Capitol Hill: The LGBTQ Neighborhood and the AIDS Crisis

Seattle's LGBTQ community organized itself politically before it organized itself geographically. The Dorian Society, the first LGBTQ political organization in the Pacific Northwest, was founded in nineteen sixty-seven, a full two years before Stonewall. It focused on decriminalization, on police harassment, on discrimination in housing and employment. It operated at a moment when same-sex activity was a criminal offense in Washington state and when gay men and lesbians in Seattle could be and were fired, evicted, and arrested without recourse.

Capitol Hill became the neighborhood, with its bars and cafes and bookstores and apartments, across the nineteen seventies. Pride marches began. Community institutions took root. By the early nineteen eighties, the neighborhood had built a visible, self-sustaining LGBTQ community culture.

Then AIDS arrived.

The federal government's response to the AIDS epidemic in its early years has been characterized by historians as a failure of public health policy, a failure driven in part by the identity of the people dying first. In Seattle, as in San Francisco and New York, the communities most affected did not wait for the federal government. The Chicken Soup Brigade, founded in nineteen eighty-two, mobilized volunteers to deliver food and services to people with AIDS who could no longer care for themselves. It was among the first and most effective community-based AIDS service organizations in the United States. It later became the Lifelong AIDS Alliance and eventually Lifelong, one of the region's largest social-service organizations.

The losses in Capitol Hill during the nineteen eighties were enormous in a neighborhood that had not been large to begin with. The names of the dead accumulated. The response was to organize more, not less. Seattle became, alongside San Francisco and New York, a center of community-based AIDS advocacy. The organizations it built in that crisis are still operating. The bars and gathering places of that era are largely gone. The neighborhood is more expensive and more gentrified. The community's political infrastructure, built in the nineteen sixties and hardened in the nineteen eighties, outlasted the spaces it grew in.