She was born in color.
Created by artist Deedee LaRue alongside five sister pieces, each panel that hung inside The Three Sisters was more than decoration. In a bar with peeling paint and sticky floors, they were the closest thing to grandeur the space had — light bending through glass, painting the room in something that felt, if you squinted, like grace.
She watched it all.
She watched women find each other in the way that only happens when a room gives you permission to be exactly who you are. She watched the holidays spent there by women who had nowhere else to go — potlucks shared among people who had built their own definitions of family from scratch. She watched Buffy guard the door. She watched the police come and leave again.
She also watched what happened beyond those walls, in the years the bar was alive.
In the 1980s, as AIDS carved through gay communities across the country, it was often lesbian women who showed up. They drove men they barely knew to hospitals. They sat at bedsides. They organized, donated blood, fought for funding, and refused to let their brothers in community die invisible deaths alone. The queer community was fractured in many ways in those years, and the women of bars like The Three Sisters were among those who held it together — not because anyone asked them to, but because that is what community does when we need each other most.
The five other pieces were so beloved that the bar sold postcards featuring them — a small act of commerce in service of survival, which is what lesbian bars in the 1990s were always doing.
Surviving.
The postcard money helped keep the lights on, kept Buffy at the door, kept the room available to the women who needed it most.
Then, in 1996, The Three Sisters closed. One of its owners had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and the bar could not go on. Ginger Elm, one of the bar’s regulars, purchased the stained glass piece before the bar shut its doors permanently.
For nearly thirty years, the piece lived in Ginger's basement. Safe. Quiet. Waiting.
But not forgotten.
Every two or three years, Ginger would bring her out — to Three Sisters reunions, gatherings where women who had loved that bar came back together to remember it. Each time, the piece was met with something close to reverence. She was passed around, admired, wept over a little. She was proof that something real had existed.
The world kept changing around her. Colorado legalized civil unions in 2013, extending legal recognition to same-sex couples for the first time in the state. Two years later, the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges made marriage equality the law of the land — a victory that had seemed like fantasy not long before, the kind of thing the women of The Three Sisters might have toasted to as a dream that sometimes felt far away.
The community that had survived raids and violence and an epidemic and erasure had lived to see its relationships recognized by the government that had so often worked against it.
She was shaped by a world that made it possible.
The other pieces from Deedee LaRue's collection found their way into a private collection, cherished in their own right. But this one kept coming back to the community that made her meaningful.
In July 2024, at a reunion held at Hamburger Mary's, David Duffield — who leads The Center on Colfax's Colorado LGBTQ History Project — gave a talk about the bar and its legacy. Ginger brought the piece. The room rededicated her informally, in the way reunions do things: with stories, and laughter, and the weight of shared memory. It became clear that the piece deserved something more permanent than a basement.
Ginger agreed. She believed The Center on Colfax should have her.
That decision wasn't sentimental — it was strategic. The Colorado LGBTQ History Project exists precisely for moments like this one. Established to collect and preserve oral histories, archive materials, and actively educate the community on LGBTQ history, the Project has donated 30 collections to the Denver Public Library and other institutions. It maintains an oral history catalog of over 100 recorded stories of LGBTQ Coloradans — funded in part by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It is, in short, the place where things like this stained glass piece belong: held carefully, made available, connected to the living history still being made.
On March 30, at 5:30 p.m., The Center on Colfax will formally rededicate the piece at 1301 E. Colfax Ave. Ginger Elm will be there. So will the generation of queer Coloradans who never set foot in The Three Sisters but who are, in every way that matters, its inheritors.
There are thirty-six lesbian bars left in the country. The Pearl, which holds the afterparty that evening, is Colorado's only remaining one. The legal landscape for queer people has never moved in only one direction — civil unions gave way to marriage equality, and now gender-affirming care, legally protected in some states, faces challenge in others. This rededication is not separate from that context. It is a response to it.
She has been waiting thirty years for a permanent home. She remembers what it looked like when women walked through a door and, for the first time, didn't have to pretend.
She is ready, now, to tell that story to whoever needs to hear it.
The rededication of The Three Sisters' stained glass art piece takes place March 30 at 5:30 p.m. at The Center on Colfax, 1301 E. Colfax Ave. An afterparty follows at The Pearl. To learn more about the Colorado LGBTQ History Project or to get involved, visit lgbtqcolorado.org/programs/lgbtq-history-project.