Bryher Herak came to Seattle in 1972 from Montana when she was 25. "There’s a lot of cowboy hats there," she would tell an interviewer two decades later, "cowboy boots and big trucks." "Bars are where people hung out," she added, "so that didn’t change for me [when I moved]. I just had to find a lesbian bar."

Jane Meyerding arrived the same year, when she was 22. She was from Chicago, college-trained and already soaked in political activism, the daughter of Quaker activists who had taken her to Vienna to work with Hungarian refugees, a protester against the Vietnam war, a volunteer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference headed by Martin Luther King.

When they arrived in Seattle, theirs was the usual search to discover a place where they could belong. In a previous decade they might have followed the footsteps of women who had gone down a stairway into an underground bar in the city’s rundown Pioneer Square district. But what is revealing about both of their journeys is something that Herak said next in her interview. "What did I do? There was a bookstore-a women’s bookstore, It’s About Time-there in the U-district. So I went to It’s About Time. I heard there was a lesbian party the first week I was in town. That’s how you do it. You do it word of mouth. You call the women’s bookstore, you call the YWCA. It’s actually pretty easy."

For Meyerding, it was a similar story. "I cannot remember the first occasion on which I made contact with lesbians," she said, "but it must have been...on the Ave in the University District, upstairs, over a typewriter repair place." That was the YWCA.

By the time Meyerding and Herak arrived in Seattle in the 1970s a geographic and political shift had begun to occur for the city’s lesbians. Bars for women were still operating in Pioneer Square, particularly on South Jackson Street where one called the Silver Slipper had opened in 1969. Out in the University District, though, a new place of arrival was forming, one that was going to have as historic an impact on the development of the city’s homosexual community as had the old underground bars.

Gay women had always been more invisible in Seattle than gay men. When the Seattle Times published a 1966 story about the city’s homosexual "problem," only gay men had been mentioned, not lesbians. When the police threatened gay bar licenses and the city council held its first public hearing about homosexuals, the targets were male bars. When the health department blamed homosexuals for spreading venereal disease, the doctors focused on men. Arguably, the police had tacitly reinforced the lesser importance, or perhaps lesser offensiveness, of lesbians by their decision to extort fewer dollars from the women-frequented bars than they demanded at the male bars. One of the women’s bars had even adopted the name of the Annex, as if bars catering to women were some type of add-on to the gay male space in Pioneer Square. Within the invisible homosexual culture in the city, then, there was a kind of doubled public invisibility for homosexual women.

By the 1970s lesbian communication and identity were changing, and the saloons on the mudflat with their methods of dancing, dishing, and butch-femme drag-however pleasurable, traditional, and valuable in previous decades-were simply not big enough to accommodate the new gay woman. A change in geography would be part of the shift, and the selection of the University District had much to do with how that neighborhood had developed and what it, like the mudflat, had come to represent in the city’s history.

The University of Washington had first been housed in downtown Seattle. Once it became apparent that the university’s land was needed if the city’s retail and office district was to expand, the professors relocated northward to a broadly forested slope overlooking Lake Washington. In 1905 Professor Edmond S. Meany hit on a clever way to secure more support for the infant university. He proposed that the lightly developed slope host the world’s fair that was then being planned for Seattle, knowing that the school would afterward inherit buildings and landscaping paid for by the fair’s promoters. The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition took place in 1909, just where Meany had envisioned it. Both a university and a neighborhood were born on the back of passionate intellectualism combined with unbridled boosterism, two factors that would influence the style of the lesbian community later formed there.

Among the exhibition buildings was one representing the achievements of the Northwest’s women. Seattle’s Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) sponsored a restaurant there as well as a gallery of women’s arts and a nursery for many of the fairgoers’ weary children. Once the AYPE closed, the women who had been volunteering decided to form a neighborhood YWCA, eventually nesting-in tidy auxiliary fashion-with their male counterpart, the YMCA, on the university’s tree-lined fraternity row. That neighborly arrangement lasted for several decades. By 1968, however, with the national feminist movement burgeoning, that locale among men-fraternity men at that-seemed at odds with the new identity many younger women hoped to forge. A new University YWCA director hired that year, Ann Schwiesow, took a single look at the men’s landscaped building and the women’s auxiliary office and saw a symbolism she wanted no part of. "It was a traditional male-female relationship," she told a Seattle Times reporter in 1972. "Just what we’re fighting against," adding, "We knew from the beginning we would be concerned first and foremost with women’s liberation."

