June 1, 2026 — Pride arrives. This year it comes under the most anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in American history — more than 850 anti-LGBTQ+ bills filed in 2025 alone, executive orders banning transgender people from military service, eliminating LGBTQ+ inclusive curricula in schools, moving to restrict the HIV medications keeping people alive. The message from the dominant culture is familiar. It has been delivered before.
June 6, 1889 — Seattle rebuilds after a catastrophic fire above its original footprint, creating a maze of underground tunnels beneath what is now Pioneer Square. Seattle in the late 1800s was a booming timber and logging town filled with transient male workers. Women were scarce. Men lived together in camps, worked together, depended on each other for survival. Male-to-male relationships formed — for protection, for resources, for companionship, and for love. The camps largely tolerated them as a matter of practical necessity.
Seattle Notes:
—The underground spaces of Pioneer Square became some of the first queer safe havens on the West Coast.
—The Double Header bar has been operating there since 1934 — the oldest continuously operating gay bar in the United States.
—The Casino, operating from 1930 to 1946, was one of the few places on the entire West Coast that permitted same-sex dancing.
—The Garden of Allah, frequented by both gay men and lesbians through the 1940s and 1950s, featured female impersonators and vaudeville acts.
Gay culture did not arrive in Seattle. It was there before the founding.
September 25, 1968 — ABC airs Here Come the Brides, two seasons set in the 1870s Seattle logging frontier. Three brothers, a mountain full of timber, a camp full of lonely men, and a scheme to import one hundred marriageable women from Massachusetts to keep the logging operation going. The show was beloved. It was also something more than it appeared. Bobby Sherman, who played the youngest Bolt brother and became a teenage idol, was said to have been in a relationship with Sal Mineo. David Soul, who played the brooding middle brother, went on to play the gay-coded Detective Hutch in Starsky & Hutch — a partnership so openly affectionate that producer Aaron Spelling called it “TV’s first heterosexual love affair.” A logging camp full of desperate men needing attention, for gay audiences watching in 1968, was indeed a rainbow moment fully understood.
May 29, 2026 — The Orange Suite responds to the avalanche of current anti gay legislation with four digital collages celebrating a fulsome array of gay male love and identity, each panel distinct, the architecture constant. The suite is dedicated to every man who built this country while hiding who he was. He deserved better. He always did. — Behan
