Friday September 22, 2006 SGN.org |
 |
Volume 34 Issue 38 |
 |
|
Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
|
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
|
||||||||
 |
Not Thinking Straight by Madelyn Arnold |
||
 |
||
| Over this rainbow | ||
| Somewhere
Over the rainbows - [We need lots!] - There's a place called Seattle With all these high-rise plots... As has many another before me, I lemminged to a coast and a big city. Maybe not quite the way as most Gay folk, however. I had actually only heard of Seattle because of a small, ambitious political party I belonged to, which wanted to beef up its work in the white-collar and professional unions. It had been natural for me to join the Party: in my teen years I was more involved in the civil rights of others; then, I went for my own in the Gay Liberation Front. But I wanted to include everyone's rights, something only organized politics could address and - all along - I had wanted to work in medicine. Since I couldn't be an MD, I'd get involved in a hospital, becoming indispensable, as I'd been wanting to be all my life, more or less. One understands about cities in one's country either haphazardly (having or not having relatives there, hearing about them on TV programs, or, through schoolwork). But I personally don't remember formal schooling about any US city but New York - where Everyone Came From (except in my school - most had come through The Cumberland from Scotland), and which is a few rods shy of this place. IF NOT GAY, AT LEAST CHEERFUL So I headed off to the library to look Seattle up: it had a wild labor history, for a long time (partly over Group Health) being called the "Soviet of Washington". And there were a number of wonderful hospitals, several unionized. Being interested in epidemics, I fell in love with the US Public Health Service, an enormous place out at the end of 12th, and within the month drove through the flooding Red River at the Minnesota/North Dakota border, over several years of prairie, and over an unexpected mountain range to get here. Everybody (S. Eastward) knew there were only two mountain ranges in this country: the Smokies and the Rockies. So someone had been careless with the landscape. And as to the Red River - only the Ohio and the Mississippi flood to any great degree, so moisture over the bridge wasn't too alarming. Heck, even Indiana's White and Wabash Rivers flood a little, so, passing some workers as I began to cross, I was somewhat surprised to feel the wheel jerked firmly to the left. I locked my arms inside it and looked around: there were white caps bobbing gaily across my lane. Picking a landmark, I steered hard toward it to keep the car straight [?] (the way you do with a motorboat) and with difficulty reached the opposite side, to be met by a phalanx of very disgusted (disgusting) little boys. They'd been laying bets. As I rolled up onto land my passenger gasped: "Why did you do that?" The freckles on her face stood out like thumbtacks. The fact of the matter was, that bridge was west of Minnesota, and I was driving West. "They said go on," I explained. "No!" she yelled at my head. "They said don't go!" Later that year, I got my hearing checked. PERFECT TIMING I'm told that a few weeks before I arrived, that summer of '75, they had just taken down a sign referring to the [most recent] Boeing Bust: Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights? Boeing's business, hence workforce, has continued to wax and wane - teaching the process to Microsoft et al., and causing enormous disruption. This is Capitalism, and it's supposed to work this way, the significance of which began to dawn on me as I applied to hospital after hospital, clinic after clinic. Apparently, to gain such employment, you had to be [1] under 40, and [2] have 35 years of experience. I hadn't been without a job since I was 12 years old, but I became quickly and intimately acquainted with one of the large "temporary structures" near the Seattle Center - around which a thick caterpillar of people ambled moodily every morning, carting coffee cups and passing paper bags. Nearly everyone with kids necessarily brought them, and watched them sprawling happily over the air-conditioned floor with pens and paper. My introduction to the city and [Un]Employment Security. PRETTY LITTLE CITY To date, the only Pacific Northwest hospital I have never worked in is Public Health - now shrunk to little PacMed Clinic, tucked in beneath the giant Amazon works. It had never crossed my mind that I wouldn't live in a city - after all, I'm a Lesbian and knew pretty well how welcome I was in a small town, even a college town like Bloomington, In. But at first, it was hard to see Seattle as a city. For example, much of an average day Bloomington had more traffic - which sounds silly right up until you realize there was an Interstate bisecting Seattle, bleeding off surface streets, and that town was choked. The forward-thinking Fathers of Seattle had planned for a future of traffic ... very far forward. For many years, 30 cars was rush hour. Seattle was often difficult to think of as a city, although it announced itself a city very often [the way a short kid may announce it's tough]. It had no nightlife to speak of; after 8 downtown was deserted; live music was generally over-mellowed [half-baked] hippie. At least it had innumerable Gay bars [that closed at 12]. Like Cincinnati, Seattle called itself the Queen City, so there was the Queen City Bowl, Queen City Insurance, Queen City Tavern, Queen City Nonesuch... and then on my way to work one day I turned on the radio to hear Mighty Seattle describing itself as "The Emerald City". How many Queen City things do you see here now? There must've been some sort of contest to rid itself of, um, controversy, but I have never heard about it, that day to this. How proud of the S[e]attl[e]ites of yore. This makes perfectly good sense if you look at a map. Little Seattle had to look in a mirror - there aren't any other American cities close by. [Portland, then even smaller, and if anything, more diffident, wasn't all that close.] It had to be culture, even telling itself its little Opera was good. It wasn't. BEER, BEER, WE DISAPPEAR In certain ways the US isn't united, which our liquor laws used to elegantly show. Since there is no general Bar/t Mitzvah for Youth, and no Queer test to pass - so the claiming of booze was passage, especially for us. Drink and you're grown. Drink in one of our bars and you're one of ours. At 18, I couldn't drink in my home state, but North, South or East, there was no barrier but distance (and we were great drivers). And then the bars. At least they wanted us (or wanted our money). So much had been made of booze that many of us had a mail drop at a bar (I think I did). Bars: the place for us. When I got here, there was The Crescent and the Silver Slipper for women. And several places, dance bars, where gender meant much less - the important factor being whether there was room to dance and if you wanted to be able to hear yourself scream. I loved the bars. I got my pitcher of beer and pickled eggs, and settled down to read a really good book. Then, the party, most likely ditching alcoholics, dropped me out. Yet I had succeeded: I had Come Out formally, moved to a city, found a (boring series of) hospital job(s), though not indispensable to anybody, and was, in a way, still working for civil rights. I started writing for the SGN in 1975, soon after I got here. Now, those dank little dungeons we called Lesbian bars are replaced by the excellent Rose, and everywhere else. All the bars are ours. Many sections of town either ignore or tolerate Queers. And somehow, while I was drink/work/ing, Seattle grew up. Too bad it's no longer the Soviet of Seattle |
||
|
|
||
 |
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||
International Readers |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
 It's new! and live from Bumbershoot! |
 |
 |
|
|
working for the freedom to
|
copyright Seattle Gay News - DigitalTeamWorks 2006