This blog originally appeared at CHRON.
Julie Mabry, owner of Pearl Bar in Houston, warned that insurers are “adding drag in as a risk factor.”
Julie Mabry remembers walking with her sister into the Bonham Exchange, San Antonio’s iconic queer bar, for the first time in 1989. “I just saw a completely different person. She was just happy, she was in a great mood,” Mabry said.
Mabry had watched her sister struggle for years before that night: “From a very young age, my sister’s identity was more like a boy,” Mabry explained. “And we didn’t have these terms, we didn’t have this knowledge when we were kids. It’s just how she was born.”
After watching her fight through years of isolation and addiction, Mabry says the memory of her sister’s happiness that night in San Antonio inspired her to open Pearl Bar, the only remaining lesbian-specific bar in Houston.
Julie Mabry, owner of Pearl Bar, poses for a photograph at the bar Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2020, in Houston. The Human Rights Campaign awarded Pearl Bar, Houston’s only lesbian bar, funding to help preserve it during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It became something I was obsessed with. The idea was to provide an environment for people like my sister so she could have something to do so she wasn’t [using drugs], or going through things where she hated herself, because people on the outside didn’t see her as normal. That was the purpose of Pearl Bar,” said Mabry.
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