There’s promise at the end of this Rainbow
Spokane’s gay and lesbian community is looking for a home. And filmmaker Denise Thomas is trying to document that search, the yearnings behind it, and the potential drawbacks in a conservative city that has nonetheless adopted a progressive attitude toward its homosexual residents and businesses.
Thomas’s “A Rainbow Vision” has been commissioned, in part, by the Inland Northwest Business Alliance and its Vision Committee, which has worked for two years to formulate a plan for assembling a critical mass of gay-owned homes and shops that will raise that population’s profile.
Committee chairwoman Bonnie Aspen says the recent failures of two anti-gay initiatives in Washington and Washington, D.C., indicate Americans have moved beyond prejudice toward that population. For one, Tim Eyman’s effort to roll back a new state law banning discrimination against gays fell short of securing the necessary petition signatures. And the U.S. Senate decisively spiked a proposed constitutional amendment that would bar same-sex marriages.
Of course, Spokane has had its own law barring discrimination against gays since 1999. Voters rejected a bid to set the law aside.
Those challenges behind it, the gay and lesbian community can move on, Aspen says. “We’ll never be able to go back to ‘Oh, those people.’”
She says Spokane gays and lesbians can now refocus on the hows and whys of concentrating somewhere. A district would underscore the economic power of the estimated one-in-10 Spokane residents who are gay, she says, and combat ignorance about who gays are by making them more visible.
But the definition of a gay business and/or residential district can be elusive.
The intent is not to create an exclusively gay neighborhood, just one where gays and lesbians live close enough and in numbers large enough to provide support for one another. The West Central area is a potential location, as is the South Perry area, where the relocated Odyssey Youth Center has been well-received by the business community. The center, which is not just for gays, is already working with the local business district on activities like a farmers’ market.
“What a great opportunity,” Aspen says. “It’s nurtured both sides.”
She says she hopes the documentary will accelerate the emergence of a gay-oriented district.
For Thomas, meanwhile, “Rainbow” is one half of a two-pronged effort to increase local consciousness of important human rights champions in Spokane. The other half is a documentary of Spokane attorney and civil rights activist Carl Maxey, who died in 1997.
“People need to know what’s going on in their own community,” she says.
“Rainbow,” Thomas adds, is a follow up to an earlier, shorter video that helped rally the Spokane gay and lesbian community behind the district concept. A one-hour production would allow her to expand her exploration of the implications for a gay neighborhood, including commentary by opponents.
An employee of The Spokesman-Review, Thomas says there is a national audience for the Maxey and gay-district stories, with distribution interest from the National Filmmakers Telecommunications Association to support that claim. If she can secure additional grant money, she says she hopes to have at least one of the projects ready next year.
Black and a lesbian, Thomas graduated from North Central High School in 1985, then attended college and started her professional career in the south. Returning to Spokane, she says, revived conservative values like respect for authority and devotion to family that she had learned growing up in a military family. Part of her mission is to assure the broader community a gay and lesbian enclave would share those values.
“You’re talking about sexual orientation, you’re not talking about anything else,” Thomas says. “I think a gay district really helps to bring down ignorance.”