Pam Hall used to be a fighter, a protestor, a full-fledged advocate for human rights.

Now, she realizes that time and relationships, more than protests, can change people's hearts, even her own.

About 25 years ago, when she was a barber in her 20s, she helped stage protests around town on behalf of blacks, women and gays. She is white and a lesbian.

She was rebelling against her father, she explains now, who had held bigoted views.

"When I first came out of the closet when I was 23, I wore my gayness on my sleeve, just waiting for someone to look at me wrong or say something to me for being gay," said Ms. Hall, now a 48-year-old paralegal living in Newport.

"I assumed everyone hated me because I was gay, and I was on the defensive. I was angry, paranoid, self-conscious, whiney, radical, negative, uncomfortable and argumentative."

Perhaps it was because her family treated her differently, "like I wasn't Pam anymore," she said. Her mother cried for three weeks.

Perhaps it was because her boss fired her from his Forest Park barbershop, stating plainly it was because she was a lesbian.

Perhaps it was because of the reactions she got from her activism.

"I touted the gay cause every chance I got, and all I did was turn people off because I was very accusatory," she says.

A calming influence

One day that changed. While holding signs and protesting her firing on a street corner near her old barbershop, Ms. Wells began to notice that many people were showing support for her.

Drivers blew their horns or shouted encouragement. Women - black and white - yelled out their windows, "You go, sister!" Some of her customers told her they wouldn't patronize the barbershop anymore. One went in and told off the owner.

Not a single adult harassed her. Only a couple children held makeshift signs with anti-gay phrases, she says.

That's when she realized that maybe this is the real Cincinnati. Most people probably aren't the bigots she thought they were. Most people probably don't care about people's sexuality or whether people are white or black.

Soon afterward, she landed an interview at another barbershop. This time, the owner knew she was a lesbian, thanks to her prior boss. He seemed unduly curious about it, asking her personal questions. Was she was seeing anyone? What do lesbians do for fun? Would she be interested in a three-person encounter?

She left, saying the interview was over.

Beyond prejudice

Apparently it wasn't. He offered her the job the next day and, desperate for money, she took it.

What followed were six months of dodging his advances in the beauty shop hallway. Finally she told him she'd had enough.

He stopped. She ended up working for him for 22 years. He became one of her closest friends, like a father figure, she says.

She quit cutting hair only because of medical problems.

Her family, too, became accepting of her, and she became less strident.

"Now, 25 years later, my family loves me and waited quietly for me to come back to being myself,'' she says. "I have been openly gay at every job (since), and people love me.

"I don't assume anyone hates me, and I don't whine or make being gay my life, because it's just a part of who I am."

She "calmed down," she says, because she stopped assuming the worst in people.

And when the worst came out, she didn't assume that that was all there was.

E-mail damos@enquirer.com or phone 768-8395