Interview Of Don-Gay Male Olympia 1970-90s

April 2009 interview of Olympia History from Don M. Gay White Male Activist

Interviewer Karama Blackhorn

This was project I was involved with in the early 90s. HIV and AIDS ws just kinda beginning to be understood. And there was finally funding for doing educational work and the state gave money to Thurston county to do outreach to not gay men but men who had sex with men who didn’t identify as gay.

Technicalities to keep it okay?

Yeah, there was a group of us who realized that we couldn’t really approach them with the idea that they were gay men. It had to be to kinda titillate and tantalize so we decided to do a series of comics that we handed out in some of the parks in downtown that people were secretly meeting in and stuff with an HIV message. The comic was based on the dick Tracey comics called dick safety.

Oh I’m excited to see this. This is great.

I did all the art work on these. And actually they are really small. So this is the cover that was on there he was a sex detective.

All this time I’ve never came across these before I love it.

Have you ever heard of the movie the word is out? It was interviews of people in San Francisco in the mid 90’s or something but there is actually a picture of these in the movie. So this was like the first one, large panels here this is the cover. We had four ideas but we only put out two. So this one is the case of back seat B.J. So he come across a car, the car is shaking, you know he come up and shows them how to put on a condom. There was about four of us we would sit around and try and think of ideas. It was fun we had a great time doing this.

When was this about?

I think it was 91’.

Did you do this through Thurston County or a group?

Not really it was just friends. One or two of the guys that were involved worked for the county, Thurston county health department. So they were doing this kinda on the sly, because we couldn’t actually put it through. The county would have shocked to think their money was going into something like this.

Thanks for sharing that, it’s amazing and a great was way to start this. So what I have been learning so far is tons of stuff about feminism and lesbian communities through feminist activism and ways that lesbians ran a lot of organizations in town. So something beyond that I want to learn from you is about male culture but also because you’ve been labeled an honorary dyke, what is your perspective of working towards feminist causes and lesbian solidarity and rights. We can go where you’d like but that’s my main questions for you. So easy place to get there when did you come to Olympia?

I came to Olympia, my freshman year I went to WSU. I worked on the student newspaper; I was the news editor of the daily newspaper four days a week. I got an assignment to do a story on the new college that was opening evergreen in 1971 in the spring of 71’. So I came over here and interviewed the original faculty members and kinda took a tour of stuff and it was kinda just a big mud hole at that point. I mean they hadn’t really started much construction. So I decided to transfer here because I didn’t really like WSU it was really conservative and I thought it was going to be different. There had been student riots the year before and it was very anti war movement but turned our it wasn’t a very big anti-war movement there

A lot of press coverage and hype?

Oh yeah, and it was just a really big university. I had grown up on a farm in small town just outside of Yakima actually. And I didn’t like the school that much, I felt really kinda impersonal. So I decided to come to evergreen in 71’ it opened in the fall of 71’ and actually it didn’t open until October. The first few weeks we couldn’t be on campus. They had us housed in an apartment complex in town because the dorms weren’t built yet. And when we finally moved in I think it was after thanks giving to the dorms there was no carpet or anything it was bad really depressing. So I was an original student the very first year. I was already a feminist by then, my sister was a pretty active feminist and she had a really big influence on me.

An older sister?

Yeah two years older. And she actually started several women’s groups in Pullman at WSU and had been involved with pretty radical movement activities at the time. But I also think you know it was back in the day and the anti-war movement was a big influence on me too I think so many things were changing at that point plus the civil rights movement there was just a lot of stuff going on that made you question everything. I grew up in this little conservative area and I was kinda the high school radical. I really felt strongly that men and women’s roles were messed up and I didn’t want to follow that.


Were you out at that point?

I didn’t come out until I was in college.

But political otherwise?

Yeah, yeah, defiantly very political and question gender roles from a really early age. I didn’t really understand all it that well but I consciously tried to not dress like a man and I felt pretty strong about feminism. Both my mom and my sister were very strong women and had a very big influence on me and at the times I just count see following in those gender roles. I just seemed so unfair that women didn’t have an equal place in society. That all preceded my coming out.

That’s great, checking your gender issues before even coming out.

And all of my really close friends were women. It was actually pretty lonely when I did finally come out most men, most gay men are not particularly feminist and I used to always say you could fit all the politically active feminist gay men into one room on the west coast and I think knew almost all of them

How did you get involved even those you had these politics as a gay man did you have problems getting into the feminist and queer community?

