Don Orr Martin

Don Orr Martin grew up on a small farm in Yakima and came to Olympia in 1971 as an original Greener. He had been assigned to write a story for the WSU student newspaper on the new college opening in Olympia, and decided that fall to transfer. Don is a lifelong activist, a founder of the Cooper Point Journal, the Gay Resource Center, Emma Goldman Collective, Theatre of the Unemployed, and Hard Rain Printing Collective. He was an early board member of Stonewall Youth and later, the regional board of the Pride Foundation. Don was an actor, dancer, set designer, or director for over 40 community theater productions with eight local theater companies. He was a graphic designer for 20 years and a public health educator for 25 years. He moved to Canada in 2014 when his husband got a job with the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation. They received Canadian citizenship in 2021. Don is currently on the coordinating committee for Quirk-e, a Vancouver writers collective for queer elders.

• Early Evergreen and the Harbaugh Affair – By LLyn De Danaan and Don Orr Martin
  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.
• Hard Rain Printing Collective Part 1 – By Don Martin
  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.
• Hard Rain Printing Collective – Part 2 – By Don Martin
  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.
• Recollections on the Founding of the Gay Resource Center By Don Orr Martin
  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.
• Don’t Cry for Me Miami – 1978 – By Don Orr Martin
  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.
• Logger Dude – Don Orr Martin
  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 . . .
• Karen Silkwood Memorial Choir – By Don Orr Martin
  “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.
• Practicing the Revolution: Making Bagels – 1974 – Don Orr Martin
  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.
• A Small Town’s Sex-Positive Response to AIDS – By Don Orr Martin
  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.
• Emma Goldman Joins the Co-op Movement – By Don Orr Martin
  Representatives from each household would meet weekly at a member’s house. We had product lists from the wholesale suppliers with whom we had previous ties and we would order items in bulk, purchasing only an amount we could completely divide up, keeping no inventory. We would bid on portions of wheels of cheese from Peterson’s in Seattle, crates of milk from Flett Dairy, sacks of oats and rice from Cooperating Community Grains, boxes of fruits and vegetables from Nisqually Valley Produce. These meetings were a little like the New York Stock Exchange: initial orders were compiled, then bids were taken to increase or decrease a family’s order until we reached a case lot.