One of the more fascinating details on Beneath the Streets's Queer History Tour: these spikes were installed on railings around basement windows in 1940s Pioneer Square to dissuade gay men from sitting there while cruising in the neighborhood.

— पांच हजार दो सौ तैंतीस —

I have a 31-shot photo album of the Queer History Tour I took myself to last night; it now takes my total Pride 2022 photo albums to six; one more and I'll match a previous record, and two more will be a new record—which is very likely, at least once Trans Pride actually happens in September.

These "Queer History Tours" proves so popular that, well after all the Wednesday evening dates they had sold out, they added Thursday evening tours too, and I got just one ticket under the wire before even those sold out. Thus, even though Tracy expressed interest in coming with me, especially bringing her recently-out lesbian older sister, she missed out on the ticket buying opportunity.

I was both surprised and heartened to see that I wasn't even the only one who came alone; at least three other people did: one was a very tall, middle-aged gay man; one appeared to be (maybe?) a trans man in his mid-thirties; and my favorite was a gay kid who could not have been older than 18, in from the suburbs somewhere and having just graduated high school, as I overheard him tell our tour guide during one of their several conversations walking between points of interest in Pioneer Square. He said he had done a report on the Stonewall Riots as a class project, and said he felt it was important for young queer people to learn about their history. I thought all of that was awesome, on top of the fact that he came to this thing by himself, something I would have been terrified to do at 18 (and not just because I was closeted at 18; I would not have been brave enough even at 20 or 22).

Anyway, I've got maybe two thirds of the photos done with mostly detailed captions, often including links to other pages with more information to source what we had been told about points of interest on the tour. I've actually transposed three of the captions from Flickr into this post, going in the opposite direction of how I usually do this—usually I paste captions from a travelogue email into Flickr and then into here, but I didn't do a travelogue for this event.

The tour was at 7:00, went on for about 80 minutes, and Shobhit drove me there on his way to Home Depot to return the shower faucet cartridge we didn't need, of the two he bought the night before: we did it! With the help of more borrowed tools from Alexia, before dinner last night we finished up the replacement in the guest bathroom. The leak is stopped! That stupid dripping has probably been going on for two years or more. I bet our water bill goes down.

— पांच हजार दो सौ तैंतीस —

I chose the three photos in this post just because I thought they would be the best mix of visually interesting and yielding the most interesting or fun information. Consider the photo below, of the Smith Tower:

When you visit the Smith Tower observatory as a tourist, there's a few historical displays, one of them of the Submarine Room, a gay bar that existed in the building's basement in the sixties.

I nice little double entendre, albeit only in retrospect: our tour guide noted that when the Smith Tower was built and broke a certain height record, it had been referred to in the paper as "The biggest erection on the west coast."

— पांच हजार दो सौ तैंतीस —

One of the more interesting stories on Beneath the Streets's Queer History Tour: the history behind "Shelly's Leg," a gay bar in Pioneer Square between around 1973 and 1978. It's the stuff of legend in local queer history, both in terms of its beginning:

[Shelly] Bauman had been living in Seattle for about a year and a half after moving throughout the U.S. as an exotic dancer when she went to Seattle’s first Bastille Day Parade in Pioneer Square in 1970 at age 22. A cannon in the parade blasted into the crowd, hitting Bauman on the left side of her pelvis. A nearby doctor who intervened saved her life and she was rushed to Harborview Medical Center. She underwent nine months of operations and recovery and her left leg was amputated, according to Levine and “Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging.”
Bauman won $330,000 in an out-of-court settlement in 1973 after suing the parade sponsors, the man who brought the cannon and the city for ignoring the loaded weapon in a public event. With that money, she and some friends opened a bar in Pioneer Square, named for the lost leg that paid for the place.

—and its end:

In mid-December 1975, an oil tanker was driving south on the elevated portion of the Alaskan Way Viaduct — above the bar — when the tanker collided into the guardrail, unhitching the 4,800-gallon trailer, which exploded and poured fiery gasoline onto a passing freight train below and more than 30 cars parked in front of Shelly’s Leg.
No one was injured inside the bar, but its front windows were blown in and the DJ’s booth and turntables burned.
The bar lasted for more than a year longer, but the crowds were never the same and the disco closed in 1977.

(Sources vary slightly regarding the year of its closing; I've seen 1977, 1978 or even 1979.)

I had been told Shelly's Leg had been located on 1st and Main, so I walked over to that block after the tour was over, looking online to find what the exact location was. Turns out it was actually Main and Alaskan Way (a block west of 1st), and I spent a fair amount of time and energy finding which corner exactly it had been on: according to this article, it was on the northeastern corner of that intersection. That puts it at the end of the street in the above photo, the corner closest to the camera, on the right.

It turns out I have a few previous references to Shelly's Leg on my Flickr account, the earliest being this much better shot of the Alaska Hotel building, taken on a local queer history themed Seattle Architecture Tour I forgot I had taken in 2009, when the Alaskan Way Viaduct was still standing (it is partly visible in the far-right background of that shot).

It was also noted on today's tour that the old Shelly's Leg sign is on display at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) at South Lake Union, which I actually got a picture of while visiting there as my Birth Week activity with Dad and Sherri in 2017.

I now actually have four photos pertaining to Shelly's Leg, taken in 2009, 2017, and 2022.

[posted 12:30 pm]