I think something that happened in the early 70s is that there was a lot of, and this wasn’t just with women, there was a lot of separatism going on. Everyone was trying to figure out their identity and their place in society and they wanted to be by themselves to figure it out. Women didn’t want to have to deal with men; gay didn’t want to deal with straights. Blacks didn’t want to deal with whites you know I mean there was a lot of separatist movements that was going on and I think it was a fine it was a stage everybody had to go through. And I felt stung by that a little bit with my role and relationship with women but I understood. I never felt like bitter or anything like that, I remember my sister took me to a, she moved to san Francisco and became quite a well know feminist in san Francisco and I remember visiting her once and she took me to some of the book stores she really liked and there were times when they wouldn’t let me come in and things like that.

A time when they were carving out their own space and making sure no one disturbs it even when they’re not trying to.

Yeah, yeah and you know I completely understood that I never felt bad about it at all. So that was something that I think happened for several years in the early to mid seventies. But I still had really close friendships with women. I lived in a collective household it was called Emma Goldman Collective which I started it was mostly women when we first started there were a couple other men but for a long time I think I might have been the only man. We did a lot of political organizing, a theatre group.

What was the theatre group called?

Theater of the Unemployed.

Was it focused on labor and class?

It was sort of like street theatre oriented and real issue oriented so we were always looking for new issues to write [plays about. Our theory was that we would involve the people that were in the middle of the issue that was going on in writing the play and performing it. For instance we did the phone company and being a monopoly before they broke up the phone company. And several of the people were employees of the phone company. We did a play about government programs and we involved the government workers in writing it and performing it and stuff. But soon we started moving in to more feminist plays and there was a lesbian poet named Judy Gran who had written a book of poetry and we took one her longer poems and made it into a play. That was pretty interesting, we performed that in Seattle at a black theatre company and they kinda censored it because of the language was inflammatory.
That was an interesting experience.I’m kinda rambling here sorry.

There is such richness to the stories and work that has happened around here and around these issues it no worry. I’ve heard from so many angles the random stuff you’ve done with your time that it would have to be kinda sporadic. What other sorts of Olympia queer actions have you been involved with? I heard about you picketing at places like the evergreen Christian center, do you remember that?

Oh yeah. Well I’ve always been a militant atheist. I think I became an atheist at 14. And to my mother’s horror that may have been the very first things of consciousness.

The first thing you had to come out as?

Oh yeah ha. It seemed like for a while in the 60s religion didn’t have a part of anything and then suddenly in the 70s there was like this big movement that started with Billy graham and Larry flints nemesis, jerry Farwell. They started this big kinda right wing christen movement so every opportunity we had we tried to protest what they were doing. They were pretty horrible a lot of times. There’s a lot of anti-abortion stuff and uh...

Serve your husbands kinda stuff…

Yeah. That’s why there’s a lot of things that we did to protest that kind of movement some of the things that they were organizing. I don’t really remember the issue exactly was at the church. Oh man, I was trying to think of the sequence of events to me that went on. So the collective household started first. Then outta that we developed the print shop which was part of the collective.

As a part of the Emma Goldman house?

Yeah. The theatre of the Unemployed started as a way to kinda focus on unemployment issues and several of the people that were involved in starting that wanted to do different kinds of community organizing around employment issues. And we realized at one point that we needed to have more access to media so we decided to start a print shop. Do you know grace Cox?

I know of her. I’ve been trying to get a hold of her I’ve left like 4 messages on her phone and tried to catch her at the co-op a few times.

Okay good. She’s big in the co-op movement and actually I was involved a lot with that too but grace and I and this other man the bat guy in town Greg Faulks started the print shop. Greg was a print but grace and I knew nothing about it at all. He sort of taught us how to be printers and screen printers. We were kinda like the movement print shop for a long long time. We did a lot of stuff for political organizations like the American Indian movement but we also just printed stuff for little community groups in Olympia like the bus schedules for several years. So we kinda had a business angle too and that sorta financed our political activities.
I was told you had a calendar you put out every year that was well received?
Well we did it one year I don’t think we did it more than that. That was like 92 or 93, no 80 something, 79’ wow it was too long ago.

When did the print shop start?


