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The Queen City Business Guild, an organization of bar owners that would eventually become today’s Greater Seattle Business Association, as well as the United Ebony Council, a black gay male organization founded in 1975, and part of the Court of Seattle with its empresses and royalty, both used the Mocambo for early organizational meetings.Īnother important organization that met regularly at the Mocambo during the late 1960s was the Dorian Society. The Mocambo, open from 1951 to 1978, served a vital role as a meeting place for early gay organizations. There were no gay bars on Capitol Hill at that time.” And the group would just kind of go to the Mocambo, and what was very interesting was a lot of the group that I was going with would start at Spags, meet people later at the 6-11, then go to the Mocambo or go out to dinner but they’d all wind up back at Spags, because that was the closest bar to Capitol Hill. recalled the routine: “It was a cocktail lounge, and what a lot of people would do is, they would drink earlier in the places like- One popular place was the 6-11 on 2nd Avenue because beer was 10 cents and at happy hour you could have a lot of beers. for $1.30.”īy the 1960s, the Mocambo was part of a social circuit as LGBTQ patrons navigated the neighborhood’s queer landscape. Jacques, Provencal and roast loin of pork, stuffed with prunes, etc. Bill Parkin, a dishwasher at the Mocambo, recounts that, “The Mo was a mixed crowd until 1955, when it became mostly gay - except for daytime, when office workers, courthouse workers, lawyers and judges came in for lunch…The menu was sophisticated Coquille St. They look happy, and relaxed.The Mocambo Restaurant served as a restaurant and cocktail bar. Her mother's girlfriend is feeding Webber's sister a bottle. Webber pointed to one picture she’s titled “Our American Dream,” from 1963 or 1964: "My lesbian mother, her butch girlfriend, my newborn baby sister and me," sitting on a bed. One wall of photos features Webber’s family in their daily lives - like a school for Alaska Native children in the early 1900s run by imperious-looking white teachers or Webber’s father in drag. "Native women still face tremendous amounts of abuse and are missing at horrific rates and murdered, and these are Native women in the '50s and '60s presenting themselves," Webber said. You can see the fierceness of them," Webber said. But they went into this little booth and made these photographs. "This speaks to their self-determination and their self-identity, because they were creating their own image in a world that didn’t welcome them or honor them. Many are from photobooths, some glamorous, some solemn. Walls of portraits and self-portraits feature Webber’s mother, grandmothers and great-grandmothers. "I learned about the ways in which people are soulful that help them to survive." I learned how delicious Filipino food is," Webber laughed.
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I learned how people could love one another and care for one another, even under oppressive situations. "I learned about how people made community when they were considered outsiders. I think of being in these spaces as a child was somewhat like a child artist’s residency," Webber said. Webber said it used to be a 24-hour diner for Boeing workers."By the time I spent time there, and this was the 1960s, it was a bar and grill, and it was a gay bar. There are archival photos of the gay bars and restaurants where Webber often went with her mother growing up, like the Busy Bee. Webber and Frye curator Miranda Belarde-Lewis tell that story through family photos, historical documents, Native stories and Webber’s poetry, which plays in one room as well as being interspersed throughout the exhibit. Because it’s a story that needs retelling," Webber said as she walked through her exhibit recently. "There’s a proverb I heard years ago: ‘Until lions learn to write, tales of the hunt will always be told by the hunter.’ And I feel what we are reaching to do is to tell the indigenous story of Seattle again.