“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.