The print shop started in 75’. Just before I graduated. I actually dropped out of evergreen and I went back to finish up because my parents really wanted to finish my B.A. and I didn’t really have much left to do so I think I spent a couple of quarters in 75 and 76 but I was working at the print shop while in school. WE stopped when we w went out of business in 85’ so it was ten years.
What are some things you distinctly remember printing and doing with the print shop? Things related to the lgbt community, like printing the matrix and issues?
There was a lot of things going on, a lot of different trundles in the community coming out of the print shop. Grace and Jene and some of the people we’ve mentioned were involved with a magazine called Matrix for a long time many years. And I think it was monthly.

Yeah that’s what Jene said.

Yeah it takes a tremendous amount of work to put out a monthly magazine. They wrote everything the entire layout and it was all printed at the print shop. There would be maybe a long weekend and the entire group of women would come to the print shop and just take it over.

The lesbian work day at the shop basically.


Oh yeah. They would spend all that weekend typing out and typesetting doing graphics and doing all the layout and everything and they would get it all laid out and grace and I would print it. So that was major activity. That went on for many years.

It ran until 84’.

Sounds about right. I wasn’t really involved with that because it was all women but I certainly helped where I could and supported where I could.

Could you tell me more about the men’s magazine issues?

There was a man I remembered and I think he still lives in Seattle you might be able to get a hold of him Jeff Cochrane. He was a student at evergreen and he was going just as I was finishing so we just barely overlapped. He was really active in the gay men’s community. We sorta had a mutual boyfriend and that was a little contentious but he really wanted to do this magazine like matrix but from a men’s perspective. I also had a really close friend that had always wanted to do an art magazine. And he was a really good writer and he was and jess was trying to do that too so we gathered some of our friends together to try and do something similar to matrix but we just never could sustain it. I don’t think it lasted more than about a year and a half at most but it was interesting. A lot of work, I think I wrote some really good stuff I don’t know if I have any copies of it anymore. I have this stash of all of this stuff that we printed and even before the print shop I worked with Greg and a man named john woo who was a designer here and some of his stuff may actually be on display in the college but they had a silk screen shop in the basement of their house it was called Blanco y negro. And Greg and john taught me to do silk-screening before the print shop. And I have all of that stuff under the stairs of my house. We printed so many things and just have I mean sheets of paper it’s really kinda stuck away and I haven’t really gone through it in many, many years. There was a reunion of all the women who worked on matrix several years ago. And they asked me to pull out some of that stuff because I don’t think grace has as much of the archive as I do. We took over Capital Theater and put up all of the artwork that we had done on the inside. It was amazing to see of that again it had been a long time. So that’s like 30 years ago now.


How long did you stay in hard Rain print collective?

Well we were always on a shoestring. They way we started was grace and I we were pretty working class and poor. We had no money, we had no connections to any kind of capital to start a business which is so silly when I think about it in some ways but I think we borrowed $1500 from our relatives all combined and we bought this print shop in Seattle that had gone bankrupt. The guy printed racing forms for the horse races and then he would go deliver the racing forms then get paid then bet all the money on the horses and he did this forever and lost the business. So he was trying to get rid of all this equipment and presses and stuff and he was pretty desperate to sell it so we bought this entire print shop for $1500 which doesn’t sound like much but back then it was equivalent to maybe 10000 today or something like that. It was kinda in bad shape, he locked the door one day and all the ink was left in the presses, I mean it was a mess everything was rusty and oh. So we kinda had to take it all apart and recondition it and put it back together. We spent several months doing that and we moved into a little building that was kind of a garage that was next to lapatiseunson. Oh no it’s called Portofino now on division it’s this old house that was a restaurant but next to that was this old house that’s not there anymore. It was a pretty small little building and it was in bad shape but that was a our print shop for two years but then we moved downtown where the radio station is on Washington

Right across the transit station?

