In 2020, I got into grad school in Ohio. My partner Gabby and I had spent the past 10 years in Seattle. On the morning we started our long drive eastward, we stopped by Denny Blaine Park one last time. It was the end of one of those miserable, gray summer weeks we’d both come to resent so much. It was July; how could it still be this gray in July? But to be fair it couldn’t have been much later than 8 a.m. You never knew if the fog might burn off, if the sun might finally, finally come out, but that particular morning, the beach was gray and empty.
We had never seen it empty before, and I think it unsettled us both: the lack of chatter, no smell of sunscreen or sweat, and worst of all — no color. No color from beach towels or bikinis, potato chip bags or seltzer cans, floaties that looked like pink sprinkled doughnuts and unicorns or the people, of course, our people, with all the colors of our naked bodies drenched in gooey sunlight, gleaming, sprawled out naked in the sand.
Gabby wanted to go in the water at Denny Blaine one last time before leaving. We hadn’t gone to the beach much that summer because of the pandemic, yes, but also it just wasn’t quite warm enough yet. I said I was open to swimming but then as I toed the water — too cold, way too cold. More often than not, I was the one left with the towels. Even on the hottest days at Denny Blaine, I was content to bake in the sun while the rest of our friends raucously splashed in. But Gabby, a true Pisces, took off her clothes and dove headfirst into the water. She started swimming, like she always did, in the direction of Mount Rainier.
During a typical summer, Gabby and I would go to Denny Blaine an average of three times a week. Before we met, I went with other partners, with friends or alone. I never considered spending a day at the beach anywhere else, and I rarely went naked at Denny Blaine. Instead, I went shirtless with the most stereotypical board shorts I could find. They were blue with palm trees on them, picked out from the boy’s section at Target. I didn’t get top surgery until 2019, and so for years, Denny Blaine was the only beach at which I could go shirtless. I could walk around in my corny, blue board shorts and know I’d be understood the way I understood myself. That’s why I kept my board shorts on. At Denny Blaine, I knew I was a man.
Recently, thanks to a private donor, the city had proposed installing a playground at Denny Blaine.
In short: They wanted to take our beach away. We, the queer beachgoers of past, present and future, could not let this happen. Not when there is already so little left in Seattle that protects and nourishes queer life, so few free, public spaces that are still bastions of queer joy.
I am so grateful Denny Blaine was there for me in those fragile, early years of my transition, when walking around shirtless in the sun without fear or harassment was the highlight of my every week; I am furious that there are people who would rob other queer and trans people of such life-affirming experiences.
Thanks to the hundreds of community members who voiced their outrage, this proposed plan did not succeed. This victory is a testament to the power of the queer and trans community in Seattle when we decide to stand together: Together, we saved our beach.
Read more of the Dec. 13–19, 2023 issue.