Q-Seattle Events: Tacky Tourist Clubs

Just to catch up on what other folks were saying before and after the Pride week festivities...

The lede of the PI story by Keri Murakami on yesterday's parade focused on a Japanese tourist who unexpectedly got caught up in the big crowds:

But in the Seattle Pride Parade's second year downtown, there were those, like Yui Igarashi, who planned to spend the day shopping, but instead ran into parade crowds.

She was at the corner of Fourth and Pine holding her digital camera up, trying to shoot over the two tall men in front of her.

Retreating to change memory cards on her camera, she said, "It's very live."

Igarashi, who is visiting from Japan, had never seen a gay pride parade in her home country. "It's very open," she said, as peacock feathers from the headdresses of a few men in the parade peeked over the crowd.

The Times story by Marsha King called the parade "dazzling celebration of Seattle's gay and lesbian culture."

In advance of the weekend, the PI ran a couple of stories about Seattle's gay history, including a remarkable column by the paper's cranky columnist, Joel Connelly. He recounts his return from a trip in 1978 to find a headline that would often be repeated in the years to come.

A headline across the top of the Seattle P-I front page carried big news: Seattle had just become the first town in America to vote AGAINST a bid to repeal its city ordinance prohibiting discrimination against gays and lesbians.

Anita Bryant and her ilk were turned back by a civic campaign, chaired by Mayor Charley Royer's then-wife Rosanne, arguing the right to privacy.

The remarkable vote, in what was then called the Queen City, was driven home as I dragged my duffel bag through customs in San Francisco. Supervisor Dianne Feinstein was on TV announcing that Mayor George Moscone and gay fellow supervisor Harvey Milk had been murdered.

The 1978 campaign that defeated the anti-gay initiative was probably unknown to most who celebrated here the anniversary of the Stonewall protests in New York, but it was Seattle's own Stonewall.

Connelly does a great job of tracing the political and social tolerance in the city that was both given its birth by that initiative fight and reflected in the outcome.

PI reporter Keri Murakami traces the history of the Double Header, the Seattle bar that was in many ways like New York's Stonewall except that its customers never attracted the kind of raid that would lead to the Stonewall protests.

Seattle University professor Gary Atkins wrote in a 2003 history of gays in Seattle, "For the next three decades, one gay man or woman after another would find that all-important staircase on Washington Street, go down into the underground, and begin the process of both coming out and finding a new family."

And gradually, the scene moved upstairs to the Double Header.

Rose Bohanan, who is quoted in Atkins' book, recalled that she hadn't been to the Double Header for years. Now 66, she said she was a teenage runaway when she came across the Double Header in the '50s.

"For a 17-year-old, it was heaven on Earth. Finally finding people like me, and finding out I wasn't the only one," she said in an interview. "I was a street child, and the drag queens took me in. They taught me how to behave, not to be a fool."

There were fights in the bar, she said, because sailors would come in to harass the drag queens, but, she said, "There's nothing like an angry drag queen. I've seen some sailors dragged out with a high heel embedded in them."

That was a long time ago, but friend-of-The-Stranger and YouTube star Chris Crocker sent Seattle a greeting to remind us that it's not so different than what folks elsewhere deal with today.

Another such reminder from the experience of Seattle Men's Chorus who tried to do edgy posters for their annual Pride Week concert over the weekend. But edgey turned out to be offensive to several merchants who demanded that the Chorus censor its poster promoting the concert.

The promotional material for this weekend's concert at McCaw Hall, for example, features two protesters hoisting picket signs that proclaim: "God hates fags" and "You're going to hell."

Coleman's intent was one of humor, a spoof of the very religion with which many gays struggle and to which so many have found a closed door. He titled the performance "Scared Faithless: God and Gays in the 21st Century." ...

"I probably made a mistake," Coleman admitted Thursday. "I guess I was naive and just didn't realize that people would be that uncomfortable with that image and those words. After all, we live with this all the time."

The concert will explore ? through song and performance ? the pain some members have faced in seeking acceptance in their church. But it will also celebrate the warm welcome gays have felt in other communities of faith.

While many of their songs are religious, the Seattle Men's Chorus is secular, its mostly gay members hailing from many different faiths ? or none at all.

And in other censorship news, a school administrator in New Jersey apologized after his staff was ordered to black out an image of two men kissing that was included in the school's yearbook.

And congradulations to Randy, Mark, Scott and the big crew who've worked so hard to create Butch the big, pink, gay poodle mascot of the LVHS Classless Reunion. Butch won the second-place prize offered by The Stranger for entries in the Sunday parade. (And congrats to The Stranger judges for not holding grudges. [This is a point where we're glad that they ignore this blog.]) Congratulations as well to Nothwest Bears for thier grand-prize entry, "Bears, Bath & Beyond" [Times photo].

Labels: gay news, gay pride, Gay Seattle, history, Seattle, Seattle Pride