Welcome to Boyfriend Co-op, Brooklyn’s New Queer Coffee Shop and Cocktail Bar

New York’s hottest club is Boyfriend Co-op.

Located in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, the coffee and cocktail cooperative held its grand opening on Saturday. Co-founders Hena Mustafa, Mica Fisher, Nat Risk and Kacey Liebes are part of a growing renaissance of queer women creating spaces that center other queer women and gender non-conforming people.

This place has everything. Poetry readings. Open mic nights. Crafting. Radical workshops about resisting and deconstructing capitalism, patriarchy, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. Eccentrically curated chairs, tables, artwork and lighting fixtures.

It’s a coffee shop during the day, with coffee sourced directly from sustainable farms around the world and processed at a micro-roastery just a 20-minute walk away. In the evenings, it serves up cocktails and mocktails crafted using locally- or regionally-grown ginger, turmeric, tarragon, borage, corn, carrots, pea tendrils and apples.

It’s also a worker-owned cooperative. You know, that thing where the workers collectively own and democratically manage a business instead of a traditional structure with a single entrepreneur or shareholders at the top holding all the power and extracting all the profits made by exploiting or abusing workers at the bottom.

“Boyfriend was born from our shared desire to have the space we wish we had,” Mustafa says. “This is obviously a really scary time to be in this country. …Having spaces where you have community, especially community that’s coupled with education and resource sharing and an outlet to grieve or to organize, is really important to us.”

Creating a cooperative

From the unconventional ownership structure to the menu to the furniture, everything about Boyfriend Co-op is an expression of who its co-founders — and their community — are and how they envision building and stewarding a space where they can all feel safe and at home.

“We wanted this space to feel like a queer living room,” says Mustafa, creative and cultural curator. “So it looks like everything is thrifted, you know that mismatched vibe.”

Mustafa and Fisher grew up together in San Diego. Fisher first learned about cooperatives from the food justice movement, which she first connected with as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. At one point she was running a food purchasing cooperative out of the student center’s basement. After college, Fisher continued supporting cooperatives through jobs in city government and the private sector while living in Queens, near Mustafa, who was making her way as a screenwriter.

“I had always been frustrated with the hierarchical nature of the film world, of everything being so top down,” says Mustafa. “When I’ve had autonomy over producing something or writing something or directing something, I’ve always wanted it to have sort of that nonlinear structure. Building a business together like this, maintaining that was really important.”

It became a long-running joke among their friend group that Fisher and Mustafa would someday start a lesbian co-op cafe and bar. That day finally came in March 2022. With the post-pandemic rise in remote work, they realized there was plenty of unmet demand for daytime working space in addition to nightlife and community spaces that centered other queer women and people like them.

“Being a queer woman of color, not a lot of spaces around were built by people who looked like me or prioritized people with my identity markers,” says Mustafa, whose family is from Palestine.

In 1987, there were an estimated 206 lesbian bars across America. By 2022 that number had dropped to just 21, including only three left in New York: the legendary Cubby Hole and Henrietta’s, both in Manhattan’s West Village, and Ginger’s in Brooklyn’s Park Slope. Since then, The Bush opened in Brooklyn’s Bushwick in 2023, and last year saw Mary’s Bar in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint and Animal in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg added to the mix. Pop-up Dave’s Lesbian Bar is now shopping for its first permanent brick-and-mortar location — and Dave’s will also be a worker-owned cooperative.

The complexity of coffee

Boyfriend Co-op started out as a pop-up, holding its first event in June 2022 at Mayday Space, a radical organizing space in Brooklyn. Though Fisher and Mustafa both share a love for coffee and cocktails, they knew they didn’t quite have the necessary background in either. Through social media, they connected with Nat Risk, who had recently been laid off from her job at a New York film production company, but also happened to have years of experience as a barista at some of the world’s most prestigious sustainably and ethically sourced coffee companies.

Risk didn’t know much about cooperatives, but listening to Fisher and Mustafa talk about it, the appeal was immediate for someone with a background as an immigrant, service industry veteran and member of some kind of minority group wherever she has ended up. Born into a Coptic Orthodox family in Egypt, Risk moved to the U.S. with her family when she was seven, settling in Nashville.

“Not just in service but in the world at large, the ones who are generating the profit see none of it,” Risk says. “That inequity – both financial but also just the pure responsibilities and decision-making and autonomy over the work that you’re doing – is so unbalanced. When the pandemic happened, that became so glaringly apparent in so many ways, how expendable the most important people became in our society. Working in a cooperative setting was attractive to me in that sense.”

Risk started out just helping with Boyfriend’s pop-up events, but by September 2022 she had officially joined the co-founder group as coffee director. Boyfriend Co-op serves coffee from Sey, a micro-roastery located a 20-minute walk from the co-op, where Risk previously spent time as a barista herself.

Sey is one of the places where Risk learned about the “Nordic” approach to coffee: treating coffee like wines, putting a high value on establishing long-term relationships with farmers each producing unique varieties and flavors, instead of treating the product like a mere commodity. There’s a complex and complicated story behind every bean, and Sey provides marketing and education resources to help baristas tell that story.

“Coffee is one of the most exploitive industries in the world and one of the least sustainable,” Risk says. “All of the hard work and intentionality that came from those farmers is being completely disregarded. When really what happens at the roaster and what we do in the cafe is the cherry on top. The sundae’s already made. So everything that we do should highlight the work that has already happened and shouldn’t impart anything on it.”

