Mad Monks' Bar

Mad Monk's Pub'' was a lesbian bar located at 20 Upper Circular Road, #B1-01/06 The Riverwalk. Its telephone number 6536 1386.



Located across the road from Boat Quay, the pub came alive every Friday night with Top 40 and R&B hits, a packed dance floor and al fresco area. It was a good bet for an action-packed girls-only night out. It opened in 2002 and closed in 2005.

=Mad Monk's Pub in popular culture=

Amanda Lee Koe, in her article "Not Gonna Get Us" published in The Paris Review on 29 July 2019, recounts her experience at the pub: "On the last day of 2002, we went to Mad Monks, a lesbian club flanking the Singapore River. It doesn’t exist anymore. The bouncer was a butch in her thirties. I was stunned: There are old lesbians in Singapore? Patently underaged, we were told to run out the back in the event of a police raid. Inside, there were adult butches in binders dirty dancing with adult ah lians in halter tops. Online anglophone definitions of this Hokkien slang word suggest a “skimpily dressed girl gangster with tattoos,” an “unsophisticated hillbilly seen in unsavory places,” a “distasteful (Singaporean Chinese) female who speaks bad English, is lowly educated, crude, loud, foulmouthed,” but this does nothing to capture the demotic reverence encoded in the term, which is not half as pejorative as it sounds: the ah lian is always hot, sassy, and ready to hold her own in a fight. Wow, I smirked to myself, watching them dance. It was so not a phase."

=See also=
 * Singapore gay venues: historical, minor
 * Singapore gay venues: historical

=References=
 * Amanda Lee Koe, "Not Gonna Get Us", The Paris Review, 29 July 2019.

=Acknowledgements=

This article was written by Roy Tan.