Yeah. So we were in that space for the rest of the time until 85’. And moving all those presses up those stairs and then down again was not fun oh my god. We had to build a big ram and it was like two flights of stairs and these huge heavy machines. There were some scary moments doing that strained muscles and all that. We had a lot of friends but you know were always struggling. We never had enough capital to keep the business growing and replacing things and we were always living day to day month to month. I think I lived on $300 a month for 10 years something like that. It was not good for my social security too. The print shop did pay into all those things. We paid all our industrial insurance and health coverage and the business bought a car for me and grace. So we did okay but it was a pretty meager existence for a long time. After ten years of that you have to do something else and we were at each other’s thoughts at some points and a lot of arguments about what we should be doing. It was right before desktop publishing happened that we went out of business. We had this clunky old typesetter that was actually at the time was a computer typesetter that was pretty advanced but it used really terrible chemicals and we knew if we’re going to keep going we were going to have to figure out how to capitalize on the new printing desktop publishing industry that was happening. We just didn’t have the money to do it though so we decided we’re arguing all the time and it’s really hard to do this, let’s just quit. And we closed the business. Grace became manager of the food co-op right away and has done that ever since. I got a job, I had several really bad jobs for awhile but then I got a job as a graphic designer for the department of transportation eventually I became the director and then I left there and went to the department of health when it was formed in 1990.


I didn’t realize it was started so late.


It was part of DSHS until then. I studied marketing and design and they wanted someone to help develop educational materials. I was writer and designer I was a perfect fit. I was able to pay off my student loans you know. After being an anarchist printer for ten years working for the state was a little strange. I always wanted to smash the state but now I was the state. At least you’re educating with their money.

Because I’m focusing this study on LGBTQ community how to you think your printing collective, hard rain printing related to queer life and community beyond matrix and issues? Any further tendrils as you put it and any further influence in Olympia?

Well I think we just made everything very visible in the community and sort of respectable in a way it hadn’t been before maybe.

A little more legitimate?

Yeah. I don’t know exactly. It was sort of a hub, sort of the center of a lot of things that we were doing and things we were all involved in. and grace and I were both pretty active n gay rights so it was kind of a meeting place. A place were a lot of activities were planned and discussion were had. People were comfortable there they knew they could come there and be safe. A lot of community activist were involved in different things in the print shop, we may have employed them for a short while. I think we probably employed every gay person in Olympia for awhile. I guess that’s how it had an influence. It wasn’t so much that it was focused on queer issues but it was certainly a place where it happened and [people came together over gay stuff and felt comfortable.

Are there some things around Olympia and things you’ve done that you would like the talk about?

Anna Schlecht worked really hard on although she doesn’t remember this so much that it was me. I was pretty active in getting the non discrimination ordinance passed with the city council. That took a lot of politicking and we were the second city in washing ton to have one in place.

Seattle was the first?

Yeah and not that many years before.

When did this pass in Olympia?
It was in the 80’s I don’t remember exactly.

Okay Seattle passed late 70’s like 78 I think.

Sounds right. Here there was a couple of people who were somewhat sym[pathetic and we kinda had to meet in secret and not tell anyone on the council what was going on and they had to plan the vote on a time when certain people were not going to be there and not be there/. It was just a lesson in politics and timing. And that was another place where the religious community got really riled up and wanted to try to stop us. I worked with, when I first started; I worked with a bunch of other folks to start a gay and lesbian state employees association. It didn’t last very long. It was just hard to meet and we didn’t have much in common. Those of us involved tried to get our agencies to pass non-discrimination policies within their departments. We worked very hard with cal Anderson who was the first openly gay legislature to get an executive order signed by the governor so that all government agencies could not discriminate. When that happened it really didn’t seem like we needed to have that organization anymore. What else? You saw dick safety.

How long were you guys working with that guerilla advertising for HIV?

For a couple of years. Unfortunately, the really sad thing about it was that some of the men who were really deeply involved with HIV education stuff also had HIV and it was during the time where there was no therapy for AIDS and people got sick pretty fast and died really quickly. And they were a lot of friends who just went really fast. That didn’t really chance for quite a bit later.

So Don, as we’ve spoken about before the majority of my informants have been lesbians and their perspective is that HIV and AIDS had practically no influence on the Olympia queer Community. I didn’t feel that would be right, do you?

I wouldn’t say that.

What is your perspective and experience of it all then? In their perspective they didn’t see much organizing around it or impact them. But with the separatist politics still in mind it would make sense for women who sleep with women to miss out on some of that visibility.

Yeah, yeah well I think small towns gay men especially in small towns always try to get away. They would go to the big cities and of course that were the big problems with AIDS and Seattle for sure where there was a lot of problems. I often say that the reason I survived was because I stayed in Olympia. Well I certainly had my share of adventures; I mean it’s amazing to me. I knew a lot of people that died and was very involved with them. I was just very lucky. Most of the men who had AIDS and needed services needed to go to Seattle there just wasn’t anything here. In that sense there wasn’t a lot of organizing around it because people just went were they could get services. I think the role that Olympia played was in terms of state government and there were a lot of, quite a large, actually two offices that grew out of the crisis and the health department and a lot of the employees of those offices were gay men. So our role was kinda setting the policy of the state and working in government at that level not really at the level of chicken soup brigade. That was Seattle; people went to Seattle to die because that’s where they could get any help.

