There’s a new queer bar in town. And she will rightfully tell you that you betta WERK, Long Beach.
Headed by a team of local industry vets—Ryan Mercy, who worked at Executive Suites, Chris Barnes, and beloved longtime Long Beach bartender/occassional drag queen Abel Kon—WERK has taken over the former Executive Suites space where Redondo hits Pacific Coast Highway.
And the mission is simple but quite clear. Add some much-needed queer space to a world that has watched such spaces shrink, while also providing a safe haven for all walks of queer life—not just gay white cis men.
Before WERK, there was the Executive Suites—and that matters.
Before WERK ever became WERK, the building at 3428 E. Pacific Coast Hwy. was Executive Suites—a name that carried far more meaning than many patrons ever realized.
For decades, queer bars often hid behind deliberately mundane names like “The Office” or “Executive Suites,” allowing LGBTQ+ people to tell friends or coworkers where they were headed without outing themselves. It was a subtle but vital survival tactic born from a time when simply being seen entering a gay bar could cost someone their job, their family, or worse.
That history is not something WERK’s new ownership wants to erase. Rather, they want to preserve it with a permanent plaque honoring the building’s past while making it equally clear that the future belongs to a new generation of queer Long Beach.
Why ‘WERK’ is more than just a reference to Black and Latinx ballroom and drag culture…
That balance between preservation and reinvention defines nearly every decision the trio has made since taking over the beloved club institution. Ryan himself has an unusually personal connection to the space: he first worked there a decade ago after moving across the country with little money. And like many queer people who consider their bars their churches, Ryan credits Executive Suites with helping stabilize his life when he desperately needed it.
“It really was a space and opportunity that gave me, in all honesty, an actual sense of security,” Ryan said, noting how previous owners Lenny and Robert were crucial in bringing him to the state he currently is.
When the longtime owners finally decided they were ready to retire after years of joking about it, Ryan and his partners saw an opportunity they had spent years quietly hoping for. Rather than simply inheriting a bar, they chose to rebuild its identity from the ground up. That’s an admittedly bold decision for one of Long Beach’s longest-running queer institutions, but one they felt was necessary if the space was going to serve the community for decades to come.
“The plan was always to honor the history of this building,” Ryan said. “Executive Suite was a coded word… We wanted to make sure we still had a word that hinted at being coded, but then we put the ‘E’ in there to make it super gay. So now you can say, ‘I’ve got to go to WERK.’ It’s honoring the past while bringing a queer space into the future.”
The future begins with WERK in Long Beach…
That future begins with a simple philosophy: inclusion isn’t something that happens by accident—it has to be programmed into a calendar.
WERK recognizes that today’s LGBTQ+ nightlife can’t survive simply by opening its doors and expecting people to show up. Queer spaces increasingly have to become community centers as much as bars, offering reasons for people to gather beyond ordering a drink. That’s why WERK’s programming intentionally reaches into communities that have historically lacked dedicated spaces of their own.
There are leather nights. Fetish nights like puppy play evenings. Karaoke. Themed drag productions. Game nights. A forthcoming Blackout party created specifically to celebrate Long Beach’s Black queer community… Ryan is equally enthusiastic about concepts like “Drag Service,” a tongue-in-cheek Sunday gathering inspired by the historic role queer bars once played as substitute churches for LGBTQ+ people who were unwelcome in traditional religious spaces. The goal isn’t novelty for novelty’s sake; it’s ensuring that, sooner or later, everyone finds a night that feels built for them.
“Our core principle is outreach and inclusion,” Ryan said. “We want anybody who wants to move through the queer community to feel represented. We want people to walk in and see somebody who looks like them working here. And we want parties that represent people so that anytime anybody walks in the door, they feel like they’re welcome.”
Three levels, three vibes: How WERK is utilizing its multi-level space.
That same philosophy shaped the physical redesign of WERK itself. Rather than forcing every patron into the same nightclub experience, the owners have divided the building into three distinct personalities. Upstairs delivers the high-energy dance floor expected from a queer nightclub. (Though with the removal of the tint on the windows, it provides an entirely different dance vibe as you can look upon Redondo Avenue below while grooving.) The main level functions as a lounge where conversation comes more easily and patrons can drift between performances, billiards, and cocktails.
Then there’s perhaps the building’s most unexpected transformation: the basement.
Chris laughs when describing it as “your grandma’s basement from the 1980s,” but that’s exactly the point. Outfitted with vintage couches, board games, coloring books, video games, and communal tables, the downstairs isn’t meant to compete with the dance floor. It’s designed as an intentional escape from it. Friends can disconnect, talk, play Mario Kart, color together, or simply breathe without leaving the building. Some patrons have even begun leaving behind artwork they’ve created during the night, gradually turning the walls into a community gallery of sorts.
“We want anything we can do to make them feel like this is their space,” Chris said. “We want it to feel like home.”
You. Betta. WERK.
For Ryan, Chris, and Abel, WERK isn’t simply replacing Executive Suites. It’s attempting something more ambitious: preserving one chapter of Long Beach’s queer history while writing the next.
In a city that has lost LGBTQ+ dance spaces over the past decade—RIP Ripples—while trying to create makeshift ones—hey there, Hare—they’re betting that the future of queer nightlife isn’t built around a single dance floor. It’s built around creating a place where every visitor—whether they come to sweatily dance or for a conversation on a couch—can genuinely feel that the building belongs to them.
WERK is located at 3428 E. Pacific Coast Hwy.
