Little Gay Book comes to Chicago to help those who are ready to mingle at its Fast Flirting event at Pub 626, 1406 W. Morse Ave., on April 28.
Little Gay Book is a boutique lesbian and bisexual matchmaking firm. Started in the Bay area in 2009, Little Gay Book reaches to women across the nation, offering services including matchmaking, relationship coaching, coaching sessions, wing woman assistance and psychotherapy. Little Gay Book also holds high-tech lesbian and bisexual matchmaking events where women can find romance, business connections and friendships.
Dr. Frankie Bashan is the founder and CEO of Little Gay Book, a doctor of clinical psychology, a relationship expert and coach and a mother of two teenagers.
"From a very early age, I just gravitated toward connecting with people," said Bashan. "I just love people. I have a very interesting knack for bringing people together. Naturally I just would want to set people up with each other and I started to make matches. At the age of 13, I set my dad up with a woman he was married to for 25 years."
With this passion, Bashan became a therapist. While she was having a positive impact clinically in her practice, she wanted to shift away from heavy stuff like helping people manage anxiety and depression, to instead help people find love.
"For years I was doing therapy and I kept gravitating towards working with singles and couples," said Bashan of her experience. "I loved couples work and I loved to help single people build up their confidence, be bold, make shit happen in their lives, in the area of romance. Then I just decided to take something that is a gift, which is matchmaking, and combine it with my psychology background experience and see if I could help our community find quality partners and be more successful in their relationships once they find somebody."
In her current work, she does LGBTQ and ally coaching, explaining it requires all the same tools that she teaches. Her matchmaking and Little Gay Book's events, however, focus on lesbian and bisexual women interested in monogamous relationships.
Her coaching approach, she described, is solution-focused. She looks at the goals people want to accomplish and helps to figure out what is getting in the way, as well as how to overcome those obstacles.
"I think we need to be out there connecting with each other and having loving caring relationships and we sometimes just need some skills to learn how to make that happen," said Bashan, who identifies as a queer woman. She also added that according to studies, people are happier when partnered up.
Fast Flirting is an event with different locations all over the country for lesbian or bisexual women that want to make new friends, business connections or are looking for relationships.
Bashan developed a software containing an algorithm that does the matching. With this software, Bashan explained, participants have the opportunity to meet people that they will have a greater likelihood of making a successful connection. When mingling, through the software, the participant indicates if she is interested in a particular woman for business, friendship, romance, all of the above or two options. If both women select the same interest, they get each other's email address.
Women show up to the event and meet 12-13 women who fall within their selected range of interest for a five-to-seven-minute date.
Fast Flirting will be coming to Chicago for the first time at this April 28 event. Fast Flirting events are held every four to six weeks and focuses on different age ranges each time. This particular Chicago event will be for women ages 40-plus.
"I'm so excited because Chicago women have been wanting us to bring our events there," said Bashan, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
For more information on Little Gay Book and Fast Flirting, visit LittleGayBook.com .
