Celebrating 46 Years! Issue 26 Volume 48
FRIDAY June 26, 2020 FREE!
25¢ in bookstores & newsstands
Remembering George
Seattle Gay News S E AT T L E ’ S L G B T Q N E W S & E N T E R TA I N M E N T W E E K LY
“Portrait of the Activist as a Young Man” – Rudolph George Bakan, age 18, circa 1959/60 – Portrait by Virginia Newman – Photo by Renee Raketty
Remembering George Bakan by Gaysha Starr Olympia 29 The Empress of Good Fortune & the First Asian Pacific Islander Empress of Seattle 1999-2000 Special to the SGN How symbolic for me to pay my respects to George Bakan, the publisher of Seattle Gay News, on the 93rd birthday of my father, Primo Matencio and the day of the final funeral for George Floyd. George, to all of us in Washington state’s LGBTQIA community, was our father. Even if you didn’t know him, you benefited from his lifelong commitment to activism. Whenever I would introduce him on stage or acknowledge him from the audience, I would credit him as “The Grandpapa of Capitol Hill” and the crowd would cheer. When I first started doing drag, I met
George in the spring of 1993 through his photographer Anya. I was photographed for the first time in the paper with my drag mother Hiram Starr, and I was wearing a Carmen Miranda outfit for a Gloria Estefan number. Thank god that issue is somewhere buried deep in the SGN archives. Every Friday, the drag queens would grab an SGN to see whose photo and name in bold print would appear, because back then we didn’t have Facebook or Instagram, just the SGN. I came to the office with Anya and told George I would like to write for the paper and that I had experience writing in my high school paper. Slowly, he gave me unpaid assignments, and when Anya moved on, I started to write about drag events and our queens. George believed in and loved drag queens so much that he featured us regularly in the paper, donated ad space for
see GAYSHA STARR page 9
George Bakan: Rescuer of lost souls by Michael McNamara Special to the SGN George Bakan and I met at Spag’s. Guess I caught his eye straddling the pool table to make a shot. I did have a fine ass back in the day. He chatted me up, we flirted a bit, and a he took me to his Capitol Hill apartment. He was leaving his real estate career and life in the Tri-Cities. I was leaving the Navy after they caught me smoking weed. It was 1982, I was 22, homeless and kind of drifting. So our first night together was just two tricks on a one-night stand. I needed a place to stay and George needed to get laid. We went our way for a couple of days, but I had to go back for seconds. He wasn’t home, so I sat on the hood of his light blue 1950s era Rambler station wagon, with fins. It was totally crammed with stuff! He sees
me sitting on his car and says, with his huge smile, “Hey, look who showed up!” That smile melted my heart. “This guy really likes me,” I thought. So we hooked up and began a conversation. More than anything else our relationship was an intense, on-going, passionate conversation that lasted 20 years. George was always the smartest person in the room. Even when that room was filled with Senators and Governors and Chiefs of Police. In 2005 George took me to the inauguration of Gov. Christine Gregoire. He was not dressed for the occasion. It was a grand evening strolling from table to table. Slurping oysters on the halfshell, me drinking the wine, George ever the teetotaler was not. Every two minutes someone would see George, start gushing, say “Hey, George!”, and come over for big hugs. Like they were
see MCNAMARA page 9