The Brief

Opening a sports bar for women used to be much harder than it is today — and Jax Diener can tell you that from experience.

"About 30-plus years ago, I wanted to open a sports bar," Diener said. "The friends that I still have in my circle know that I've been talking about this for all of these years."

And while Diener would have loved for this bar to show women's sports, that wasn't even a possibility at the time.

"Back then, you couldn't catch women's sports on TV anywhere — I mean, that just wasn't a thing," she said. "So it wasn't about that. It was just about having a space where we could all be together and watch any sort of sporting event and feel comfortable."

And her dream is finally coming close to fruition, with the bar Watch Me set to open in Long Beach later this year, according to Diener and her co-owner and wife Emme Eddy. It would be the only bar for women's sports in Long Beach and in Greater Los Angeles, not to mention one of a small but quickly growing number of women's sports bars.

Women's sports bars nationwide

If you didn't get it right away, "Watch Me" is a reference to how women athletes often have to prove themselves by showing doubters what they can do — not to mention the act of watching sports, of course.

Watch Me is part of a growing movement of sports bars that exclusively (or at least primarily) show women's sports. The Sports Bra in Portland and Rough & Tumble in Seattle served their first drinks in 2022. Icarus Wings and Things opened last year in Salem, Oregon, and A Bar of Their Own opened in Minneapolis earlier this month — and even more bars are in the works.

Interest in women's sports in the United States isn't new — stars like Lisa Leslie and Mia Hamm drew in big crowds decades ago, to say nothing of Venus and Serena Williams — but the audience has grown in the last 10 years. About 27 million people in the U.S. tuned in to see the U.S. take home the FIFA Women's World Cup in 2015, and nearly 20 million watched the team defend their title in 2019, according to figures from FIFA.

Meanwhile, the 2023 WNBA season has been seeing increased attendance and viewership, which is expected to continue as college superstar Caitlin Clark prepares to go professional, breaking longstanding NCAA scoring records and drawing bigger audiences than her men's basketball counterparts along the way.

And it's much easier now to watch women playing all sorts of games: The Women's Sports Network, which started in 2022, streams women's sports 24/7.

How Watch Me's owners got the ball rolling

Diener said seeing The Sports Bra open in Portland — and do well — was the final push the couple needed to pursue opening a sports bar.

Originally, Diener and Eddy had planned to open a franchised Sports Bra location in Long Beach, even consulting with that bar's owner Jenny Nguyen. But when it came down to it, the two decided starting their own brand was the way to go.

"We spoke to a gentleman who is a franchisor and a franchisee, so it was really great to get that perspective of both sides," Diener said. "He basically said, 'Why are you doing that? Go out and do it on your own.'"

With that said, Diener and Eddy have found some key allies in the L.A. women's sports community: They've struck up partnerships with Angel City F.C. and the L.A. Sparks, and they hope to continue the partnership by becoming the designated place to be for those teams' watch parties and even draft events.

What to expect at Watch Me

First things first: It wouldn't be a proper sports bar without food. Watch Me has already hired a chef, Charlie Ray, who's been working on building out food offerings for the bar's future visitors.

"Some of it is similar to a typical bar menu, but elevated," Eddy said. "Fresh, sustainable, locally grown products and also vegan and vegetarian options in the spirit of inclusivity, and gluten free — there's no barriers for someone who wants to come in and eat."

Watch Me's owners want the bar's inclusivity to go way beyond the menu: They anticipate a big portion of their crowd will be LGBTQ, filling a gap for public spaces for queer women in Long Beach and Orange County.

"The access to those places has really, really gone away, so there's a real need for that, I think, in the community here now," Eddy said.

But even though it's a bar, Diener and Eddy say that they want Watch Me to be a gathering space for people of all ages, from girls' teams coming in after games to collegiate athletes to casual sports fans.

And yes, you can still watch big men's games like the Super Bowl at Watch Me, though this is very much an exception to the rule.

"We're very big NFL fans over here," Diener said. "But we are flipping it — probably 95% of the time you would catch us with women's sports in our space."