In 1970, then, the YWCA relocated into a second-story office suite on busy University Way, the core of the retail district adjacent to the university. "The Ave," as it was called, bustled with pizza shops, real estate developers, used-book vendors, and tables of anti-war literature. Schwiesow moved the YWCA next to a fast-food shop called Sandwich a Go Go.

Then she issued a brochure describing the YWCA’s mission in terms surprising to anyone with a traditional view of the organization. None of the usual swimming, cooking, and socializing. The YWCA women, the brochure asserted, were not just "volunteers" as they had been in past years, but "workers" who "describe their commitment as one of creating alternatives to those institutions which degrade or humiliate women, institutions which are inhuman,‘overprofessionalized’ or unreasonably expensive."

Soon, the small cluster of otherwise indistinct offices physically embodied the new rhetoric, advertising a fount of possibilities. Notices about feminist events, women’s services, jobs, and housing jammed bulletin boards. T-shirts flashed, "Women are Changing the World." An abortion law reform group that had been ordered off the university campus was invited to set up a new office at the YWCA; soon its referral service was fielding about 7,000 calls a year. A Northwest Women’s Law Center opened in the suite to pursue legal challenges. A local chapter of the National Organization for Women arrived. A rape counseling service began. Women formed a weekly co-op garage to learn how to repair their own cars. Women’s works of art hung in a room devoted to a cultural center. Workers, not volunteers, remodeled a storeroom into a women’s health clinic named Aradia. A Women’s Divorce Cooperative started giving advice about inexpensive ends to unpleasant marriages. Women’s studies classes burgeoned. A newspaper named Pandora was added, its name chosen deliberately to challenge male control of storytelling. Women, the newspaper asserted, had opened a box of blessings in mythic times, not the box of troubles that appeared in the male interpretations.

Pandora became one of the new media of communication among the city’s women, including its lesbians. In 1976 it would be followed by Out and About, a newsletter published solely by lesbians. In Pandora’s very first issue, in December 1970, a writer named Rachel daSilva described a historic gathering for gay women that had occurred in Seattle just a few weeks earlier on November 19. Women from the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in Seattle had called a meeting "to allow us to meet other lesbians and get to know each other, [and to express] our feelings about GLF, the gay scene in general, sexual politics, the gay bars, and hopefully, what we wanted out of GLF or any other organization we might want to start." Forty-five women had showed up, "a surprisingly large turnout."

The idea of starting a separate lesbian group had been discussed:

The consensus was that at this point there is nothing bad about this kind of split. GLF is not on a "power trip," the majority of the men feel no antagonism toward women who want to work apart from the larger organization, and in fact they encourage women to do so if unable to relate to GLF as it now exists. It is hoped that, in the event a gay women’s group does begin, there will be no hostility between it and GLF. In fact, something on the warm side of indifference might be more in line with our goals.

The gay women wasted no time. Two weeks later Pandora announced the start of the Gay Women’s Alliance. In just a few hundred words, the announcement set the three-part mission for a new lesbian movement in Seattle. First, it created a rationale:

For as long as women have been struggling against the male-domination prevalent in our society, lesbians have been the niggers of the women’s movement. Women’s liberation has been running scared in fear of the labels "lesbian" and "dyke" hurled by men trying to quell the rise of self-determination among women. And, for the most part, women have reacted defensively, and have put down their gay sisters in order to appear valid in men’s eyes. But our common goal, as women, must be to write our own definition of woman and womanhood; in order to do this, all women, gay and straight, must work together without fear of one another. To rid ourselves of this fear, we must learn more about our various lives and life styles and by learning, come to accept each other as individuals.

Then it proposed a way for women to communicate: in small affinity groups "in which women can feel more at ease about discussing personal problems and where trust is built between women, a revolutionary idea in itself."

Finally, it laid out a strategy for achieving political changes: building coalitions. "As they begin to get themselves together to understand one another on a human, personal basis, gay women will want to establish contact with other women’s groups in the Seattle area. Our goals as women may not be identical, but we have enough in common to warrant communication and common rallying points."

Comparing the changes in rhetoric in the Gay Women’s Alliance statement to that of the Dorian Society, a maledominated group in the city, is instructive. Rather than work independently, the GWA wanted to operate as part of the larger women’s civil rights movement, as had the gay male Dorians. It wanted to write its own definition of "womanhood." It urged women to build trust and make decisions by discussing personal stories rather than by Robert’s Rules of Order, which guided most men’s gatherings.

