Meet the couple building a mini-empire of queer-focused spaces

When Fathom, the nautical-lite queer neighborhood bar in Lake View, debuted in early April, it became the first official joint project of married business partners Whitney LaMora and Zoe Schor.

Between real estate negotiations, fundraising, buildouts, hiring and permitting, it took two-and-a-half years for LaMora and Schor to open Fathom from their first glimpse of 1622 West Belmont Avenue (formerly Flagship Tavern). The bar was a few days out from officially throwing open its doors when Schor’s thoughts began straying elsewhere — to Milwaukee, Wis. More specifically, about the untapped potential of a “disgusting,” albeit “charming,” old bar there that was still on the market a year after the couple looked at it.

“Well, my wife never stops looking for real estate,” LaMora said archly. “She’s always hungry for the next project.”

The couple, who also own the subterranean lesbian cocktail lounge Dorothy Downstairs in West Town, have higher ambitions that stretch beyond Chicago as they build the city's first lesbian-owned hospitality group solely focused on creating queer gathering places.

So far, their business venture — called Friend of Dorothy Bars — is backed by 30 mostly local investors who’ve bought into their vision, too.

“We are really showing that the queer community wants and deserves these beautiful spaces,” LaMora said. “Hopefully that is also translating to more investors taking what we’re doing and our vision seriously. Because that’s what holds so many women, queer people, people of color, and trans people back. They don’t always have the resources or investment behind them, nor can they get it from banking institutions. I really do feel like that’s changing.”

Fathom arrives at a time when more prominently queer spaces are blossoming here; new census data reveals a 70% increase in same-sex couple households in Chicago since 2005.

Tryst Hospitality is developing a luxury boutique LGBTQ+ hotel called Tryst in the Northalsted neighborhood. The sober, queer social club Everywhere is coming to Uptown this summer, according to reporting from Block Club Chicago. Last fall, Nora McConnell-Johnson opened women’s sports bar Babe’s in Logan Square with help from a crowdfunding campaign that raised $75,000. The multilevel sports bar Levels Sporting Club in Wrigleyville is backed by six women investors. The latter’s founder, Clarissa Flores, also cofounded Lesbian Social Club, the popular roving party series that draws hundreds to LGBTQ+ events at venues like Tao.

Elsewhere, the former home of beloved queer nightclub Berlin is transforming into an inclusive club: a craft cocktail bar called The Belmont, and a late-night dance club called Decibel.

Even as more LGBTQ+ spots pop up increasingly outside of historically queer neighborhoods to mirror the meandering path of social progress, Schor emphasized the prevailing need for dedicated safe spaces.

“Even though there is, theoretically, more acceptance, even though queer people have spread out in more places around the country, we still do need a place to gather and that’s still really important,” she said. “What's really interesting is, there have always been gay bars, right? But what’s a gay restaurant? What’s a gay hotel? What’s a queer neighborhood bar? How do we determine and define what these things are?”

She and LaMora have been slowly unpacking these questions in the nine years since they met at Split-Rail, the now-closed upmarket fried chicken restaurant where Schor was the chef and the co-owner alongside Michelle Szot.

A week after Split-Rail opened in the summer of 2017, Schor declared she was ready to open a lesbian bar. Six months after that, LaMora — then a prospective gallery owner — walked in to interview for a server assistant job.

Schor and LaMora fell in love and built a working partnership over the ensuing decade, which came with plenty of transition, heartbreak and renewal. LaMora opened a gallery, The Martin, first in Humboldt Park then adjacent to Split-Rail. About a month after the team opened Dorothy, the pandemic shut it down — ultimately twice. Schor and LaMora reopened it in 2022.

The pair married in the fall of 2023, the same weekend Split-Rail was broken into — a memory that haunts them whenever they hear a sound like the phone alarm that awoke them that night. In November 2023, they shuttered Split-Rail and The Martin, morphing the space into the queer wedding and events venue Villanelle, which closed in October 2025, the 10-year mark of the lease on the ground floor of 2500 W. Chicago Ave. Schor still carries the burden of Split-Rail’s financial failure, even as she evolves in her notions of what success and failure look like.

