![]() ![]() The block included the first iteration of Bimbos and the Cha Cha Lounge -a Mexican food joint started in the 1990s that has since relocated to East Pike, a few blocks away-gay bar Manray, Irish punk bar Kincora Pub and The Bus Stop, where Cônnére got her first bartending gig. In its first incarnation on East Pine Street in 2007, Pony was little more than a makeshift bar on a block slated for demolition in an increasingly gentrified Capitol Hill. Wheatpasted collages from vintage magazines cover the walls at Pony. (Re-Bar’s owner has plans to reopen the venue at a yet-to-be-determined location.) If time travel were an option, Re-Bar would always be at the top of Cônnére’s list: “Re-Bar is going to be my answer if I could go back anywhere.” Shuttering in May 2020, Re-Bar was one of the early venue closures of the pandemic, and Cônnére worked behind the bar until the very end, serving vodka-sodas and vodka–Red Bulls, as well as her very own Key Lime Pie Martini, to ravers, poets, actors and drag performers. “Anything I’ve done of any real artistic significance has been involved with Re-Bar,” explains Cônnére. It was there that Cônnére first took the stage as a performer, honing her singing and acting chops. Somehow, all these elements just clicked into an inclusive, one-of-a-kind space. Re-Bar was a venue that hosted many different happenings-fringe theater, drag, poetry slams and the longest-running house music night on the West Coast, Flammable. As soon as I walked in the door it was like, ‘OK, this is going to become home for me.’” “They suggested I go to Re-Bar on Thursday night-an ’80s dance night. “I met a few people that became kind of lifelong friends there,” she recalls. In 2004, she lived on Capitol Hill with friends and went to nearby Jade Pagoda, a decades-old local’s spot for Chinese food and stiff drinks. ![]() When the Colorado-born Cônnére first moved to Seattle, it wasn’t always clear where she would find community. She’ s one half of disco-pop duo Bijoux, and has bartended for years at queer hot spots like the late Re-Bar-a 30-year-old institution that shuttered during the pandemic-over-the-top nightclub Supernova and Pony, a divey gay bar where she currently works slinging whiskey-gingers and tequila shots to crowds of queer punks, artsy queens and those who like their gay culture with a little (or a lot) less polish.Īt Re-Bar, Cônnére created her very own drink, the Key Lime Pie Martini. Singer, artist, performer and, according to Seattle’s alternative news weekly The Stranger, “ a staple of just about every gay Seattle thing worth doing,” Cônnére has brought theater, fashion and activism to the city’s most notable gay bars. And at the center of it all, exuding star power as a local icon of queer nightlife, is a Adé A Cônnére. The pandemic is only another chapter in the lineage of Seattle’s queer nightlife-one that proved that, despite some changes, Seattle’s gay bars aren’t going anywhere. The city is currently home to one of the last remaining lesbian bars on the West Coast, the Wildrose. The city was home to the country’s first known gay bar: The Double Header, which operated from the 1930s to 2015. In the history of America’s gay nightlife, Seattle holds an important record. ![]()
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