Pride in Seattle is a well-lubricated machine. If you’ve ever come out to Pride to party, find community, or rally for the good fight, I’d like to highlight one of the people who makes that possible.
L.A. Kendall has accepted the label of “elder” with a 30-year career in nightlife. Alongside being Deputy Director of Seattle’s PrideFest, Kendall is a DJ, event producer, talent manager, booking agent, and champion of community fundraising. Her years of experience come with firsthand knowledge of how the city has changed and stories from mentors who inspire her own commitment to mentorship.
In a cinematic start, Kendall stepped off a plane from Arizona with a goal of working in the entertainment industry and hit the ground running, bartending and teaching herself to DJ from broken equipment at the bar. In 1993, at the age of 21, she was working in Seattle’s nightlife during the peak of the AIDS crisis, the height of grunge music, and an era where Seattle had more than one lesbian bar. “A lot of the gay men that had HIV were coming over to the lesbian bars where they were more welcome than they were at some gay bars,” Kendall told me in our interview. “HIV/AIDS still had so much stigma to it. We had safe-sex packs everywhere in every bar. We were raising a lot of money for Chicken Soup Brigade, which then became Lifelong AIDS Alliance. The lesbians from the bar would go and feed or drop off food or sit with the guys that came into the bar that didn’t have family. We became their family.”
She recalls having meetings with the lesbian mafia. “As younger lesbians, we called our elders the lesbian mafia because they were protecting us. They would take us for these lunch meetings to give us a terse talking to, plan a party, or just give us a history lesson. I can’t tell you how much I would give to go back and have one of those meetings again.”
Kendall reflects on three core mentors. Amanda Bailey taught her how to bartend and made sure Kendall knew her queer history. In the early 1970s, Bailey was “part of these young queers that were going across the country after the Christopher Street Liberation Day parade, risking their lives. It was not a popular thing to do to start these Pride marches across the country.” Kendall recounted Bailey’s stories of “people attacking them physically, throwing tomatoes at them, throwing rocks. This wasn’t a safe thing to do, but that was very inspiring to me. It’s because of her that I feel so strongly about Pride and trying to keep the community tied into the past—to bring the past into the future so that we don’t ever forget about that.”
Another mentor was the late and beloved co-owner of the Wildrose, Shelley Brothers. “I always used to try to give her credit for being an elder and she would always say ‘big sister!’ I was so lucky to have her in my life to gossip with, to have a cigarette with, to get advice from. She was a great support to me. That woman had my back in so many spaces.” Kendall says Brothers not being here has been devastating, but she is also “so happy that Martha and Katie have taken the torch and run with it.”
A third mentor to Kendall has been Caroline Davenport, cofounder of Tasty Shows. “Caroline basically took me under her wing. Caroline was groundbreaking. She was in with the grunge scene, Kurt Cobain, everything. She gave so many of those bands their first shows. They had this club night called Lemon Twist.” Kendall remembers going to the event and feeling like “Alice in Wonderland. I mean, I’ve never seen anything like it since.”
With that spark, Kendall began planning her own events. “I started this club night called Caliente at the Easy.” It was so well attended that Davenport helped her move it to the Showbox. “We are still very good friends. Without her I would definitely not be doing this. She taught me the integrity of event work.”
Kendall’s career continued to grow. She worked for Virgin Records, then KBA Marketing, and eventually went all in on producing club nights, DJing, and deepening her strong bond with the drag community. Eventually a fateful connection was made with Egan Orion, Executive Director of PrideFest. “Egan had run into a coffee shop like, ‘Do you know any lesbian DJs?’ The girl at Vivace just happened to be one of my good friends.” She went from DJing to booking to producing, and then Orion offered the role of Deputy Director. Now she’s also a big part of the Mix’s Pride block party in Tacoma, and has recently been brought on for Portland Pride as well.
On top of this, Kendall does considerable community fundraising with her wife, Amy Kendall Labree. They started DSA (Do Something Already) in honor of Amy’s mom. The organization includes things like the StarLightsStarBrights Fund, which provides micro-grants during the holiday season, the $500 Glitter Grant to help event producers, and the Julian Fund. “It’s a $1,000 grant that we give on Pride weekend. Amy does all the fulfillment, but we hook them up to mentors and connections. As a recipient, you can come to us always, for anything. It’s about creating community. Do Something Already is all-volunteer. All of the money goes out to the community and 95 percent of our donations are small business and individual contributors.”
When asked about Seattle’s past and where she wanted the scene to go, she reflected on how interconnected the community used to be and how she hopes we can regain that. “All the queer nights were so diverse. There was no social media, so your ass had to get up at 1:30 a.m., get all dolled up, stomp over to the clubs, pass out flyers, put flyers on every car, wheat-paste the light boxes in the darkness of the night. You had to make really deep relationships. There was a lot more direct conversation. It was a lot more integrated then. I hope to see our community come back together, because when it’s important, we are going to need every last one of us to fight this fight. And we have a real fight ahead of us.”