“The money part will never sit right for the rest of my life; people gave me money for that and it all got lost,” she said. “But if you remove that part of it, it feels much more organic. I don't feel like a chef anymore; that’s just something I did for a couple of decades. When you’re young and learn you could be good at something and want to do it with your life, you don't know all the different ways you could apply that idea.”

Building Dorothy into a cultural homebase — one packed to the gills for events ranging from karaoke and immersive theater to a senior LGBTQ+ storytelling panel — solidified the couple’s prowess as queer bar owners. The place has the kind of employee buy-in such that requests to fill shifts render Schor’s inbox overflowing.

“We do so many different types of events, it’s not a monotonous kind of bar at all,” said Jasmine Santiago, bar manager at Dorothy since November 2024. “It’s exciting to come to work everyday.”

Previously the general manager at Moneygun, Santiago worked with the hospitality group 16 On Center (The Salt Shed,, Mariscos San Pedro, Longman & Eagle, All Well) for nearly six years before departing amicably, eager to fully assert herself as a manager without apologizing as a woman of color. In the year and a half since joining Dorothy, Santiago has felt herself “change profoundly” as a professional, embracing the nurturing style of hospitality she inherited from her grandmother. It owes partly to conversations with Schor and LaMora affirming her past experiences and encouraging her to stand in her power, she said.

"While at Dorothy, I’ve learned that softness is a power and there’s a way to really harness it so it doesn't feel like I'm muting myself,” she said. “I’m a mom, so you can be motherly, you can have those maternal qualities and also say, I need this to happen. I can be more firm and soft at the same time.”

The couple are increasingly empowering staff to take the lead on social media and to oversee events, like the bimonthly trans- and nonbinary-focused Trans / Enby Night at Dorothy, spearheaded by Dorothy’s product manager, Lou Neimerg. Santiago aims to keep growing in her own role and is open to how that might look.

“For now, let’s get those standard operating procedures down; let’s open the second bar; let’s open the third,” she said.

Meanwhile, the couple’s vision of a multiconcept future that won’t burn out them or their employees is taking shape.

“We’re both very devoted to this idea of professionalizing this very unregulated industry with safe spaces where nobody who’s working is drinking, where people are taken care of, where they don't have to beg for vacation pay if they’re leaving the job,” Schor said. “It’s also a great transition moment for us out of being in the spaces all day everyday. One of us is in her 40s, one of us is on her way.”

Buying the property that houses Fathom was a key piece of securing a future on their terms.

Unlike its sapphic, ‘70s speakeasy sibling with a packed dance card of events, Fathom positions itself as a “simpler, more casual gathering place,” with easygoing packaged beer, wine and non-alcoholic drinks and classic cocktails that tip a tricorne hat to rum. (Think pineapple rum daiquiris and lush, mutedly tropical rum old fashioneds.) A nautical term to measure depth, Fathom also refers to the average wingspan, nodding to the open arms that initiate an embrace.

The couple tapped Siren Betty Design to design the bar, which subtly nods to the sea-worn east coast joints of Schor’s native Massachusetts via oceanic blues, brass and dark wood accents, luffing linen fabric draped above the bar and porthole-style mirrors in “the boat lounge.” Schor’s mom even handed over 100 seashells from her extensive collection, which adorn the bar’s fireplace.

Drawing on nautical themes required the team to confront some gendered design baggage. Take the wallpaper in the third bathroom, whose early pattern mockup featured the prevailing imagery of buxom, white and blonde sailor women. When they noted this, Siren Betty designer Susan Yong Williams happily offered to do a custom design. After a bit of back and forth, they settled on a pattern that depicts a diverse range of bodies, many of them tattooed, swimming, diving, toasting and posing in swimwear.

The same custom wallpaper adorns the interior of Fathom’s photobooth, a vestige LaMora and Schor rescued from Berlin back when they opened Villanelle; “so, you know, it’s still in the family,” LaMora said. This small artistic gesture has a deeper mission, much like the friendly neighborhood bar it adorns.

“What’s most important to us is to show a wide variety of bodies, and a wide variety of people who could, for the first time, see themselves in a wallpaper,” she said. “It’s for anyone who’s been othered.”