The 3rd Annual Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival at Harvard Exit Theatre, Seattle, WA, October 30-November 5, 1998

This poster advertises the third annual Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, which was held at the Harvard Exit Theatre in Capitol Hill in late fall 1998. Vito Russo (1946 –1990), film historian and advocate for LGBTQ inclusion in popular media, had planted the seeds for the festival, which had officially begun at the Harvard Exit Theatre in 1996, with his film and lecture show, “The Celluloid Closet,” performed in Seattle in 1982 and 1990. Since 2016, the event has been called Seattle Queer Film Festival and is produced by the Three Dollar Bill Cinema, a community arts organization which provides forums and screening of films by, for, and about LGBTQ people. 

In 1891, a group of prominent Seattle women, including suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, founded the Woman’s Century Club, designed for the cultural and intellectual development of its members and for social service. In 1925, they began meeting in a newly constructed building at 807 East Roy Street in Capitol Hill, which they sold to Boeing engineers and film buffs Jim O’Steen and Art Bernstein in 1968 under the condition that the parlor, with its fireplace, grand piano, and chandelier, would remain as an intact meeting place for the club. The rest of the building became the two-screen Harvard Exit Theatre, which the two sold to Landmark Theatres in 1979. The theatre closed in 2015 and was sold to Eagle Rock Ventures, whose main tenant is the Mexican Consulate of Seattle.