When Asheville, North Carolina’s queer bar and event space DayTrip was devastated by Hurricane Helene, the owners, and husbands, Brandon and Davie Davis had only been in business for about a month.
The space that had already become a joyful sanctuary — full of fundraisers, burlesque shows, and even dog adoptions — soon became the site of disaster.
But almost as quickly as it all fell apart, supporters mobilized and raised over $190,000 through a GoFundMe fundraiser to help the couple rebuild.
“Thousands and thousands of queer people from all over the world have been donating,” Brandon told NBC News, “and I don't have words to explain how grateful I am.”
Although DayTrip is just one of countless LGBTQ+ owned businesses, its comeback story represents the significance of queer spaces in every corner of the globe.
“I think building a queer economy and really investing our dollars into people that are going to fight for us is really important,” Charlie Sprinkman, the founder of Everywhere Is Queer told Good Good Good.
“If there's four restaurants on the block and one is queer-owned, and suddenly they get this massive rush of people and they become a super successful restaurant, the other three are going to be like, ‘Whoa, what did you do to become this successful restaurant?’ And it’s like, well, ‘I opened up my space. I was a safe space for so many people.’”
Everywhere Is Queer is a worldwide app and directory of over 20,000 queer-owned businesses that Sprinkman made after leaving their rural Wisconsin town, traveling around the country, and realizing it was hard to know where exactly to find safe and affirming spaces.
But now, Sprinkman’s surrounded by them.
“I've had thousands of people message me on Instagram from all over the world in areas where it's illegal to be out,” they said.
“They have said, ‘Thank you for visibly showing us the representation of queer people. You're helping me keep going, knowing that I can move somewhere where there's this many queer-owned businesses.’”
And those queer-owned businesses need both financial and social support.
While Everywhere Is Queer helps people find those places, Cat Perez and Marianna Di Regolo are helping build them.
The married couple created what is often referred to as the “LinkedIn for the LGBTQ+ community” — Famm Connect.
“Most professional spaces weren’t built with LGBTQ+ people in mind,” the pair told Good Good Good.
“It’s not just about being ‘included’ as an afterthought. It’s really about belonging somewhere built for us by us from the start.”
Their app, which is an invite-only professional social network, is a place where thousands of LGBTQ+ community members can build relationships, hire one another, amplify their businesses, find funding opportunities, or just talk about the challenges they face and receive peer support in a professional landscape.
Rollbacks in diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across large corporations and government spaces — as well as potentially harmful content moderation policies on traditional social media platforms — Perez and De Regolo said, make this kind of online hub even more important.
“When you open the app, you don’t just see professionals — you see queer therapists, gender-affirming doulas, trans software engineers, non-binary designers, and Black queer financial coaches,” they said.
“That visibility matters. And it changes the game for who gets hired, trusted, funded, and referred.”
In addition to the invite-only policy, the app has a strict code of conduct, terms of service, and privacy policy that explicitly center LGBTQ+ safety, the founders said.
They also reportedly do not share data with any third parties.
“Beyond safety, it’s about celebration. Famm Connect is a space for values-aligned people in the LGBTQ+ community to come together in support of one another through kindness, respect, collaboration, and care,” Perez and De Regolo added.
“It’s about creating a space where people feel grounded, excited, and energized, not drained. Famm Connect is designed to be a breath of fresh air in a digital landscape that often feels overwhelming, extractive, or performative.”
Sprinkman shares that desire for a “breath of fresh air.” Their whole business stemmed from an experience volunteering with Brave Trails, a nonprofit that provides queer youth leadership opportunities in the outdoors.
“The whole reason Everywhere Is Queer became a thing is because of the feeling that I had when I was around solely queer people and how free I felt, how seen I felt,” Sprinkman said.
“I wanted to build that to a global scale — allowing our community to feel that way on a day-to-day basis, not just at these extremely special places. Queer community allows so many people to feel alive, feel seen, feel heard. And that is what every human being deserves.”
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A version of this article was originally published in The 2025 Pride Edition of the Goodnewspaper.
