In January we started up in support groups in San Mateo County, an organization called Ellipse, and Peter started doing a lot of volunteer work with them. In December of '89 we decided to get tested, and both of our tests came back positive. Peter just beamed-he was so incredibly proud-and I graduated with a 3.5 GPA in History. You either need to get a real job you need to go to college or you need to get out. It came down to, "You need to do something with your life. We were together about three years, and I was working odd jobs. I honestly believe, with every fiber of my body, that he saved my life. Had it not been for Peter, I probably would have ended up on the streets of San Francisco hustling that's typically what happens to a lot of people that were in the situation I was in. I was basically starving to death, when I met him. Louis: Well, he demanded I go back to school!. You said that he'd influenced you to go back to school. You change the world by going into the corporate dragon's den and changing the way money is spent, because money is what makes the world go 'round. He finally came to the conclusion that you don't change the world by screaming and yelling and throwing red paint at people. He had always been the radical, outsider – you know, shake things up. He started their gay employees' union, which blossomed pretty quick. īy the time he went to Oracle, he got on to their employee benefits committee, and he started Oracle's domestic partner program. wasn't quite radical enough for him, so he decided to get involved in Queer Nation, and started going to a number of protests, which he loved. I believed more along the lines of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Matter of fact, we had a couple of disagreements about that. The image of his eyes at that moment are still burned into my memory: incredibly deep, the most brilliant blue eyes I have ever seen. I had never felt anything like that before. Our eyes met and it was like an electric shock. The truth is, I met him the first time I ever went to a bath house. I said, "So are you proposing to me?" His comment was, "You can take that any way that you want," so I took that as a proposal. And after a week – Peter knew the situation I was in – he asked if I wanted to move in with him. … Eventually he ended up working for Oracle.
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He didn't like large corporations he thought they were too dictatorial, and he liked the small startup atmospheres. He was working in Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley was really Silicon Valley. Louis: Peter just flipped over the openness in San Francisco, and he really loved California.
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Giguere said that Peter was pleased with how he was portrayed, but that his life wasn’t quite as stable as the article made it seem. In April 2002, the Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project interviewed Louis Giguere, Peter’s partner for the last 13 years of his life. He moved to Seattle after being outed and expelled from Whitman College in the 1960s.
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Wichern was born in Havre, Montana, in 1946, the son of a Presbyterian minister. When reporter Ruth Wolf asked to interview members, they agreed – but only Wichern agreed to use his real name. Members appeared on radio programs and led tours of gay bars. The Dorian Society hosted drag balls and helped to establish the Seattle Counseling Services for Sexual Minorities. At a time when most gay people lived closeted double lives and most straight people didn’t know that “respectable” gays existed, the message was a radical one. Their aim was to promote socially acceptable images of homosexuality. to counteract common stereotypes attributed to gays and lesbians – drag queens, butch dykes, pedophiles and barflies. Wichern was a member of Seattle’s Dorian Society, which emerged in 1966 along with other groups across the U.S.