Chapel closed in 2011 the Broadway Grill in 2013. One by one, the queer spaces I loved have shut down. But I feel like we’re losing the soul of that area.” “ was the place where, just walking down the street, you knew you belonged. “‘Magical’ is a good way to put it,” says Sarah Toce, publisher of the Seattle Lesbian. “I love the space - the bathrooms, the red paint, the rough-around-the-edges vibe,” English says. When Kristina Hudson English, who co-founded community group The Social Queer with wife Molly, left Baltimore’s queer district in 2015, she wanted to go where she felt welcome, which meant Capitol Hill and within walking distance of the Wildrose. I even fumbled early attempts at flirting with women at the Wildrose while my wingmen watched. My two gay best friends and I were dinner regulars at the Broadway Grill haunted mortuary-turned-gay-bar Chapel and danced our hearts out at club and drag performance venue R Place, where I always felt welcome, both before and after I came out as queer and gender-expansive. “They get emotional, saying, ‘You can’t close,’ and we’re trying not to.”Įver since I wandered its gritty streets as a gender-confused closeted teen, Capitol Hill was magic a chosen home. “People have met their partners here they’ve been coming here for Pride for 10 years,” she says. Wildrose co-owner Martha Manning talks to a customer at her bar. As spaces close or relocate in search of cheaper rent, there is an opportunity to rethink both the nature of queer space and the boundaries of Seattle’s gayborhood. The neighborhood’s demographic and economic makeup has been in flux for decades meanwhile, younger generations of queer people do not define themselves by the same markers of identity - physical or otherwise - as their elders. The bars and clubs of Capitol Hill are suspended in a long-established holding pattern that reflects shifting dynamics in both American and queer culture. As queer bars and the neighborhoods they build slip away, there’s more on the line than just dancing and drinks here, identities are forged and live-saving communities of found families form. is spotty at best, but a 2019 study revealed a nearly 37 percent drop between 20 - and that’s before the pandemic ravaged the bar and nightlife scene. Data on the number of LGBTQ spaces in the U.S. The ones that cater to femme-leaning clientele are most at risk: The Wildrose is one of just 21 lesbian bars left in the nation, and one of three remaining on the West Coast. Both Pony and Neighbours would later reopen, but spaces like these have been closing at an alarming clip since before the pandemic.
But they’ve been scraping by since long before COVID-19, and the pandemic “is just the latest in a long line of disasters,” Brothers says.įrom 1934 to 2015, Seattle was the site of what some sources call America’s first queer bar, the Double Header today, the city is home to some of its last.
Under the initial pandemic restrictions, they took turns being bartender, cook, and security they even got part-time jobs at dispensaries to make ends meet. Martha Manning, the other owner, bustles in the background, rearranging freshly painted chairs.īrothers and Manning finish each other’s sentences and divide labor equally in the 114-year-old former apartment building the Wildrose calls home at the epicenter of Capitol Hill. When I enter the bar, co-owner Shelley Brothers is sitting in the big picture window, bathed in the red glow of humming heater coils. It’s split into a social and a seated bar area a framed poster of queer icon Joan Jett, for whom I was a teenage doppleganger, hangs on the scarlet-hued walls. The “Rose,” as patrons affectionately call it, is a comfortable dive.
Next to sex shop Castle Megastore and its massive silicon molds is my destination: the Wildrose. I cut through Cal Anderson Park, named after Washington state’s first openly gay legislator.
… isn’t a zoo and we aren’t your pets” Neighbours, the nearly 40-year-old nightclub institution often targeted by hate crimes. At the time, the queer bars I pass are sitting silent and shuttered: Pony, whose signage announced in 2014 to a changing neighborhood, “This is a very gay bar. On a rainy winter day in 2021, Capitol Hill’s rainbow-colored crosswalks stand in stark relief against the steely sky.