On Wednesday, September 15, Seattle’s LGBTQ+ history came alive at MOHAI as community members gathered for a special History Café celebrating the voices, memories, nightlife, activism, and people who helped shape queer life in the Pacific Northwest.
Since 1994, the Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project (NWLGHMP) has collected and preserved oral histories from LGBTQ+ people throughout the region. For this special evening, nine of those histories were brought to life, primarily through readings by community leaders. In a few particularly moving moments, the people who originally contributed the oral histories were there to read their own words.
One of the evening’s most colorful histories came from John Reed, whose oral history was read by Howard Russell, aka Ladie Chablis. Reed’s memories offered a front-row seat to the birth and evolution of Seattle’s Imperial Court and a gay community that was still figuring out what it could become.
Reed traced the court tradition back to San Francisco in the 1960s and José Sarria, whose idea of electing an empress created something wonderfully difficult to categorize. As Reed described it, the court combined monarchy, democracy and a republic into something that was, appropriately, “kind of very gay.”
Seattle soon developed its own version. Reed recalled the first Seattle Ball in November 1971 at the Olympic Hotel, with Scottie elected Empress, followed by her coronation in February 1972 at the Hilton. At the time, Reed was only 18 and discovering Seattle’s gay nightlife for himself.
His recollections painted a vivid picture of a Seattle that has largely disappeared. There was the 107 on Occidental, an underage club where young queer people could gather, along with establishments including the 614, Trojan Shield, Regents Roost, Greek Torch and Macombo. Reed remembered meeting Dominique during the summer of 1972 and being awestruck by her glamour, elegance and commanding presence.
Then there were the balls.
Reed remembered one candidate wearing an electrified hoop-skirt gown covered in gold roses and lights—with an extension cord trailing behind. When the cord came loose, the dress began blinking on and off. Another candidate appeared covered in elephants. Reed compared the spectacle to an MGM musical with “a little bit of cabaret decadence thrown in.”
It was funny, outrageous and glamorous, but Reed’s history also revealed something much more important happening underneath all those sequins.
By the mid-1970s, the court was evolving from a social organization into a significant force within Seattle’s LGBTQ+ community. Empresses including Scottie, Dell, Lola and Dominique helped expand its reach, while the organization began connecting with groups such as the Knights of Malta and the Seattle Committee. Reed remembered court meetings drawing 60 or 70 people—remarkable numbers at a time when queer people had few public places to safely gather.
His story also didn’t romanticize the past. Seattle’s gay community had divisions. Some gay men rejected drag because they believed it reinforced stereotypes. Others resented the idea that an empress could somehow represent them. There were class differences, political differences and cultural divides between the bar crowd, professionals and what Reed remembered as the more countercultural gay community center crowd.
But politics would eventually force those different worlds together.
During the battle over Initiative 13 in 1977 and 1978, Reed recalled the court and the Dorian Group recognizing that, despite their differences, they shared a common fight for gay rights. Each organization brought something different to the table. As Reed remembered it, the court knew how to raise money, while the Dorian Group knew how to direct political action.
That partnership represented something larger than organizational cooperation. A community that sometimes struggled to agree on what it was—or who spoke for it—was learning that protecting LGBTQ+ rights required people from very different corners of that community to work together.
Reed’s oral history was just one of nine shared during the evening, but collectively the stories demonstrated why preserving first-person LGBTQ+ history matters. These weren’t simply accounts of organizations, elections and political battles. They were memories of finding community, falling in love, going dancing, confronting discrimination, building institutions and sometimes just trying to find somewhere to belong.
The evening extended beyond the spoken word. Seattle gay bar maps, photographs and ephemera from the Come Out Seattle History Project helped visitors visualize a queer Seattle that has dramatically changed over the decades. Also on display was a collection curated by Nathan Benedict, adding another layer to the evening’s exploration of the people, places and artifacts that document Seattle’s LGBTQ+ past.
Together, the oral histories and displays made one thing especially clear: queer history isn’t simply a collection of dates, protests, court decisions and political milestones. It lives in people’s memories—in the bars where they gathered, the organizations they built, the friendships they formed, the battles they fought and even the electrified gowns that occasionally came unplugged.
History Café is produced through a partnership between HistoryLink, the Pacific Northwest Historians Guild and MOHAI. On this particular evening, however, history wasn’t sitting quietly behind museum glass.
It was talking, laughing, remembering—and occasionally wearing sequins
Check Back for the rest of the Oral Histories, All this Month.
