“There was all this stuff and coming from Nevada it was.it was like coming home.”Īt the time, Manning had just come out, at the age of 25, and started working at The Rose. “When I moved to Seattle it was like ‘oh my God.’ There was Broadway Market, which was like a gay mall, and there were bars - gay bars, there were gay bookstores,” Brothers recalled of the time she arrived in 1992.
And in 2005, Brothers and Manning bought out the third person and have co-owned the bar since. Shelley Brothers bought one of them out in 2002. In 2000, Manning and a couple of her co-workers put together a business plan and bought the bar. The Rose, as it's known, is a part of the Lesbian Bar Project, a fundraising campaign to help the remaining bars around the country survive the pandemic.Ĭo-owner Martha Manning first got a job as a bartender at The Rose in 1997 after moving from the East Coast. Now, the bar is facing an unknown future. The Wildrose opened on New Year’s Eve in 1984 in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. There are only a few lesbian bars left in the United States and one of them is in Seattle.