When did it become visible in Olympia itself? Was there a turning point or time period where AIDS and HIV started to have more visibility of impact on the community, more education like dick safety?

I think just as soon as everywhere else. I knew a man who was actually the landlord of the first print shop space on the Westside he got HIV in 83’. Just right after it was named. And he died really fast probably in several months. So you know there were people that had it in the community there were some pretty awful things that happened here. St. Peters hospital some of the nurses would refuse to go near r in the rooms of people who had HIV. They would put up tapes across the door so that people would not go in. They would dress in these outrageous suits to be protected. You know there were kids, young young men I remember one young man who was probably 17 years old in the late 80s who got it who was disowned by his family and had a pretty sad life. He had enough good friends in town that he was able to kinda be somewhat comfortable. And that kind of stuff happened a lot. I think in small towns it was worse in some way but I think it was bad everywhere. You think of New York as being progressive but this kind of stuff was going on there too. You read Larry Cramer’s plays and the gay writers of the times it was going on everywhere. In small times especially there was just so little tolerance and people were so awful. So people tried to leave the small towns.

So for those who didn’t leave, what was lighter side of the gay male scene in Olympia in general. You spoke of handing out dick safety in parks and spots for gay men.

Well everyone always wanted a bar. That was the dream so everyone would have a bar to go. But it was never financially viable. Several times they would take over the bar. And have a gay night.

Like the Conestoga?

No that was a different thing. It’s on like 4th and capital that old mercantile building there. There was a woman names Laura may Abrahams who had a restaurant called the rainbow. It was just like a hippie restaurant. They served whole grain bread and homemade soups that were kinda strange. But it was a kinda really hippie kinda place. But Every Wednesday night for many years it was gay night at the rainbow. That kind of thing was going on. The gay men’s social network tried to influence that somewhat because there was no meeting place or obvious nightlife they would try to organize events like volleyball was one of the more successful things they did. But even like game night where they would play board games or cards or something like that. And we had potlucks all the time. Potlucks were big here. I think that might have started it at evergreen. The co-op movement may have played into that too though. But anyway there wasn’t a lot of social outlet for the community and that’s still true here I think. If you a young gay person in Olympia you don’t want to be here you want to go somewhere else. And it’s been like that since I got here too. There was a bar called thecla for awhile. It really did try to open as a gay bar. And they tried for a really long time to keep it that way. But it just, it’s hard. I think the fate of all gay bars is when they become really popular. You know it’s a really fun place to be and people dance really well and the music is really good, then it gets taken over by straight people.

The pattern that I’ve learned about today is that it’s fun and gay so the fag hags come along, then more straight girlfriends come along then all the guys find out it’s fun and straight girls are there then the homophobia kicks in and all the gay people stop going. Any different?

Exactly the same, that defiantly happened then. There was a bar in Seattle like that I may have talked about when I spoke at the 35th anniversary of the EQA. It was called Shelly’s leg in Seattle. This woman was at a Memorial Day service in one of the parks in Seattle. One of the cannons they shot off exploded which shot off her leg. She got this huge settlement from the city and she opened this bar called Shelly’s leg. It was a lesbian and gay bar and it was the hottest place.

Wasn’t it a disco hall?

Yeah and this was at the height of disco. It was the best place and they had really great music. So crowded. It was amazing. But because there was no place like it in Seattle it was attractive to everyone who was young and wanted to go dancing so it didn’t take long to get taken over by straight people.

That was the sign that had the gusto to put up the sign though that this is a gay bar for gay patrons and their guests. Too bad it didn’t seem to work.

Oh yeah. That was about 75’ or 76’ something like that.

Do you know what openly gay places were like before then?

You know there were places in the 40s and 50s but they were all underground. It was all very secretive. Nothing was really open until stonewall, the stonewall riots.

Was it a real quick transformation after the riots? Even locally to Olympia?

