Mood Ring

Overview

Astrology-themed bar and dancefloor opened in September 2017 by Chinese-American co-founders Vanessa Li and Bowen Goh as a deliberately QTPOC-centered queer space in Bushwick, part neighborhood living room, part incubator for underground electronic music, built against the grain of the traditional gay bar.

Mood Ring opened in September 2017 at 1260 Myrtle Avenue, steps from the Central Avenue M stop in Bushwick, built by co-founders Vanessa Li and Bowen Goh, longtime friends, both Chinese-American, then in their mid-twenties and working office jobs while researching the concept nights at home. Li brought six years of nonprofit experience at a queer and trans youth community center in San Francisco and a background in Asian American Studies; Goh brought a filmmaking and business sensibility. The direct inspiration was Roses, a small gay bar in Berlin known for its red-shag-walled interior and community warmth, the founders wanted to channel Berlin's queer-mecca ethos and DIY zoning culture into a Bushwick room that felt like something they had never found for themselves: a space that was genuinely comfortable for young QTPOC without demanding fluency in any single subculture. The name comes from the color-shifting novelty rings of the 1970s; the bar's organizing logic, a rotating cocktail menu keyed to the twelve zodiac signs, updated each astrological season, is intentionally light-handed, more mood than dogma. The physical space divides into a front bar room and a back dancefloor. The bar area features cozy six-person velvet booths, a backlit marble top, and video screens looping glitchy Hong Kong-cinema-inflected visual art, with Wong Kar-wai's 'In the Mood for Love' a declared influence on the lighting palette and wallpaper. The rear dancefloor adds fog machine and strobe, consent signage (No Racism, No Sexism, No Transphobia posted prominently), and in its early years a notoriously rudimentary DJ setup, DJ Dee Diggs, who played the room in late 2018, recalled the booth as 'a little wooden stand… it looked like someone's intermediate woodshop project.' Goh has described the room explicitly as an incubator: 'If the only places to play are massive clubs with big fees and bigger expectations, you're skipping a whole part of the process.' The back room accordingly became an early platform for the then-emerging Discwoman-adjacent Brooklyn circuit, with bookings including Yaeji, LSDXOXO, Jasmine Infiniti, Umfang, DJ Haram, Shyboi, BEARCAT, and Stud1nt among those documented as having played the venue. Mood Ring's cultural positioning (Asian-owned, LGBTQ-owned, minority-owned, overtly QTPOC-centered) landed it at the center of a Brooklyn-wide debate about what 'queer space' means after the decline of the traditional gay bar. i-D, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Resident Advisor all covered the venue. DJ Dee Diggs described it as 'our living room, date and hook-up destination, fantasy, club, and meeting place', a condensed articulation of Mood Ring's refusal to be only one thing. Sound profile favors the lighter end of the dance spectrum: house, some techno, hip-hop, and an expanding genre palette including Latin nights. In February 2020, Li and Goh opened a sister venue, Heaven or Las Vegas (named after the Cocteau Twins album), a few blocks away in Bushwick, adding karaoke and disco/hip-hop programming to their footprint. A cocktail book, 'Margarita in Retrograde: Cocktails for Every Sign' (192 pp., Abrams, April 19 2022), co-authored by both founders, distilled the bar's concept into a popular-press format with zodiac-structured recipes developed during the pandemic closure period.

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