When the bar will open

Eddy and Diener are working toward finalizing an opening date: They said they're in advanced negotiations with the owner of one location, and they've started the process of hiring staff and applying for a liquor license.

"We're setting things in place so that when we sign the lease docs, it's a finite amount of time [before opening]," Eddy said.

And Watch Me's owners have set a pretty big deadline for themselves.

"We desperately want to be open by the Olympics," Eddy said. "And we want to be actually open as much before that as we can to have a soft opening and iron out the things that we need to get settled."

The couple has also started a crowdfunding campaign to help kick things off, though they say that they've been slow to see results.

"Our business model is based on the other women's sports bars ahead of us that had very successful crowdfunding campaigns, whether or not they announced their location," Diener said. "We are not experiencing that same thing."

But Eddy and Diener said they hope they'll catch more eyes when their location is announced, and they're still moving forward with the bar opening regardless — just watch them.

"It seems like a slam dunk that there's going to be a crowd for this, a group of people that it's going to fill needs for," Eddy said.

Longer wait times for graffiti removal and streetlight repair. Fewer police officers per shift. Completely eliminating school crossing guards.

Those are just some of the service cuts the city of South Gate made earlier this year as it stared down a $9.4 million annual budget deficit and a looming fiscal emergency.

But none of that was enough to convince South Gate voters to approve an 8% utility user tax that would have been tacked onto a wide range of utility bills, including electricity, water, cable and phone service. Now, the city is gearing up for more cuts, including closing sports fields and the city pool for the winter months.

South Gate’s utility tax was just one of the many ways Southern California cities asked their residents to give them more money via local tax initiatives this November, with proposed taxes on everything from hotel stays to cannabis businesses.

And those early results suggest South Gate is an outlier: Of the 32 total local tax measures on the ballot in Los Angeles and Orange counties, all but six appear poised to pass, according to early results. (There are still several more days of vote counting to come.)

Eleven transient occupancy tax measures, which tax overnight stays in hotels or short-term rentals, passed in cities from Burbank to Los Alamitos. Most cities sought to increase their existing hotel taxes by anywhere from 1 to 5 percentage points, while Lynwood residents voted to establish a hotel tax for the first time.

Business-related taxes, such as taxes on business licenses or on certain businesses, also mostly passed, as did most parcel taxes in cities including Pasadena and Culver City.

But sales taxes saw more mixed results. Cudahy, San Gabriel, Orange, Santa Ana and Los Angeles all approved sales tax measures, while voters in Diamond Bar, Hermosa Beach and San Clemente all voted down their local sales tax proposals.

Most of those sales taxes focused on maintaining basic city services in communities facing big budget deficits, driven by the rising costs of insurance, maintenance and infrastructure projects, and employee pensions, among other factors. But in San Clemente, the proposed 1% sales tax would have specifically funded sand replenishment and other beach projects, along with wildfire prevention work. That measure appeared to be headed for failure, with just 36% of voters in support as of Wednesday afternoon.

Voters in San Marino approved an extension of their utility tax, and increased it from 5% to 6%. Last year, the tax provided almost $2.2 million in revenue.

City officials in South Gate had hoped for a similar boon, and projected the utility tax would bring in an estimated $10.4 million per year in general fund revenue, while raising total utility costs by about $39 per month for a typical household.

Leading up to the election, the city of South Gate pointed to other neighboring cities that have their own utility taxes, including Downey, Lakewood and Norwalk, where the tax mostly hovers around 5%. “South Gate is the exception, not the rule,” noted one city presentation that pointed to these other taxes in a bid to coax voters to go along.

Voters weren’t convinced. “I’m extremely frustrated that you now want to do electricity, water, sewer, cable, cell phone, gas. ... That hurts us. You’re passing that on to us and that is absolutely not acceptable,” said one resident at a City Council meeting on the measure earlier this year.

LAist has reached out to the city of South Gate about what’s next for the city.

The city of West Hollywood has approved an ordinance to create a domestic partnership registry for people in polyamorous relationships.

The domestic partnership registry extends certain legal protections for people in the city, including visitation rights to hospitals and jails in West Hollywood and some tenant protections. The registry doesn’t replace the state’s marriage or the state’s domestic partnership laws.

