Next month is Three Sheets Northwest’s one-year anniversary. Through the holidays, we’ll be posting a few of our favorite stories from the past year. This story was originally posted on Aug. 2.

The men and women gathered over cocktails and a potluck at a Gig Harbor marina on a recent weekend could have been part of any boating rendezvous on Puget Sound.

But when Seattle’s Olympic Yacht Club started, the price of membership for many was the fear of losing their jobs or alienating family and friends. They took refuge in the club, one of the few places they could be openly gay.

Seattle has changed considerably since then. And 30 years later, the Olympic Yacht Club is thriving and has grown into what is believed to be the oldest gay and lesbian yacht club in the country and the only one in the Pacific Northwest. Launched in 1979, will celebrate its 30th anniversary Aug. 22 at an annual membership picnic in Port Orchard.

“It’s about fellowship, getting together with other gay and lesbian and allied folk and just hanging out,” said Mike Cox, the club’s commodore.

Primarily a social organization, Olympic Yacht Club organizes about 14 events annually, including weeklong cruises, rendezvous, a holiday party, Halloween “pumpkin hack” and the occasional family event. There are theme get-togethers, low-key potlucks and land-based events such as camping.

The club currently comprises about 120 members and 65 boats, from kayaks to ski boats, runabouts to blue water cruisers. Owning a boat is not a requirement, nor is being straight an impediment—the club has had numerous heterosexual members over the years, Cox said.

About half the current members are active, Cox said, while others are longtime members who may not show up for events but like to stay in contact with the club.

Kaler Wise, left, and Jim Downey visit at a recent Olympic Yacht Club event.

It’s an affinity born out of common interests and shared struggles. Some members can remember the early days of the club, started just a decade after New York’s historic Stonewall riots. Though gay and lesbian Seattleites had begun organizing politically by then, discrimination was still rampant.

In that charged environment, Olympic Yacht Club founder Andy Johnson was guarded about his personal life. He was active in the Dorian Society, Seattle’s first gay rights organization, and worked as a librarian at the University of Washington, ground zero of the city’s gay rights movement. Still, Johnson told few people that he lived with his male partner.

“People could and were still being fired for that,” Johnson said.

Despite his caution, Johnson reacted enthusiastically when a friend, Mark Arnold, proposed an idea as they sailed through the San Juan Islands one day in 1978.

“Don’t you think,” Arnold asked, “that it’s about time that we had a serious gay boating group in Seattle?”

Arnold’s brainchild wasn’t entirely out of the blue. Various activity clubs for gays and lesbians had sprung up around Seattle in the late 1970s, from hiking groups to karate collectives.

“There was a great deal of interest then in establishing clubs for a wide range of activities so people could go and meet other people outside of the gay bar, which is all we had before then,” Johnson said.

Johnson and Arnold agreed to see how much interest there was in starting a gay boating club. They placed a notice in the Dorian Society’s newsletter in early 1979, inviting interested boaters to call.

“My phone just started ringing like crazy,” Johnson said. “We had 10 people, then 20, then 30.”

Johnson hosted an inaugural meeting at his Seattle apartment that spring and the first event, an overnight trip to Port Blakely off Bainbridge Island, was held in August.

The club’s founding members intentionally chose a generic name, not wanting to advertise its focus. In the same vein, Johnson said, some members insisted that their club newsletter be mailed in a plain brown wrapper. The Olympic Yacht Club website includes no board members’ names and no photos of members, just a first name, an email address and a phone number for those interested in joining.

Members include teachers, military personnel and other professionals who fear workplace discrimination, Cox said, and older members for whom being publicly gay remains an unthinkable prospect.

“There still is some discrimination in terms of jobs,” he said. “And I think there are some older members who grew up in the closet and aren’t as comfortable being out.”

Val Maxam-Moore is among a growing number of female members in the Olympic Yacht Club.

But while some club members consider the boating world more conservative than the broader society, none who were interviewed said they’ve experienced discrimination as a gay boater.

“I’ve felt more threatened in the golfing community than I’ve felt in the boating community,” said Val Maxam-Moore, 46. “I think boaters just have a camaraderie because no matter who it is, they’ve all run out of gas, been stuck, broken down, whatever, and they’ve been helped by another boater.”

