Seattle Gay News
Pride 2019 LAYING THE GROUDWORK COVER STORY
Issue 26, Volume 47, June 28, 2019
CLAIMING SPACE PAGE 14
IN AND OUT PAGE 22
DON PAULSON PAGE 25
Laying the groundwork – Coming out in dangerous times
Michele Nota - photo by Cherry Johnson courtesy of NWLGHMP
by Ruth Pettis for the Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project Special to the SGN By the end of 1965 there must have been at least 30-40 people in Seattle who subscribed to the homophile newsletter One, mailed out of Los Angeles by the Mattachine Society. Because that’s how many showed up to hear a talk by Mattachine activist Hal Call, as recalled later by Nicholas Heer, a UW professor who attended. Call was testing the waters to see if a similar effort could be organized here. Afterwards, Heer and several others clustered in an impromptu session that eventually led to forming the Dorian Society, with Heer as its first president. By then, “homophile” organizations had taken root not only in LA, but also in San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia and, of course, New York. If you have watched any of the documentaries about the pre-Stonewall movement, you have seen footage of early Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis activists like Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings, picketing the federal government over its practice of terminating gay civil service employees. Along with their impeccably dressed colleagues, they were out to make a point that gay people willing to take a public stance were not at risk for blackmail, which directly negated the gov-
ernment’s rationale for firing them. It was an audacious statement for the times, when same-sex lovemaking was criminalized and insinuations of it had lasting career consequences. Also in attendance at the Seattle talk was one of our earliest straight allies. Rev. Mineo Katagiri conducted a street ministry for the United Church of Christ. His beat was the seedy 1st Avenue corridor that linked Pioneer Square, site of most of Seattle’s gay bars, with the notorious “Penney’s Corner” uptown, haunt of young gay male hustlers. [“Penney’s Corner” refers to the SW corner of 2nd Ave & Pike St where the downtown J.C. Penney’s department store was located back then.] Full gentrification of this area was still many years off and, after dark, tourists didn’t venture in unless they had personal reasons to do so. Rev. Katagiri was witness to the effects of marginalization. He was on a first-name basis with the down-and-out, the flophouse residents as well as those sites’ owners, the pawn shop proprietors, and the small cadre of well-intentioned helpers who practiced an improvised style of social work, trying to link up the destitute with whatever resources were available. And he lent a sincere and caring ear to the young street hustlers, and was especially disturbed by the dead-end paths into which stigmatization had trapped them. In 2003, Katagiri described his singular
Katagiri Mineo - photo by Ruth Pettis courtesy of NWLGHMP
view of theology. “An insight that I’ve lived with is that the powers that be always, in time, become oppressive because they want to increase their power, and broaden their power. So the question is: how do you keep that from occurring? … The principle with which I look at the world is that change cannot be expected to come from the centers of power. Change will always have to come from those who feel the oppression, and they must organize. They must strengthen themselves. … If you don’t have organized power, you’re not going to be heard. Therefore, whether it’s the Dorian Society … or anything else, you have to have group power. … That’s why I’m always for the oppressed organizing and making their hurts known as well as their hopes.” Katagiri’s intuition linked the efforts of the academic and white collar gays with what he had seen on the streets, knowing that if those in position to influence did not assert a voice, more youths would end up on Penney’s Corner. When Hal Call’s audience gathered after the talk, Katagiri came forward. He offered encouragement, and a place to meet – his office on Capitol Hill. Heer elaborated, “Katagiri saw a problem because there’s no way to get in touch with gay people as a group. He said gay people have to have some sort of organization so when the city wants to pass some law they can get input as to how it would affect gay people and lesbians.”
Author Rebecca Solnit wrote in Hope in the Dark (third edition, 2016), “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen, and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.” “Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous,” Solnit continues, “but it is the less visible long-term organizing and groundwork – or underground work – that often laid the foundation…. Change is rarely straightforward. Sometimes it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds.” Nicholas Heer had recently relocated from the Northeast, and had a wider perspective because of his involvement in Mattachine Society New York. Dorian Society members, he said, “were having the same problems that all gay organizations seem to have. You start off with fairly conservative people, and then they’re radicalized and then split off.” But the Dorian Society persisted and gained membership, approximately half of them from academia, others from the local
see GROUNDWORK page 8