![gay sex club tumblr gay sex club tumblr](https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/member/9/1/0/b/member_264517131.jpeg)
“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 gar 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.
![gay sex club tumblr gay sex club tumblr](https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/member/e/7/7/4/member_256799252.jpeg)
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.