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Reviews
Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging
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By Gary Atkins
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University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2003. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 464 pages. $28.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Peter Boag
University of Colorado, Boulder
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Within the past few years, scholars of the Pacific Northwest have
embarked on an examination of the region's rich history of sexual
minorities. A handful of articles and a reprint of a classic, book-length
study on 1950s Boise have appeared. Other publications are due out
soon. To say that such inquiry is yet in its infancy understates
the obvious. Gary Atkins's Gay Seattle is a publication landmark
in this nascent field. It is the first extended and authoritative
treatment produced by a major press on the evolution of any modern
lesbian and gay community in the Pacific Northwest.
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Drawing on interviews, court records, newspaper accounts, and a variety of sources generated within the lesbian and gay community, Atkins employs a strong narrative style to tell the story of how Seattle's gays and lesbians slowly came out during a one-hundred-year period — from 1893, when the Washington legislature first criminalized homosexual sex acts, to 1993, when Mike Lowry became the first governor of the state to address Seattle's annual gay pride rally. During that century, Seattle's homosexual minority emerged from amorphous and obscure origins in the city's "mudflat" vice district, along the shores of Puget Sound, to visibility and openness in their own respectable neighborhood on Capitol Hill, just north and east of the central business district. The journey from downtown to uptown and from vice to visibility moved along a trajectory marked by advances and setbacks or, as Atkins portrays, alternating episodes of "exile and belonging." |
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Those interested in the earlier period covered will find Atkins's treatment limited. At that time, the Pacific Northwest's major cities and their so-called vice districts hosted a rich homosexual subculture supported by the large number of itinerant male laborers who regularly sojourned in these urban spaces. Atkins only skims the surface here. Likewise, his exploration of the impact of World War II, an event that scholars consider to have had a revolutionary effect on the formation of lesbian and gay community and consciousness, is also tempered. In his coverage of the pre–World War II years, Atkins is at his best when he tells a remarkable and painful story that interlaces the biography of Seattle's famed and apparently lesbian Frances Farmer with an explanation of Washington's state-supported psychiatric program and how it affected homosexuals. |
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Atkins is on firmer ground when he departs from the early twentieth-century mudflat district and examines the rise of the modern gay and lesbian community in the post–World War II period, tracing its emergence from the dark recesses of gay bars and oppression under the police payoff system through the development of gay organizations in the 1960s, the advances and challenges lesbian and gay political activists encountered in the 1970s, the difficult years of the AIDS epidemic, and ultimately the election and career of Cal Anderson, Washington's first openly gay legislator. Along the way, Atkins also ponders the reaction of Seattle's religious communities to gays and lesbians, especially the story of how Capitol Hill's Catholics responded to gays as they became more visible in that area. He investigates varied facets of the lesbian community and its central role in making advances that have benefited all gays in Seattle, and he presents a number of heart-wrenching vignettes of those whom AIDS claimed. Needless to say, the bulk and availability of materials on the postwar period in which all these events took place makes telling this more public story relatively "easier" to do. |
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Gay Seattle's well-written narrative makes it accessible to a wide audience. Pacific Northwest lesbians and gays will undoubtedly find this volume a must-read. Some interested in the field will undoubtedly want more interpretation and analysis than Atkins offers. Nonetheless, Gay Seattle is an important addition to the limited literature now available on lesbians, gays, and other sexual minorities in the Pacific Northwest. It brings to light a significant story, and it also demonstrates that there is more good work yet to be done in the field. |
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