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There are few things quite as comforting or empowering to queer folk than being surrounded by other queer folk in an atmosphere of reckless abandon-a place where we can express ourselves unmolested and unhampered by non-queer people. But nowhere is the battle for that which is queer more heated, or as keenly felt, than in the venerable institution known as the Queer Club. Many gays and lesbians are struggling to maintain a "queer" identity in the wake of this ever-advancing straight invasion of gay neighborhoods, coffee shops, men's choruses, and cologne counters. Their stories help us understand inequality of all sorts that continues today.Establishments, attitudes, and aesthetics long associated with queerdom are being systematically usurped (i.e., shamelessly ripped off) by non-gay people. “I don’t have to walk around the block three times before I walk into a bar. “What intrigues me is the simultaneous ordinariness and extraordinary courage and fortitude and persistence people had, in the same place I am now as an openly gay man,” says Brown. “They want to see their lives as part of a broader story, which it was.”īrown is involved in other academic research-his current project concerns public health and homosexuality before HIV and AIDS-but he plans to continue his volunteer work with the Northwest Lesbian & Gay History Museum Project indefinitely. “For some of these people, this was their life,” says Brown. He points out key sites in gay and lesbian history from the 1940s through the 1970s, educating audiences ranging from academics to community groups to seniors.
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Some of these bars were very hidden.” Michael Brown with a tour group in Pioneer Square.īrown leads free walking tours of Pioneer Square, the downtown neighborhood where the 1950s sailor likely headed. “It speaks to the time, but also the place. “The military actually led him to places he never would have found on his own,” says Brown. The sailor went down the list, checking out the bars, knowing that at least one would be a gay bar. The military unwittingly guided his search by providing a list of establishments that sailors were prohibited to enter. He tells of a Navy man who visited Seattle in the 1950s while on shore leave, hoping to meet other gay men but not sure where to find them. These are places we don’t think of as gay, but they’ve mattered.” “You also see the importance of Wallingford and the University District, especially for lesbians,” says Brown. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was “an explosion of sites of significance,” says Brown, particularly along Capitol Hill’s Pike/Pine corridor.
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Pioneer Square was the site of the earliest gay establishments, most of which are long gone. “The map is just a particularly geographic way of writing it down.” “You can tell a history, a historical narrative, but you can also tell a spatial story of where people claimed space,” says Brown. Accompanying text describes the relevance of each site. Using these oral histories, as well as other historical information, Brown and Larry Knopp of the University of Minnesota-Duluth have created an exhaustive map of more than 200 key sites in Seattle’s gay and lesbian history. The sites of these memories-“the where-ness of things,” as Brown puts it-add another dimension to the story. Or renting an apartment in a building that welcomed gay tenants, creating a sense of community. Those interviewed have described entering a gay bar for the first time, when being “outed” could mean the loss of a job or family. Michael Brown talks to a tour participant about gay and lesbian history in Seattle.
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Brown and others have collected scores of oral histories, each adding more detail to the story of the gay and lesbian experience in Seattle. Brown, UW professor of geography, has spent more than a decade researching Seattle’s gay and lesbian history as a volunteer for the Northwest Lesbian & Gay History Museum Project.