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There is no comprehensive list, official records are incomplete, and many original owners have died or moved away. Piecing together Rochester’s gay bar history is no simple matter. With freedom, you lose a little of what you needed in the past.”īut others insist that, regardless of general inclusiveness, there are many reasons that having specifically gay spaces is still important. “If gay people go out, they go everywhere. “The biggest challenge is that you don’t really need a gay club anymore,” said Joe Marcella, 63, owner of Club Marcella in Buffalo, which had a location in Rochester on Liberty Pole Way from 1994 to 1999. Today, Rochester has three: a pair of stalwarts in Bachelor Forum and The Avenue Pub, and ROAR, a dance club that opened in 2019. A handful were mainstays, while others were flashes in the pan.
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In 1989, the bar moved to University Avenue and Beacon Street where it now continues to operate and attract a very diverse clientele.įrom the 1960s through the early-aughts, downtown Rochester saw the opening and closing of dozens of gay bars and dance clubs. It sat next to an adult bookstore and welcomed a seedy reputation.
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Their numbers dwindled in the ensuing years, but tumbled into an Information Age-induced free fall with the advent of the smartphone. “When I tell people in Washington, D.C., where I now live, how many bars there were in a city the size of Rochester, N.Y., they are amazed.”īy the early 1980s, there were roughly 1,600 bars across the United States that catered to the LGBTQ+ community, including about 200 that were specifically geared toward lesbians, according to Greggor Mattson, an associate professor of sociology at Oberlin College who tracked the closure of queer bars using the Damron travel guide for such establishments. “The early-80s seemed to be a Golden Age for gay and lesbian night life in the Flower City,” Dardano wrote. In a blog post for the Out Alliance’s “Shoulders to Stand On” project that archives memories of LGBTQ+ culture in Rochester, Dardano recalled coming out in Rochester and some of the many gay and lesbian bars that served as social spots for Rochester’s queer community. The pub, at 123 North St., was one of the few gay bars in Rochester before 1975. Bernie Brown working the door at Jim's in 1978.“If you were looking for a boyfriend and got rejected, at least you knew it wasn’t because you were gay.” “Back then, you couldn’t meet in places that hetero people could meet,” said Robert Dardano, a 65-year-old retired archivist for the Library of Congress who spent his younger years in Rochester before relocating to Washington, D.C. To their patrons, they were important spaces for finding and socializing with one’s people - and looking for love or a hook up was a big part of the scene. “I wasn’t going to be screamed at or told how sick I was, or things like that, which we were all afraid of.”įor decades, gay bars were among the few places that queer people could gather in relative safety. “There was a lot of fear, but excitement at the same time, and it felt so good to go someplace and feel that I wasn’t going to be beat up,” she said. Still, the rush of relief Barres experienced has not left her. More than 30 years has passed since those days, and Rosie’s, like dozens of other gay bars in Rochester and hundreds across the country, has closed. And I was afraid of anybody finding out.” “I was very, very hidden most of my life. “It was one of the few places I could be totally me,” said Barres, now a 79-year-old trans woman. She found it at Rosie’s, a lesbian bar on Monroe Avenue. Pamela Barres still remembers the freedom she felt walking into Rosie’s wearing lipstick and that red wig.īack then, Barres was a middle-aged married man with children and a job at Kodak by day, and a covert “cross-dresser” by night eager for acceptance of her authentic self.