![capitol hill gay sex parties seatle capitol hill gay sex parties seatle](https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/img/editorial/2015/06/25/102788986-2622611914_ebf6f94935_o.530x298.jpg)
“I make no plea for the homosexual to be honored as a special breed or a third sex,” Eccles told the psychologists, “to be the repository of most of the world’s artistic talent, or to be permitted any special moral licentiousness. John Marks, the president of the Washington State Psychological Association, eventually persuading Marks to let him and Lucas address the WSPA’s convention in Tacoma in May, 1960. There, in 1959, a gay man named John Eccles began corresponding with Don Lucas, Mattachine’s secretary-general in San Francisco, telling Lucas the organization was the “answer for my life’s calling” which was to “show the reality of the homosexual problem in our society, to instigate a more understanding and sympathetic attitude in society.” Eccles, who was gay but had actually married and was blessed with both a supportive wife and parents, started a small discussion group in his home, with attendance ranging from three to ten. The first attempt to start a chapter of Mattachine in Washington state appears to have been made in Tacoma, rather than Seattle. They avoided the word “homosexual” in their titles for fear that no one would join otherwise. The Mattachine Society in Los Angeles was the most famous of the organizations, and, in other places like New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, similar groups had affiliated as chapters. A gay activist from San Francisco, Hal Call, wondered if they would be interested in meeting he had gotten their names from a subscription list of a national magazine for homosexuals called “One.”īy that time, gay men in most other cities on the West and East Coasts had already created social clubs to meet in homes, rather than bars, and to talk delicately about gaining civil rights protections. Shortly after MacIver Wells began his resistance against the police in late 1965, several gay men in Seattle received an invitation to the Roosevelt Hotel downtown. These excerpts are from Chapter Seven, “Roberts Rules of Order and Gay Liberation.”
![capitol hill gay sex parties seatle capitol hill gay sex parties seatle](https://www.historylink.org/Content/Media/Photos/Large/Rainbow-crosswalk-Capitol-Hill-Seattle-August-13-2015.jpg)
In new organizations like the Dorian Society, they would begin to talk to one another in ways they had not done before - pursuing rituals of organizing to present a new public face to the city. Although a semi-public queer life thrived in Seattle’s underground bars in Pioneer Square from the 1930s through the 1960s, it was not until the mid-1960s that a different sort of conversation began among the city’s LGBTQ citizens.