Yes. Very. I mean in some of the big cities there were openly gay bars but people tried to remain very anonymous and they didn’t want to be seen there. Usually there were back entrances and things like that. But right away things changed almost overnight after stonewall. A lot of drugs a lot of drinking you know.

Were there other public sites for queer people to meet?

Kinda, actually the bathrooms at the park by the lake right on Water Street and legion there is kinda a nefarious story there one of the Schmitt family men who owned the Olympia brewery was secretly gay. You know it was their family business for years and years. And he was secretly gay and he would go to the bathrooms at capital Lake Park and have secret anonymous sex with men in the bathroom and the Olympia police set up an entrapment, a sting operation for several years to bust people and he was one of the first people who got busted. It was this whole scandal because it was the big corporate family in Olympia. They were totally embarrassed. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in there but how anybody could, it’s so open it would be extremely risky. You kinda had to have a death wish or something have sex in there. And at marathon park, the bushes at marathon park. And across the street there was a big open area that was kinda like the where the Percival creek there. It was easy to go back in the woods there so that’s where our little project was to hand out condoms and the dick safety cartoons. There wasn’t really much else. It’s kinda sad. You mentioned the Conestoga though and what that was about was it was a family new building on water street and up towards the capital more. They opened a restaurant on the top floor and it was going to be this really fancy restaurant and they had a dance floor and they tried to do this big disco night for a long time. At the time it was the only place to go dancing so a lot of us queer people would go there and dance and the owners got really upset that same sex couples were dancing so they first threw people out then they tried to institute a dress code. So we would dress up really fancy and they would know that we were coming because we were all dressed up because no one else dressed up to go there. We just had a lot of protests around that and we would go and dance and crash it and there would be big scenes eventually they just couldn’t keep their straight clientele anymore because it was too much and people didn’t want to be seen there so they went out of business.

That’s amazing; I heard it even only took a few months. I heard and read about a big fight where cops where called and all the queers were drug out of the building right before the dress code was put in.

No I wasn’t there but I know what you’re talking about. Subsequent confrontations I was defiantly made to leave. I wasn’t ever arrested for it but they defiantly had a cop stationed an Olympia cop stationed at the stairs. It was really intense I hated that. You know another thing that happened here was the hands off Washington. Ever heard about that?

Nope, don’t think so. Not yet.

There was a couple of attempts to pass initiatives to overturn gay rights like the non-discrimination clauses and things like that. Or to outlaw us, in the late 60’s WA was one of the first states to get rid of sodomy laws. The religious right was trying the reinstitute that. There was a big initiative in Oregon, there was a non-discrimination law in Portland and there was a big movement to overturn that. A lot of people here in Olympia was involved in trying to stop that. I think it was actually passed.

When about was that, the 60’s?

No more in the late 80’s early 90’s. Similar things were happening then here so we formed a group called Hands off Washington. I wasn’t real active that but I did support activities and did what I could. We did at one point try to pass a gay rights initiative but that didn’t work it failed miserably. So that was a big thing in the 90’s around here. I was involved with theatre a lot I mentioned that I was in a theatre group but I also did community theatre I was involved with the old community theater companies here. I performed several times in Babes with Big Hair. Which was a benefit for the organization that kinda preceded UCAN. I think eventually it was UCAN.

What was the name of the organization?

I think it was like Olympia Aids Network. But UCAN is more than just Thurston County. And several of the people involved were of course gay and this one guy Rick Waymeyer and he may still be around, Scott Stilton and Rick Waymeyer organized this benefit for UCAN every year and they had all of the theater people they knew do sort of like a review little vignettes and show songs and stuff like that. It always ended with a big piece of the AIDS quilt was flown in the back of theatre and there was some dramatic group song. It was a really big tear jerker event and it was always pretty successful and I actually directed a lot of plays one of the first ones I did in 1990 was torch song trilogy which was Harvey Firestien who is a famous new York playwright. There’s a movie of torch song trilogy it was written in the late 80’s actually 3 one act plays that we put into a very long 3 and half hour show/ I produced and directed that in 1990. It was the first really big production of a gay themed play in Olympia.

Was it well received?

Yeah we sold out every night.

Where was it done at?

In the Olympia performing arts center?

The capital?

