Jan Denali (She/Her)

by Aundreah Jenkins (She/Her)

In 1978, Anita Bryant and other conservative figureheads led a national effort to strip the country’s LGBTQ+ communities of their hard-earned rights, including employment and housing protections. However, the people of Seattle—especially Jan Denali—were ready to fight back! The initiative to roll back rights was called Initiative 13, and the members of the community gathered under the banner of Seattle Committee Against Thirteen, otherwise known as SCAT.

While there was a strong drive against the initiative within the committee, many of the feminist activists found it stifling and very male-oriented, including the lesbian activist Jan Denali. While the main focus of Initiative 13 was to target the LGBTQ+ community, the initiative also planned to eliminate the Office of Women’s Rights and strip the city’s power to investigate discrimination claims. Out of concern that the main committee wasn’t meeting women’s needs, Jan Denali and the other women of SCAT made their own subcommittee: Women Against Thirteen, also known as WAT.

The WAT gave women a chance to organize together under the same banner, and let their voices be heard within the coalition. Whereas SCAT’s language and focus were very centered around men, the new coalition gave women the power to address their needs. Jan Denali was mainly involved in door-to-door canvassing and education, focusing on meeting people and addressing the issue in a straightforward manner. The committee worked all throughout the summer to reach out and educate the public. Thanks to everyone’s hard work, the initiative was defeated that November with a majority vote of 63%, and there was a mass celebration at Pike Place Market afterwards. But for Jan Denali, the fight wasn’t over quite yet!

In the following years, similar initiatives were proposed for the ballot targeting LGBTQ+ rights. In 1986 Jan Denali took up the leadership role to specifically fight back against Referendum 7 in King County. This one once again focused on stripping away local housing and employment protections. Flyer petitions were sent out with removable flaps that lumped the LGBTQ+ community with pedophiles and rapists on them, declaring all of them to be “sexual deviants”. The removable flap with the offensive material would be torn off before being sent in, making it look like an unbiased and non-hateful ballot petition. Believing the petitions to be hateful and deceptive in nature, Jan Denali contacted the attorney general and other state offices to address the flyers. But the response was lackluster, with state officials telling her that they would get to it later. Instead, she organized a small committee to mount a legal challenge against the flap. In the end, Jan Denali’s committee was successful once again: they won their legal challenge and the referendum never saw the ballot.

Jan Denali’s greatest achievement is protecting rights and ensuring that women had a visible spot in local activism. She found reward in the work she and her fellow activists did, and believed that their contributions would be harder to write out of history. In the end, she was right.