Welcome to AAG Seattle VR Tours

Introduction

Queer Pioneer Square offers a small window into queer life in Seattle, Washignton before the term gay liberation was ever coined. While 1969 is often cited as the birth of the gay rights movement in the US with the Stonewall riots in New York City, historians, indigenous scholars, and groups like The Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project (NWLGHMP) have found a vibrant and often visible queer world in many cities including here in Seattle. The heart of this early queer community was the Pioneer Square neighborhood. Pioneer Square is known as Seattle’s “original neighborhood” and as the area became the first long term settlement of Seattle in 1852 after white settlers took the land to take advantage of the timber resources from indigenous people. At the turn of the century, Pioneer Square was the heart of downtown Seattle, but as the city grew, the downtown core drifted north and over time, Pioneer Square became a less desirable place. As this happened, the area also became identified for providing services for people on the edges of Seattle society. The queer community was part of the wave of individuals who would end up calling Pioneer Square home starting in the late 1800s and until the 1970s Pioneer Square was the heart of queer Seattle. The neighborhood was where queer folks met, loved, and created spaces in the form of bars, clubs, theaters, and poltitical organization but they were also met with police violence including arrests and a corrupt police pay off system for spaces to remain open. Most of the original buildings no longer exist or have been heavily modified, however through the use of stories and archival materials we hope folks can still connect to this queer past in our modern spaces.

This project uses the word “queer” as an umbrella term that includes all people that challenge or challenged gender and sexual norms. This includes people that identify as gay, lesbian, trans, bisexual, asexual, intersex, two spirit, etc. who may have identified various ways throughout time as our language has changed. This history is also intersectional, meaning that we need to acknowledge that people always carry various identities including but not limited to gender, sexual orientation, race, class, ability, etc. While the current research on Pioneer Square is heavily about white gay men during this time period, women, trans folks, and people of color struggled to find community and were sometimes not as welcomed in the community that formed in Pioneer Square.

Welcome to CHOP

In the summer of 2020, there was a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to multiple accounts of police brutality against Black folx in the USA, and the overt structural inequalities along racial lines, exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. In Seattle, protesters took to the streets and were met with police using tear gas, flashbangs and pepper spray to disperse the crowds (Savransky, 2020). Protesters marched from Downtown, east towards Capitol Hill on June 1st (Scruggs, 2020). They found their way blocked by barricades around Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) East Precinct. The crowd became so large that the police declared a riot, and a tense seven-day stand-off ensued with protesters who returned daily (ibid). On June 8, 2020, when the police vacated the East Precinct, a six block police-free zone was declared the ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’ or ‘CHAZ’. It was primarily a site of protest and resistance; it marked a distinct change from the violence over the preceding 4 days.

On June 13th, CHAZ became the Capitol Hill Organised Protest (CHOP) in an effort to rebrand and remind everyone that this was a protest not a party.

As you learn about the Capitol Hill Organized Protest please remember the organizers’ demands (tinyurl.com/defundspd) and consider donating to Black Lives Matter Seattle and/or King County Equity Now to acknowledge the work the organizers’ continue to do to achieve anti-racism in Seattle. I also encourage you to engage with the resources listed below to hear other facets of the Capitol Hill Organized Protest which are not captured by this tour and to get a more thorough introduction to Black Geographies.