No the big one near it. The state theatre. It was in the black box which is the little theatre on the side there. I think we had a 125 or 130 seats and it sold out for like three weeks or something like that. Marla Beth Elliot, do you know her? She is on the faculty here, she’s in righteous mothers which is an all women’s band and she was in it and fabulous and so there was some pretty famous people who were in the show and made it successful. My sister and I were going to write a book on gay siblings and we actually had a contract with seal press. What we were going to do was collect stories of gay siblings around the country and we worked on it for two years and collected quite a few stories but seal press wanted to be really an only women’s press and they were not comfortable with me being a coeditor so they canceled our contract. So we never produced the book but it was an interesting idea and I wish we could have finished that. There is a lot antidotal experiences with gay people where at least one other sibling is gay also. At least with my friends, it seems like an interesting phenomenon.

It is! I have several friends that have a gay sibling too. My lady has a gay younger brother as do I nearly all the lesbian, dykes that have a little brother I know have a younger gay sibling.

Right. That’s why we wanted to explore it wasn’t really nature or nature. But that never happened but we had a good time trying to work on it. There were other things too though. There was gay men’s theater collective that I was involved with here. We tried to, I had seen this show in San Francisco it was called Crimes against Nature. It was just an amazing play it was these 9 men and they had all told their own individual stories in this play and it was about things they had done in their lives to be able to survive being gay. This was in 76’. And I took my mom to it she kinda freaked out but it really had a strong impression on me. It was really creatively produced and some of the things was like this one guy that survived by being a comedian. He did a standup comedy routine as part of the play. It was hysterical. One of my favorite lines of all times was he said he was a lesbian feminist trapped in a faggots body. And that really was me. So there was these 9 vignettes of different stories. And I wanted to do something like that when I came back from San Francisco. So I got several of my friends together that was going to write something like that. We did a lot of theater activities but never actually produced anything. But it was pretty fun. I also worked on a couple issues of the national magazine that was called RFD rural fags digest or something like that. Ti was a magazine for gay men in small towns around the United States. And they were kinda headquartered around Wolf Creek Oregon and I worked writing some stuff on a couple of issues. I visited the group that put it out in Oregon, spent a Christmas break pr something like that down there. It was really fun. They were the founders of the fairy movement.

I was leaning towards asking about the fairy movement soon. Could you speak more to that?

I never really got that involved with it but a lot of the people that worked on RFD worked on it and it stayed in Oregon. I think they still do their annual gathering. What that place, a big hot springs resort I can’t think about it now.

Yeah still happening, the men who sleep with men support group through UCAN just traveled down or are there now for the May Day festival they’re holding down there.

Yeah it has seemed to last from the late 70’s. there was a book that was put out that I really loved I remember it was explaining the history of the fairy movement and it divided into three camps there were the gay men, the rich gay men, then there were the fairies. And they all had their own kinda little rituals and beliefs. I thought I was a rather interesting analysis.
I also did a radio show at evergreen for about two years called Gays of Our Lives.

What was it about was it talking, music, issues?

We tried to feature gay artists. Kaos has the format to promote independent artists and there was a lot of women’s music going on then late 70, 80- and into the 90’s. Lots of independent lesbian women’s groups. And some men, there was a guy in Seattle called Charlie…oh geeze I can't even remember now see I’m getting old this is embarrassing. But I had some friends in Portland that were involved with theater that did a lot of music. Chris Tanner, and there were these little independent little groups and we would do things like a show on inheritance rights and how difficult it was for gay and lesbian people to deal with what happens when people died. And having mutual possessions and stuff like that. There were three or four students that wanted to start this radio show. I had been out of school for quite awhile, when I did that I was still working at the print shop. Then they all left town and I was the only one left so I did this radio show by myself for quite awhile then I couldn’t do it myself anymore. It was kinda sad it went away but it was fun I learned a lot doing that.

You’ve just done so many random things.

Well I’ve just been around long enough. If you live long enough.

But not very many people stay involved all that long so you still working in the community is just great.

Yeah but now I don’t do quite so many things now. I still have an interest and I still support anyone I can. One thing that was really ground breaking that happened here and I think it was in 74’ was the children of the seventies conference. This was just started organizing it soon as I dropped out of school. But I did attend a lot of it. It was a 4 day symposium they called it. Where they brought in artists and writers and philosophers and groups a music groups from all over the country to figure out what the gay movement was about. The whole tone just kinda freaked out because they had never seen so many queer people in Olympia. It was an amazing event and it was amazing it even happen. I think the homo-a-go-go event downtown is comparable. And that was just so early. The stonewall riots just happened like five years before that.