Time & Again: Vashon Pride

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, June 2, 2026

Vashon-Maury Island has become a safe place to be safely out, but it was not always that way.

To celebrate Pride Month 2026, it is helpful to reflect on what got us where we are, to look at some of the representative leaders who helped us get here, and to acknowledge the work done by the growing LGBTQ+ island community that made this journey possible in the face of discrimination and hate.

We do not know much about the “maiden aunts” who lived together sharing a life or the “bachelor farmers” also living together and sharing a home because the moral codes of the time did not acknowledge these relationships.

Vashon, like many small island communities, provided a “live and let live” attitude that allowed other islanders to accept these arrangements without asking too many questions.

The first we know about openly LGBTQ+ residents on Vashon came in the post-World War II era when Marian Fitch and her partner, Mary Lee Fraser, who had been college roommates at UW, moved to Vashon and purchased a house together.

They came to the island to start Island Views, a “photo-newspaper produced by a process known as photo offset.” The new newspaper was published from June 16, 1948, to Aug. 4, 1949, and “presented news of this community in photos, supplemented by a limited number of short news stories.”

The new publication featured cartoons by Kingsley Douthwaite of Glen Acres Road and was supported by subscriptions and advertising revenue.

While many islanders welcomed the new couple and supported their newspaper, others did not. In what we would now call a hate crime, Marian and Mary Lee’s two large sheepdogs were found shot in the head and dumped off the Judd Creek Bridge. When Island Views failed as a newspaper in 1949, Mary Lee left the island to study psychology in Vienna and eventually returned to the Pacific Northwest, settling on the Oregon Coast and practicing as a psychotherapist.

Marian remained on the island and became a forceful spokesperson for progressive causes and an outspoken critic of small-mindedness. She worked to form the Unitarian Fellowship, to cofound Vashon Youth Services (now Vashon Youth and Family Services), and to form the Democratic Club at a time when Vashon voted reliably Republican.

Marian probably never would have called herself a lesbian but rather saw herself as a “multidimensional” person or what many today would call bisexual.

She had a long-term relationship with an island man, bore a son, Tobey, who was raised on Vashon, graduated from Vashon High School and currently splits his time between the Fitch Farm on Vashon and Portland, Oregon.

By the 1970s, as the counterculture revolution hit the shores of the island, a growing lesbian and gay population began to develop that allowed more of a place for everyone.

The “Hasbians,” a lesbian softball team, and “The Rock Men of Vashon” provided a community of support for lesbian and gay islanders.

The AIDS crisis of the mid-1980s helped to create a mutual alliance between lesbians and gays to respond to the impact of AIDS on Vashon’s gay community. This alliance laid the foundation for the exceptional Vashon LGBTQ+ community that exists today.

That AIDS alliance was strengthened by the Marriage Fight of the 1990s and 2000s that saw marriage equality in Washington state become legal in 2012, and nationally with the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling legalizing marriage equality in 2015.

Emma Amiad, and her wife, Susan White, came to Vashon in 1987. She quickly became a leader in both the larger Vashon community and in the Vashon LGBTQ+ community. Emma helped found the Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust, the Vashon Audubon Society (now the Vashon Bird Alliance), the annual Martin Luther King Day celebration, Earth Day and the Interfaith Council to Prevent Homelessness.

Emma also operated a very successful buyer’s representative real estate business and was a Vashon Park District commissioner for 10 years, helping to create the exceptional diversity of parks we all enjoy on Vashon.

In 2015, Emma was honored for her community involvement by being named Strawberry Festival grand marshal.

Emma’s friend, Hillary Emmer, commented, “She had her hands in almost everything that is good on this island.”

In addition to these distinguished accomplishments, Emma feels like there are two things she achieved that few islanders know about. First is her over 30 years of pro bono work for the Land Trust, handling the real estate transactions that allowed the Land Trust to preserve significant parts of the island.

The second was the over two years of delicate negotiations with King County to transfer most of the King County parks on the island to the newly created Vashon Park District. This also included the negotiations with the U.S. Coast Guard to transfer the Point Robinson Lighthouse to Vashon parks.