Three months later, in March 1971, the GWA created a permanent organizing space within the YWCA’s offices, using volunteers to staff a small Gay Women’s Resource Center-the first in Seattle. They set about creating a survival file with the names of doctors and commercial businesses friendly to gay women. The group also announced plans to create a speakers’ bureau. Most important, though, was the fact that, as the organizers said, "there will be a place outside of the bar environment where gay women can either come and talk or call and talk to other gay women." It would be open from noon until 10 o’clock in the evening, a daytime outpost away from the mudflat bars.

In October 1971 the Seattle Post-Intelligencer discovered the gay women’s center and printed a long article explaining why women thought the center was needed. A cautionary editor’s note preceded the story, warning readers: "Lesbianism, a fact of life that’s been hidden from public discussion for centuries, has surfaced. Freer discussion of sex and the work of various homosexual activist groups have made this a current issue."

Two lesbians, identified as Tudi Hassl and Carol Anna Strong, were depicted in the accompanying photograph. In a parallel to Seattle Magazine’s decision to publish the photograph of a gay man, Peter Wichern, four years earlier, this may have been one of the earliest photos of "out" lesbians to appear in the city’s press. Most noticeable was their youth-Hassl was 26; Strong, 23. Also noticeable was their choice of clothing. Hassl’s long hair fell in front of what appears to be a flannel shirt and Strong’s striped T-shirt matched a bandanna wrapped around her hair. These were not stereotypical femmes in gabardine, but neither were they stereotypical butches in workers’ uniforms.

Their words first focused on the pain that had brought them to the center:

I knew I was gay when I was 12 or 13, Hassl said, but I repressed it until I was in my 20s. I lived in a small town and felt all alone until I read something by a gay woman. For 13 years I went through hell. I went out with men...I had sex with men and I could enjoy it. I had nothing to compare it to. But in retrospect, I didn’t enjoy it as much as with women. I couldn’t fall in love with men or get emotionally involved.

Strong added,

Before she can really "come out," a woman has to face how she feels and stop thinking she’s sick just because society says she is.... There are two comingouts. One is personal. You face who you are and how you feel about it. You stop forcing yourself to laugh at "queer" jokes and stop putting up with words like "dyke." The second is when you "come out" politically, when you stand up publicly and say, "I’m a lesbian."

Their words also revealed a growing divide with gay men in Seattle.

Pointedly using a stereotype, Hassl argued, "Unlike much male homosexuality, gay women tend to form lasting relationships." Strong extended the generalization. "[Women] don’t go in for a one night pickup thing as much as men do. We may go to a gay women’s bar to socialize and be together, but it’s not a meat rack, and it doesn’t have the pick-up atmosphere of most heterosexual bars." It was a conflict that was going to grow deeper and more public over the next five years. For example, the "Gay Women’s Resource Center" would soon become the "Lesbian Resource Center," as women decided the word "gay" was too closely associated with male homosexuality.

Housing the city’s first lesbian center in a YWCA caused controversy, but not as much as might have been expected. Redbook, for example, in an article written in 1975, said that most other YWCAs would rather have merged "with the DAR. than admit...that there might be a lesbian in their midst." But Schwiesow dismissed the differences. "Nobody knows who is gay and who is straight here," she told the Seattle Times. "The Gay Women’s Resource Center is just a part of the University YW." Downtown, the better-known Seattle YWCA felt occasional criticism because the two branches were often confused, but even its executive director, Dorothy Miller, papered over the differences. "I admire their dedication and commitment," she said. "I don’t agree with everything they do, but I don’t have to." Even the national executive director, ever respectful of a long tradition of independence among the different branches, publicly tempered any reservations she might have had. "They may be a little ahead of the rest of us," she said tactfully to the Redbook reporter, "but maybe we have a lot to learn from associations like theirs."

"It wasn’t easy walking in that door." Diane Winslow remembered her first visit to the Lesbian Resource Center {LRC) about four years after it opened. Winslow wrote about her visit in Pandora:

I was a housewife and mother of teenagers, and some of these women were lesbians. I concentrated on being as inconspicuous as possible, but I soon began to peer out of my turtle’s shell of aloofness at the other women in the small pillow-lined room. They looked like strong, independent women-delightful, real women. I was soon caught up in the discussions and expressed thoughts that had always raised eyebrows and frozen expressions with others, but these women simply nodded and smiled. I told them that I just wanted a woman friend to hold me. Every counselor I’d ever talked to-and there had been several-had told me that this was ‘inappropriate’ behavior in our society and that I was just going to have to adjust. Short hugs were acceptable, but, in my fantasy of a hug, I was a shriveled, dry sponge, absorbing until I was full. One woman...commented, "That’s what it’s all about!"

