Our troupe came together organically and by serendipity during a time of economic recession and political and cultural turmoil. We were an unusual, evolving group of mostly white, creative, working-class, young adults who wanted our perspectives to be heard. Our hard-working collective created or produced 17 plays on a shoestring from 1975 until 1981.
LLyn, former dean, and Don, Gay Center representative, share perspectives on their early days at Evergreen and the how they came to sit across the table from each other mediating a gay rights debacle.
Indeed, it was the concept of workers seizing the means of production that inspired Grace and me to investigate the idea of running a worker-owned print shop. In the days before cell phones and the internet, print media was how we communicated, how we announced our events and rallies and theatrical productions, how we debated political change. We wanted to be pamphleteers. Thomas Paine and the Wobblies were our inspiration.
We had been in the Division Street shop for a couple of years. Struggling, cold, and damp. Honing our skills. Learning from mistakes. We learned about printing standards and the allowable percentage of flawed prints or undercounts. We paid dues to the Graphic Arts International Union, in support of workers in the trade. It meant we could print a “union bug” on our work.
The first phone call I took (that wasn’t a crank call) was from a lesbian in Lacey. It was 1973 and I was the founder and sole staff person answering the phone at the Gay Resource Center, a new student group at Evergreen. She and her partner had both been divorced from men, and between them they had five kids living in a double wide trailer. She wanted to know if I could offer them any help regarding child custody issues.
Anita Bryant was an also-ran Miss America contestant in 1959 (Miss Oklahoma) and a christian pop singer who became a spokesperson for the lucrative Florida citrus industry. She popularized their slogans. “A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.”
Anita was also a rabid homophobe and a lightning rod in the thunderhead of anti-LGBT politics of the late 1970s. Anita Bryant was a piece of work.
VIGNETTES – I was right downtown on the busiest street, and this logger dude was walking toward me on the sidewalk. I knew he was a logger dude by the length of his Carhartt work pants . . .
“Jingle Coins,” “O Con All the Faithful,” “Clanging Bells.” These were the titles of some of the anti-Christmas carols ten or more of us sang in 1977. The venue was a huge new shopping mall that opened that year in Olympia. We drew in holiday shoppers with our familiar harmonies, and ever so slowly they understood these weren’t quite the same Christmas carols they remembered. New lyrics to “Jingle Bells,” “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Silver Bells,” and several others were borrowed from the Fallen Angel Choir and Family Circus Theatre in Portland with whom several of us were good friends. We also wrote a few new lyrics ourselves.
They left me alone with the bagel machine. They neglected to explain how to control the speed or shut it down. For a while I had no trouble keeping up, but soon I was like Lucy in the chocolate factory.
I worked in public health at the height of the AIDS pandemic. Powerful Republican congressmen and President Reagan’s agency heads put in place serious limits on what federally-funded educational programs could say about safe sex. Federal laws required that all the materials we produced about condom use and HIV testing had to include the message that the only ways to prevent AIDS or other sexually transmitted infections were by: 1) Abstinence; or 2) Fidelity in a heterosexual marriage. These were not messages that resonated with the men in the woods by the railroad tracks.