The many parks the Vashon Park District maintains and operates for the benefit of islanders are the result of these long and sensitive negotiations.

Emma and Susan moved to Sequim, Washington, in 2019 to find better air quality for Emma’s health issues triggered by late-summer fire smoke in the Salish Sea Basin.

“Emma is Vashon’s first climate refugee,” said Tom Dean, executive director of the Land Trust at the time.

But despite this growing acceptance and this greater involvement in the Vashon community, there were still islanders who responded negatively to the growing LGBTQ+ community on the island.

The Vashon Gay Pride Alliance adopted a section of Vashon Highway north of Burton in the early 1990s and like every other section of the “adopt-a-highway” program there was a road sign designating all the groups who adopted sections of the highways they cared for. Countless times the sign was defaced and destroyed.

Kathy Schafel, a co-founder of the Alliance, remarked, “We’d pick it up out of the ditch. We’d give it to the county. They were wonderful. They wanted to keep it up. And they spent a lot of money replacing that sign over and over and over again.”

By the 2000s, the gentrification of the island that began in the 1990s engulfed the LGBTQ+ community as well. As LGBTQ+ islanders became wealthier and began to age, the community began to look more and more like the larger gentrifying island community of which it was a part.

At the same time, a new cohort of LGBTQ+ islanders began to emerge as many island young people began to openly identify as transgender, lesbian, gay and the full spectrum of gender and sexual identities.

Into this milieu, islanders like Amy Drayer began to return to the island and become part of the newly emerging island leadership that was able to build on the precedents established by Marian, Emma and the LGBTQ+ community that had become an integral part of the larger island community.

Amy grew up on Vashon in the 1980s and 1990s, graduated from Vashon High School in 1995, went to Scripps College, worked in Washington, D.C., for years with Gloria Steinem. She moved with her now-wife to Colorado, and eventually became the vice president of the GLBT Community Center of Colorado before returning to Vashon in 2022.

When she returned to the island, she served as the executive director of the Vashon Chamber of Commerce and since 2025 as the executive director of Vashon HouseHold. In addition, Amy helped create and direct Islanders for Ferry Action, coached Vashon High School softball, was elected as a Vashon Island Fire and Rescue commissioner, and is a stalwart on the Voice of Vashon’s weekly Brown Briefly radio show.

While Amy was painfully aware of discrimination and hate crimes directed at the LGBTQ+ community on Vashon in the 1990s, she sees the island community “so differently now … Vashon is not what it was when I was a kid. Lesbians and gays were not universally accepted.” Although there is lack of acceptance by some now, they are a small minority on the island. Comments about “who is this dyke running the Chamber?” and “who is this girl who thinks she can do anything?” are unusual, but they are there.

Working for seven years for the LGBT Community Center in Colorado, Amy was, in a way, forced to be “out and proud,” no matter the consequence in a more conservative community.

This experience made the return to Vashon a breath of fresh air. Unlike many other places in the United States and the world, Vashon, often, she believes, accepts LGBTQ+ people as an equally valuable part of our community.

The “IN and OUT: Being LGBTQ+ on Vashon” exhibit at the Heritage Museum in 2019-20 was a big step in recognizing the history of the LGBTQ+ community on the island.

Although incomplete in recognizing the changing demographics of the Vashon LGBTQ+ community as more younger islanders “came out,” transitioned, or recognized and lived their own unique path, the exhibit highlighted the emergence of Vashon as a relatively safe place to be safely out.

The exhibit fell short of recognizing the increasing complexity of the Vashon LGBTQ+ community and effectively erased the growing trans, Asian, Latino and bisexual dimensions of the Vashon community.

Today islanders recognize that Vashon has mostly accepted our LGBTQ+ neighbors at a time when we are increasingly becoming an unsafe nation for these neighbors.

We also recognize the work of the island’s LGBTQ+ community, the violence they experienced, and the struggles of the past that have created the island we have today.

Bruce Haulman is an island historian. Terry Donnelly is an island photographer. This article is part of their ongoing “Time & Again” series, which explores island history in The Beachcomber.