“It's a landmark ordinance and really puts and continues to elevate West Hollywood as a city that is here to support queer people and queer families as they evolve in their needs,” said Chelsea Byers, a West Hollywood City Council member. “I think that's a real joy that we can bring to people — that they can live in a greater sense of being seen and understood.”

How it works

To file, people in a multi-partner relationship will submit a form in person that will be provided by the City Clerk’s office — all members of the relationship will have to provide identification to the clerk.

The ordinance also offers an option by mail, if the signatures are notarized.

The ordinance builds on historical precedent

In 1985, the city became the first city in the nation to create a similar domestic partnership registry for same-sex couples. Similar to that registry, people outside the city can also register.

“This new law not only gives polyamorous unions legal recognition, it also gives people permission to imagine a future together and to plan their lives openly,” said Christina Fialho, president and founder of Rewrite the BiLine, an advocacy group for bisexual people and nonnuclear families, who advocated for the ordinance.

Several cities in Massachusetts have also passed multipartner domestic partnership laws.

Among the sweeping victories by Democrats on Tuesday were wins in several congressional districts that Republicans had redrawn explicitly to boost their party ahead of the midterms.

Republicans were bracing for some losses this election cycle, so last year President Donald Trump urged his party to take the extraordinary step of engaging in mid-decade redistricting efforts.

As of Tuesday night, many of those efforts had failed.

That included in Florida, where multiple Democrats — Kathy Castor, Pia Dandiya and Jared Moskowitz — won in redrawn districts, according to race calls by the Associated Press.

In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis held on to his 1st District seat, even though Republicans in the state redrew it to be more competitive for the GOP. Trump would have won the redrawn 1st by nearly 12 percentage points, according to the Downballot.

Trump would have won by even more in Alabama's redrawn 2nd Congressional District, which Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures held on to, according to the AP race call.

Republicans in Alabama redid the state's congressional map after the U.S. Supreme Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

And in Texas, which was the first state to redistrict at Trump's urging, a few of the redrawn districts had gone to Democrats.

Republicans redrew their maps with the expectation that the coalition of voters Trump won over in 2024 would support them this cycle. In Texas, Republicans were banking on gains made with Latino voters in new maps.

But many of those voters shifted their support to Democrats this year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Nationwide election results came at a relentless pace Tuesday night, each more of a Democratic upset than the last. But you may not have known if you were attending the California Republican Party's election night event in Garden Grove.

In the dimly lit Hyatt ballroom where gubernatorial longshot Steve Hilton and his supporters gathered, the news channels were off, the music was turned up and “Don’t Stop Believin’” blasted throughout.

Minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m., the Associated Press called the governor’s race for Democratic favorite Xavier Becerra.

Around the room, the occasional person glanced at their phone to sneak a peek at the growing GOP carnage. More of the crowd instead looked at each other or toward the empty stage, where a lectern stood in front of a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset.

Not long after, Hilton took the stage to concede the race — which had always been heavily favored against him in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1.

“Maybe this isn’t the best year to be running for office as a Republican,” Hilton told his supporters, alluding to the election results that would soon lead the Democratic Party to win so big in the House and the Senate that many dubbed it a blue tsunami. “We see what’s going on around the country.”

Hilton knew the odds were long. He’d tried a number of tactics to win over California, including a suggestive advertisement suggesting voters should “Just Try” voting for him. He’d done his best to separate himself from President Donald Trump, who backed his campaign. He also attacked Becerra for staying largely out of the limelight since making it out on top of a chaotic primary.

None of Hilton’s appeals made a significant mark on the result, which trailed at around 36% of the vote as of Wednesday afternoon.

Standing outside the ballroom, Matt Shupe, a spokesperson for the California GOP, conceded it was challenging terrain for Republicans this year across the country — and always in California.

“It’s pretty typical that the party that's not in power gains some seats, so I think that was pretty expected for the most part,” he said. “We'll plan on bringing the fight more intensely than ever in 2028.”

By 9:30 p.m., people were headed to their cars to go home.