Johnson, who’s 66, said that while he’s never encountered outright hostility on the water, he has been asked about the unfamiliar-looking burgee flying from his boat. When pressed for details about the club, he’s typically met with a shocked silence after explaining that it’s a gay and lesbian group.

Johnson chalks up the response to a lack of education. “It’s about getting to know the people and realizing that hey, we have the same problems everybody else does and we pay our taxes like everybody else and so on and so forth,” he said.

“As we continue to exist and be responsible and not be going through the Ballard Locks with our pink streamers floating in the wind, everybody’s cool with it.”

While some aspects of the club have remained constant, the organization has evolved considerably over the years. When it was formed, Johnson said, there was a pronounced divide between gay men and lesbians in the broader society that carried over into the club. Men didn’t want women involved and women, not surprisingly, stayed away.

That dynamic, combined with the historically male-dominated nature of boating, resulted in a yacht club that was almost exclusively male until about 10 years ago. Women now make up about 40 percent of the club’s membership, a change Johnson attributes to the “hard work” of several female members convincing other women to join.

The club also went through a period in its early days as an unofficial hook-up venue, developing a reputation as a sex club that was alienating for some. That changed with the onslaught of AIDS in the early 1980s. The gay community was hit hard and the Olympic Yacht Club lost several members, including Arnold, who died in 1986 at age 35 of AIDS-related complications.

During that period, Johnson said, club members came together to support each other, bringing meals to sick members, taking them to doctor’s appointments, lending a shoulder if needed. Similarly, when Johnson went into treatment for alcoholism in 1982, the club members were there to prop him up.

“The club has been a very supportive force, I think, for a lot of people,” he said.

Over the years, the club increased its focus on boating safety, offering seminars on topics such as engine maintenance and boating first-aid. That aspect is what attracted Sue Ferguson, who joined the club three years ago and is now its rear commodore.

When Ferguson met her partner, a boater, she owned an RV, couldn’t swim and hadn’t spent any time on boats. She took a boater safety course through the Olympic Yacht Club and gained skills and a new community.

“They’re such a great group of people,” Ferguson said. “Everybody has a talent and they’re willing to share.”

Formed in 1977, the Olympic Yacht Club celebrates three decades of boating and camaraderie.

These days, the Olympic Yacht Club seems to have hit its stride. At the Gig Harbor get-together, which capped off an annual weeklong cruise in south Puget Sound, club members visited, showed off their dogs and played rounds of card games punctuated by raucous laughter.

The group included Maxam-Moore and her partner, Mickey Maxam-Moore, 56, who traveled from Florida for the cruise. The pair previously lived in Gig Harbor and joined the club after deciding they were ready to purchase a cruising boat and needed to learn more about boating.

A club member accompanied them on the first cruise in their 30-foot Bayliner, coaching and guiding as they sailed on a snowy January day in 2005.

“It was so helpful,” Val Maxam-Moore said.

Sitting nearby was club historian Kaler Wise, 40, who joined the club in 1990 after hearing about it from his college roommates. He’s belonged to two other Seattle-area yacht clubs but didn’t feel comfortable revealing his personal life to either of them.

“They were very family-oriented. Everything’s ‘Mister’ and ‘Missus,’” Wise said. “I wasn’t ready to go ahead and let them know who I am as an individual.”

A fourth generation Seattleite, Wise started boating as a child on his grandfather’s 50-foot custom-built trawler. After his grandfather died in 1983, Wise said, he wanted to carry on the boating tradition.

He now cruises on his 30-foot Tollycraft, Wise Guy, and is thinking about applying for membership in the Seattle Yacht Club. He’s attracted to the club’s history, its traditions and its amenities, but admits he’s a little nervous about approaching the venerable establishment.

“I’ve been scared to do it because I’m gay,” Wise acknowledged. It’s kind of intimidating. It absolutely is.”

Johnson, who now lives in Palm Springs, California, wasn’t at the Gig Harbor get-together but is looking forward to the August membership picnic. There, he’ll catch up with old friends and proudly celebrate the organization he started three decades ago.

“Helping the club get going and seeing it succeed probably brings me more joy than anything else I have ever done,” he said. “I’m hoping that in 20 years I’ll be around for the 50th anniversary party.”

For information about the Olympic Yacht Club and upcoming events, go to the club’s website.