Cash and CDFIs

Through pop-up events and a crowdfunding campaign that’s been running since 2022, Boyfriend Co-op raised about $50,000 to help startup the business.

The vast majority of Boyfriend Co-op’s startup capital, however, came from a loan made by The Working World, a nonprofit that specializes in making loans to worker-owned cooperatives. As a community development financial institution, or CDFI, The Working World funds its work through a combination of public funds, private grants and a growing network of hundreds of private investors from all over the country.

Since 2015, The Working World has received operating support from the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative under the New York City Department of Small Business Services. Fisher actually oversaw the initiative back during her time in city government.

The Working World uses a form of what’s known as royalty-based financing, or what it likes to call non-extractive financing. Instead of fixed monthly loan payments its borrowers pay a fixed percentage of monthly profits — and only in the months when the business makes a profit. Banks and most private investors generally don’t make loans on those terms, given the uncertainty. Even most CDFIs don’t like to use those loan terms. The Working World is one of a handful that do.

Since its inception in 2004, The Working World has made more than a thousand investments in worker-owned cooperatives, including startups and conversions from conventional ownership. Despite using a loan structure for businesses with ownership structures that conventional banks feel is too risky, 98% of the Working World’s loans have been repaid so far. Boyfriend Co-op is just the second worker-owned co-op bar The Working World has financed in New York, and the first startup bar or cafe, after the 2023 conversion of Donna Cocktail Club from a conventionally-owned business into a worker co-op.

“It’s cool to get to be in a space where you can bring your full self and every element of that because there is this understanding across the board from lender to customer and everything in between that this is the kind of space that we’re in,” Risk says. “We can be a queer space that is prioritizing high quality, that integrates so much Egyptian or Palestinian culture and it gets to be cozy and comfortable. We don’t have to compromise on any of those things because we’re trying to fit into someone else’s vision of what is profitable.”

A commitment from the lender was essential to securing a location. In New York, as in most cities, commercial landlords won’t offer a lease — especially to a startup — without assurances that the business will have enough cash to complete any necessary buildout and open for business for at least a few months.

Boyfriend Co-op needed to convince two landlords that it was worthy of the space it got. After more than a year of shopping around, seeing more than a dozen spaces, Boyfriend Co-op finally signed a lease in May 2024 for a space right beneath a subway stop on the line that goes to Ridgewood, where three of the co-founders live. Transit access was a top priority for the group and their target customer base.

As it turned out, that property’s owner was going through foreclosure on the building and should not have been signing leases. After foreclosure, that building passed to another owner, who promptly informed Boyfriend that they were going on summer vacation. It took until the end of October for Boyfriend Co-op to secure the lease.

The whole saga was so formative that Boyfriend named one of its inaugural cocktails after their real estate lawyer — the Rich Bitch.

Cocktails and convicts

Boyfriend Co-op’s cocktail menu pays tribute to queer women history. “Delighted, Dear Carmilla” is named for a nineteenth-century lesbian vampire character who later became the first lesbian vampire on the movie screen. “Mona’s 440” is named for the first openly lesbian bar in the U.S., which was located in San Francisco. “All the Things She Said” is named after the 2002 pop hit from t.A.T.u., for which the Russian pop duo made a music video in which they dressed as schoolgirls and made out in the rain — a music video that was banned in the U.K. for being “not really suitable for children.”

The cocktails themselves were conceived through a collaborative process led by the last member to join the co-founder group, Kacey Liebes, who moved from North Carolina to New York after seeing the job posting online. She had heard of consumer co-ops before, but worker co-ops were new to her.

“I really liked the idea of a business being owned by the people who ran it,” Liebes says. “I would describe it as the way a business should be run.”

Liebes brings a local farm-focused approach from her last job as the general manager of a “farm-to-glass basement cocktail bar” back in North Carolina. While it was interesting, Liebes says, bearing the burden of management responsibilities by herself was unsustainable and even a little lonely. She’s been itching to take a different approach with her new role.

“What will be different [at Boyfriend Co-op] is the amount of participation from the other bartenders. We’re really making it a point to have that be as collective a process as possible,” Liebes says. That includes sourcing, ordering, menu creation and more. “Making sure that everyone is getting their hands involved in things – that is the number one thing that I was seeking out when I was looking for a new place to work.”

Since Liebes came on board to round out the founding worker-owner group, Boyfriend Co-op put out another call for barista/bartenders via social media. The response was overwhelming. So many others like them — queer, women or gender nonconforming, people of all races — were looking for a space where they could feel like they had autonomy and safety and their identity markers were valued instead of discounted — or counted against them.

Boyfriend Co-op eventually hired seven additional team members, all of whom can be voted into worker-ownership after one year. Instead of a monetary buy-in, which some worker co-ops require, the additional training time required for prospective worker-owners counts as the buy-in for Boyfriend Co-op. In all of its hiring, Boyfriend Co-op prioritizes candidates who have an interest in eventually becoming a worker-owner.

Ensuring a pathway to worker-ownership for every hire required extra time figuring out how to overcome some obvious barriers. By default, people with a felony conviction on their record are barred from holding a liquor license in New York State, which would make it illegal to become a worker-owner at Boyfriend Co-op. But it turns out individuals with a felony conviction can obtain a Certificate of Relief from Civil Disabilities or a Certificate of Good Conduct from the state to hold a liquor license.

The extra red tape is worth it for Boyfriend to stand by its values.

“That’s just one tiny example of the amount of different layers that we have to just work through to make this thing fit within the New York City service industry world,” Risk says. “It requires a lot of creativity and a lot of late nights.”