Mary Ellen Cunha, one of the original lesbian owners of the Twin Peaks Tavern, passed away in Palm Springs in January, a month before her 80th birthday, according to her obituary in the Merced Sun-Star.

Cunha was born in Los Banos, California on February 19, 1935. She moved to San Francisco on her own after her graduation from Los Banos High School in 1953. At the time of her death, she split her time between her homes in San Francisco and Palm Springs.

She was working for Peggy Forster at a liquor store on 16th and Valencia when they heard that the Twin Peaks Tavern on Castro & 17th was available for sale. The two went into business together, purchasing the bar in 1971 and, after remodeling, reopening in 1972 as a gay “fern bar.”

Twin Peaks had operated as a corner bar since 1935, just a few years after the end of Prohibition. Like many taverns, the windows were covered to hide patrons from their wives. Cunha and Forster — who quickly became known as “the girls” — spruced up the joint, adding a cocktail glass to the tavern’s decades-old sign and hand painting its lights in rainbow colors. But their most significant change was uncovering the windows, making it the first gay bar in San Francisco, and likely the country, to have plate glass windows where customers could boldly sit, unconcerned about being spotted in a gay bar.

In a 2012 interview, Cunha said that while Forster was a co-owner of at least six other LGBT bars, “I only had the Twin Peaks Tavern. That was enough for me.”

Cunha and Forster sold the bar in 2003 to two longtime bartenders, Jeffrey Green and George Roehm. The City officially designed the Twin Peaks Tavern as an historic landmark in 2013, in large measure due to the bar and its glass windows’ pioneering role in demonstrating LGBT visibility and pride.