“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. 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. In 1973, a bunch of bikers opened a gay bar called the Bachelor Forum on Main Street, near Goodman Street.(The data does not specify whether the women were lesbians.) The precipitous drop was only offset by a marked rise between 19 in listings for establishments in which women and gay men were socializing.
Listings for bars that catered to gay men dropped to 387 from 699 during that period, while lesbian bar listings fell to just 15. Between 20, bars friendly to LGBTQ+ people declined by almost 37 percent, according to Mattson’s online database and accompanying report.
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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.