Found in the farthest corner my underwear drawer, amid the ruins of the recently excavated bedroom (as we’ve been in the process of moving to the more-spacious rental next door): my shirt from Olympia, Washington’s first ever Queer Pride march (of which I was a primary organizer) in 1991. We put the damn thing together so quickly (the idea having been hatched one night while I was talking with my roommate, the filmmaker and AIDS activist Tod Streater (RIP Tod, I miss you every day), about 3 weeks in advance of Seattle’s Pride event, when we recalled that at 1990′s march, there had been enough of an Olympia contingent that we could have had our own.
So we threw it all together in less than three weeks, all the while terrified that no one would show up for fear of being, I dunno, murdered by loggers? (Olympia, it then seemed to me, was about 1/3 uber-liberal college students and/or musicians, 1/3 state legislators and workers, & 1/3 loggers and related timber-industry folks: for sure, a curious mix.) There was barely enough time to secure the requisite permits, much less have T-shirts formally made, so in the living room of The Dreary Biscuit (the house I shared with Tod and a few others), some of us got together before the event and made these shirts 1 using a stencil and some spray paint type stuff. (I can’t remember if the idea was Dana Schuerholz’s or that of another of my roommates, Judith Samuels/Kahan, but they were both there and actively involved, and, along with Dana’s partner Sarah Wright, also covered the event for This Way Out.) We didn’t even have adequate supplies there, because the shirt I got was a size small, and uh, well, I have boobs, so to make room for everything I ended up cutting off sleeves and turning it into a raggedy-edged tank top.
The police estimate for the number of attendees (none of whom were murdered by loggers, although I did get some death threats via voice mail in advance of the event, and I found one of our hastily put together posters with a bomb threat scrawled on it) was in the 300 range; some activists in attendance put it at 500; I’m sure the truth was somewhere in between. In any case, it was incredible to have been a part of that moment in history.
And I’m happy to say that while I left Olympia, the annual Pride celebration I helped to establish did not; the legendary Anna Schlecht, among others (she was also one of the speakers at that first event, was there at the only formal planning meeting we had time to hold, and convinced huge numbers of people to attend; it could not have been done without her) has helped to keep it alive; see the website for Capital City Pride for more.
(Many more stories from that march to tell when I’m not still in the midst of packing insanity!)
1 Loosely based on the logo for Olympia Beer. Which utter swill few of us actually deigned to drink, but hell, it rhymed with Queer, so how could we not make use of it?
UPDATE: An excerpt of this post was picked up by a really cool Olympia community blog here, check ‘em out.
