Customer Reviews

Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging

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The book Gay Seattle covers the effect gay folks had on Seattle (and the reverse) from the '70's to recent times. It includes names and dates and is a great sourcebook for further study.

What an interesting history from what I can see online. Especially the information dealing with the now rabidly anti-gay spectre known as Fr. Robert Sirico who is dealt with at length in this book. What is crucial to note is the vacillating, impressionable and unstable picture of Sirico that is painted. Could any reasonable person not see a parallel in his later "conversion" back to reactionary Roman Catholicism?? What a tawdry tale of this man displays, and for historians, one of the most pathetic ambles through complex moral issues possible. Sirico and Seattle's gay history is a very telling and damining matter.

I'm just finishing off Gay Seattle, by Gary Atkins, and can't recommend it too highly. The history is local, but the "general" history is good, gripping and valuable, and serves as a microcosm for gay history across the country. I'd forgotten how dreadful the '70's were, and how close we came to losing a lot of very solid gains. The religionists and the conservatives took over, and for a while there it was pretty bleak - quite like now: defeats all over, then slow progress. The politcal end of the book is good to read too, and reads like a good discussion of the various "how's" of political/social progress.

Well-written, immediate, and hard to put down.

Highly recommended.

NRB

Readable but superficial history of Seattle gay life from the anti-sodomy days a century ago to its appeal many decades later. Atkins offers nothing like the sophisticated analysis of George Chauncey's Gay New York or even recent gay and lesbian histories of Portland, Oregon or Buffalo, New York.

The journey that I have been led is a difficult one - from the mud flat, a detour to Steilacoom, a small climb up to Denny's knoll, and the courage ascend to the Hills.

The tearing, triumphs, grindings of teeth, and the celebrations -as words capture the emotions of the past, they captivate my consciousness and draw out parallel emotions from within myself.

The author has told his own story, keeping little distance between himself and his words, creating a close intimacy between story of the past and myself:

As Francis Framer was straitjacketed and carried off, it was my own scream for help that I hear. When her eyelid was pulled open and her eyeball stared right into a spearing ice pick, it was my eyes that are forcibly shut.

The vaudevillian movements underground come through my ingertips as I touch these words on the pages. And I gyrate my hips on Shelly's Leg.

Triumph comes to my face when it was down on 13. Shadow clouds my emotion when it was down on Cal'sbill.

Reading the book was a difficult journey for me, because, well, it had been a difficult journey indeed for those who had walked the path. But it is a journey well deserving of its travelers. As I look about Seattle, I find the reflections of my past: I hear my own language speaking through the many entrances that I have not entered. I see pictures of myself hung on the walls of places that I have never been. My heart echoes the steps taken by people whose names I have scarcely known. Today, I have, I own a sense a dwelling.