Something new began to happen in these "rap groups" at the Lesbian Center-something transformative, simply as a result of talking. Winslow, who had been married for 16 years, found that she"

didn’t want to be a useful appendage to someone else’s life. I wanted to be a socialize and be a complete and productive person in my own right. I was troubled to see women with dynamic personalities compromising their individuality, entering into heterosexual relationships out of sexual need and little more....

Her attitude about sex with women changed:

I came into the LRC rap group very much afraid of even the word ‘sex.’ I accepted my sensuality but believed I could forego passion if a woman would be my affectionate friend, entering into the giving and receiving of lovingness.... There was another inquirer in the group who had a history remarkably similar to mine. Between us, we had produced nine children, had spent a decade apiece in religious involvement, and had emerged exhausted from long, unfulfilling marriages.... So one night, we got together at my house and talked freely, shared poetry, prose, and copies of letters-memoirs of our despair. As this woman and I parted, I reached out my arms and said, ‘Let’s hug-it’s obvious we’ve both been as hungry as hell.’ These words seemed to open both of our confined spirits and, like two entombed prisoners, we stumbled into the light. We knew through our womaness [sic] what the other felt.

The CR (consciousness-raising) groups that arose from the women’s movement were a new outlet for discovery and communication. Part quilting bee, part therapy, part caucus meeting, they solidified a form of small group communication for Seattle’s lesbians different from that which occurred in bars or private homes. It was a structured way of talking about new imaginings. Best understood as a kind of personalized chautauqua that could also serve as a base for political action, the excitement of the CR groups lay in the chorus of voices that suddenly began setting a course for lesbians joining the journey out. What happened was an exposition.

In such gatherings, perhaps five or ten individuals agreed to meet regularly to wander through certain themes in their lives and then to make decisions about actions, either individual or collective. Importantly, the CR or "rap" group was not a club that passed motions according to Robert’s Rules or undertook service work as did traditional women’s auxiliaries. Instead it was intended as a safe place to learn to support one another emotionally and then, from personal experiences, analyze the causes of suffering and create ways of changing that.

Robert’s Rules would come in for particular blasts from women who found the traditional and "respectable" styles of making organizational decisions in to be inappropriate for those whose voices had been so silent in the past. Betty Johanna, for example, an activist in Seattle during much of the 1970s, once wrote a letter to Out and About, saying that she viewed "Robert’s Rules of Order as oppressive and [I] do not wish to give them credibility via my participation. I want to resist the classism that requires one to know a specified terminology in order to participate in meetings. I do not want to be told that the only way I can relate to others is in a highly structured, non-flowing, non-human way." Lesbians were raising questions that the men in the Dorian Society, at least to judge from their minutes, had never considered.

In the CR groups, each woman would speak "her own truth." Indeed, the power of this particular form of group communication lay in its insistent demand that individuals speak from personal experience, as an "I." Yet, from the individual stories arose a common narrative about what "we" shared together-the demands to conform to gender roles, the pain of hiding sexual attractions in high school, the early crushes not understood, the movement into marriages, the release when the obvious truth about sexual attraction became a revelation, the striving for a genuine life, even if others felt such a life was not respectable.

It encouraged something else too. In the democratic environment of the CR group, it was the willingness to tell and blend individual stories that was important, not the submission to any single leader. Insistence that any one person or group knew the truth about where gays and lesbians were headed, what identity should be claimed, or what single path should be pursued quickly became suspect. A new political value about leadership was emerging that would become a distinctive characteristic of the 1970s in Seattle. It would eventually be a serious point of political division within Seattle’s gay and lesbian community.

Winslow again:

In our rap group, we share our fears...and the terror of every woman who contemplates stepping outside of tradition. We discuss the implications of keeping one’s lesbian identity hidden or ‘closeted.’ We talk about radical lesbians, their political clout, and their public image, and we realize we can place ourselves anywhere on the continuum from sexually independent to social anarchist according to our wishes.

As we dare to be honest, the rap group I participate in is learning to laugh and cry together…. There is a world to be explored here and I am pleased with what I’m finding.

Gary Atkins chairs the Department of Communication at Seattle University. He specializes in narrative journalism, communication, sexual justice issues, and communication law. He is author of the award-winning Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging, from which this article is excerpted with permission of the publisher, University of Washington Press.