’ backstory printed on the packaging. Thirty minutes later, he returned to her table.
“[The dad] was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I just read your information and realized what you’re doing. My youngest just came out as trans, and I told my family about it, and we’re starting that journey to help my kid transition as a family, and I’m so excited for you to open,'” Edwards recalled.
Stories like that, Edwards said, have been a constant since last June.
“Alexandria’s queer parents, queer families [and] queer youth, specifically, deserve a safe place,” she said. “It was never really about a cafe. I really just wanted to build a community space.”
After Thursday’s panel, the Living History series will continue throughout May and June with the themes “How We Loved” and “How We Fought.”
Image via GoFundMe
