From Book News, Inc.
Recounts the heyday of a Seattle drag cabaret during the post-war era and the community of dancers, female impersonators, and gay and lesbian club-goers that blossomed around it. Details the lives and careers of headliners at the club during its ten-year existence, drawing on interviews with former patrons and performers. Includes b&w photos. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Review
"A drag bar in Seattle? In the forties? Owned by gay men? My dear, the mind reels! I salute Paulson and Simpson for showing me a world I never knew existed." -- Quentin Crisp

Review
"A fascinating look back at gay cabaret that was a safe haven for sailors, studs, swishes, and sequins." -- Michael Musto, The Village Voice

Quentin Crisp
A drag bar in Seattle? In the forties? Owned by gay men? My dear, the mind reels! I salute Paulson and Simpson for showing me a world I never knew existed.

Michael Musto, The Village Voice
A fascinating look back at gay cabaret that was a safe haven for sailors, studs, swishes, and sequins.

Book Description
Within the pages of this book lies the story of the community of lesbians and gays that blossomed around America's first gay-owned cabaret, the Garden of Allah, in seedy downtown Seattle.

About the Author
Don Paulson is an artist, researcher, and writer of local history in the Seattle area. Roger Simpson is Associate Professor of Communications at the University of Washington. He is the author of Unionism or Hearst and a number of articles on First Amendment issues.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

An Evening at the Garden of Allah tells the story of the community of gays and lesbians that blossomed around the cabaret during an age before the Stonewall rebellion in New York and other uprisings made gay consciousness a public issue. A wealth of arresting photographs from the collections of Jackie Starr, Skippy Larue, and other headliners at the club during the ten years it thrived, breathe life into the personal histories centered around this oasis of gay and lesbian culture. Through interviews with former patrons and performers, Don Paulson and Roger Simpson capture the joyful evenings where those on stage proclaimed to the gathered audiences, "Come out and be yourselves." Here are the lives of the female impersonators, the Prima Donnas and the Dames, singing ballads to the accompanying roar of the Garden's old theater pipe organ. Dressed regally or garishly as their stage personas demanded, their bravado helped others to affirm and take pride in their lesbian and gay identities. These precursors of today's drag queens blast many deeply rooted assumptions about gender as they detail the excitements, tragedies, and complexities of their day-to-day lives. Here too are the stories of lesbian and gay audience members who found a home at the Garden, the soldiers and sailors who patronized the club, the fashionable Seattleites slumming on notorious First Avenue, and the tourists who came to be photographed in the Garden's atmosphere of debauchery and abandon. In its moving portrait of a little-explored chapter in America's gay and lesbian past, An Evening at the Garden of Allah takes readers back in time with a vivid oral history of this special cabaret. Paulson, Simpson, and their informants present the story of a place where ideas about repression, identity, and resistance were beginning to be openly discussed, where hopes and dreams of liberation took shape.

SYNOPSIS

Within the pages of this book lies the story of the community of lesbians and gays that blossomed around America's first gay-owned cabaret, the Garden of Allah, in seedy downtown Seattle.

FROM THE CRITICS

Quentin Crisp

A drag bar in Seattle? In the forties? Owned by gay men? My dear, the mind reels! I salute Paulson and Simpson for showing me a world I never knew existed.

Michael Musto

A fascinating look back at gay cabaret that was a safe haven for sailors, studs, swishes, and sequins.

Booknews