![]() “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.
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