While Bartley Dunne’s, on Stephen’s Street Lower beside the Mercer Hospital, was torn down in 1990 and replaced with the Break for the Border pub and nightclub. Rice’s, at the corner of Stephen’s Green and South King Street, was demolished in 1986 to make way for the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre. There are no traces left of either establishment. I never experienced discrimination as such, probably because we were largely invisible. In 1960s Dublin the scene basically consisted of 2 pubs – Rice’s and Bartley Dunne’s. George Fullerton, who emigrated to London in 1968, was quoted in Dermot Ferritier’s book Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (2009) as saying that: There weren’t many opportunities to meet gay people, unless you knew of the one bar – two bars, actually, in Dublin at that time, Bartley Dunne’s and Rice’s … They were the two pubs and if you hadn’t met gay people, you wouldn’t have known about these pubs there was no advertising in those days, and it was all through word-of mouth.īartley Dunne’s and Rice’s proved to be critical points of social interaction and first emerged as gay- friendly pubs in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The social life of a gay man in Dublin in the early 1970s was summed up as such by one contributor in the book Coming Out (2003):Īs for most of us, being gay in those days was a very lonely experience.
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