My Queer Across America road trip has brought me to Seattle, Washington, where I’ll be living for the next five months. Originally, my road trip wasn’t even a road trip. I was escaping Los Angeles to move to Seattle so I could live with my childhood best friend. 

My first stop in Seattle is Capitol Hill, the designated “queer” neighborhood, though the entire city feels LGBTQ+-friendly.

Similar to Portland, the area has a heartwarming amount of queer diversity: non-binary folks with colorful hair, polyamorous polycules hanging in groups, and trans people holding hands with their partners.

I stop by a few bars, leaving resumes in hope of procuring a bartending gig. Cha Cha Lounge is two-story queer bar with a drag show being hosted by Betty Wetter in the basement.

Though the lip sync numbers are fun, it’s the back and forth on the microphones between the queens that really sells the show. Betty even promotes her other gig, Drag Bingo at a non-queer bar, where she invites us to “come watch a zoo of straight people.”

The audience for the Cha Cha Lounge show is not the usual audience for drag. The majority of the audience are cishet (non-trans, heterosexual) people. In one corner there’s a group of straight bros shouting over the performance to each other, probably playing gay chicken or daring each other to harass someone or some other douchey bro things. 

I continue to the next bars in hopes of finding queer spaces that haven’t been infiltrated by an army of breeders.

Pony is a small dive bar with a perfect location in the middle of a fork in the road that overlooks the neighborhood.

Next, I stop by Diesel, a dive bar that caters to the leather and bear community. 

Then I come across WILD ROSE.

Based on the clientele, I quickly realize it’s a lesbian bar. Though I would love to work at the cool dive bar, I don’t feel it’s appropriate for a non-lesbian cis man to apply. I decide to just grab a couple of a drinks to support the place since there are less than 40 lesbian bars in the US, and we could use all the queer spaces we can get. 

Finally, I end up at Queer/Bar, the trendiest venue in the area. Though I much prefer dive bars, this spot is welcoming. It’s spacious with a long runway that hosts drag shows. I also love the bold lettering of “Queer/Bar” proudly standing out front, unapologetically declaring it a queer space. Most importantly, it’s full of actual LGBTQ+ people.

The bartender informs me that bars in the area typically promote from within and rarely hire people from outside. I protest, saying that all the places I’d dropped resumes off to said they were indeed hiring and that they would contact me for an interview.

“That’s the ‘Seattle freeze’,” the bartender laughed. “Locals are passive and tend to stick to their cliques.”

I don’t want to believe this, but over the next month I notice how true it is. Seattleites seem friendly initially, but it’s more of a front. They smile and exchange surface-level conversations, but it’s difficult to get any further. 

The people of Seattle may be accepting as individuals, but as a community, everything feels performative. People get “angry” if you use emojis that don’t match your skin color, post “BLM” on their social media without actually supporting the cause, and use LGBTQ+ spaces while voting against trans rights. They do all of this because of the visibility rather than genuinely trying to help the queer community through action. 

I don’t receive any calls for interviews. 

Despite that, I recognize Seattle is still a lot more accepting of queer people compared to other cities, and I do recommend it as both a place to visit and to live. However, it’s good to know what you’re getting into and that it might be difficult to find a warm part of the community. 

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Photos courtesy of social media and London Alexander’s personal collection. The personal collection photos are copyrighted and cannot be used without written expressed permission.