Longtime activist who helped shape LGBTQ rights will be remembered at Pride Saturday
When Pierce County’s LGBTQ community celebrates Saturday with a downtown Tacoma Pride festival, it will be without one of its pioneering advocates.
John McCluskey died May 25 at age 85 from Alzheimer’s Disease at a Tacoma long-term care facility, according to those who cared for him.
McCluskey, a former tax accountant, didn’t serve as a politician or head of a public agency. Instead, he worked for decades to bring equal rights to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.
With his husband, Rudy Henry, McCluskey became the public face of same-sex marriage in Pierce County in the 2010s. Although they had been a couple for 63 years, they’d only been married since 2012 — the first year it became legal in Washington.
“He had a very strong vision of what was fair in terms of social justice and civil rights for gays and lesbians,” said longtime friend Geoff Corso. “He was more about making life better for other people.”
McCluskey worked to increase visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ people in Pierce County and Washington.
When the couple first moved to Tacoma, gay people were “virtually invisible,” McCluskey said. On Saturday, 20,000 people could fill downtown Tacoma, Pride organizers say.
Pride
Saturday’s Pride Festival is the first since 2019.
“Lots of people have cabin fever and are excited to get out,” said Troy Christensen, the executive director of the Rainbow Center, Tacoma’s LGBTQ drop-in center.
McCluskey and five other prominent members of the LGBTQ community and its allies who have died in the past year will be remembered at Friday’s Pride Awards at the Pantages Theater.
McCluskey was a co-founder of the Rainbow Center and served on the board of Oasis, an associated LGBTQ youth center.
Friends and those who worked with him on various campaigns recall his soft-spoken nature and impish smile.
“That smile and that twinkle in his eyes,” said Michelle Douglas, who led the Rainbow Center in the 2010s. “He was feisty, and he had just a wonderful degree of kindness to him.”
Oklahoma to Tacoma
McCluskey was born Sept. 9, 1936, in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, to Daniel and Lillian McCluskey.
“He came out to his parents in the 1950s and they were very accepting of him,” Corso said. They also welcomed Henry. McCluskey’s siblings, however, ostracized him and, later, Henry.
In their later years, the couple was reunited with nieces and nephews.
“The McCluskey family started having annual family reunions and invited John and Rudy to the first one in Oregon,” Corso said. “It’s impossible to describe the significance of this invitation to John. It was cathartic.”
McCluskey was drafted in the 1950s, but he was open about his sexuality and was eventually rejected by the Army, Corso said.
Together, but not legally
McCluskey and Henry met at a San Francisco New Year’s Eve party in 1958.
“I would have wanted to get married by the end of 1959,” McCluskey said in 2012. But, “after we had been together 35 or 40 years we pretty much felt married.”
McCluskey cared for Henry after he suffered a stroke.
Before their marriage in 2012, McCluskey had to show his domestic partnership card to doctors and nurses and other health care providers when he took Henry to medical appointments.
“Almost without exception, we’ve had to explain what that means,” he said.
Henry lives at a long-term care facility in Tacoma.
County’s first license
The couple received Pierce County’s first same-sex marriage license on Dec. 6, 2012. It was the first day such marriages became legal in the state following the certification of state Referendum 74, which approved same-sex marriage.
“It’s just exciting,” McCluskey said. “We never even thought it would get to this day.”
They were married nine days later at Tacoma’s First United Methodist Church. The men wore matching pink bow ties and corsages.
When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage on June 26, 2015, it made their marriage legal across the country.
“We were just sort of dancing around here,” McCluskey said. “It’s nice to know that we’re legal.”
Activism
Pierce County LGBTQ advocates remember meeting McCluskey in the 1990s when the movement was largely lesbian-led after a generation of gay men had been lost to AIDS.
Laurie Jinkins, speaker of the Washington House of Representatives, remembers meeting McCluskey at a meeting held in a Tacoma home in the mid-1990s. His support, both moral and financial, were crucial, both Jinkins and Douglas said.
“He was always involved and engaged in all of the big things that we did,” Jinkins said. He worked on every LGBT-themed campaign to come through Tacoma, Pierce County and Washington over the last three decades.
McCluskey was a leader of the Tacoma United For Fairness campaign in 2002, which sought to maintain a city ordinance that protected against discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity and other classes.
TUFF opposed another civic group that sought to repeal the ordinance through a public initiative.
When a Tacoma official suggested to TUFF leaders they ditch the transgender community to make the cause more palatable to the mainstream, McCluskey resisted.
“John was one of the leaders who said, ‘No way. We don’t leave people behind,’” Jinkins said. McCluskey’s view prevailed.
McCluskey went door to door to campaign against the initiative. At one Tacoma home, he approached a man washing his truck. When McCluskey explained why he was there, the man turned his hose on McCluskey.
The public rejected the initiative and the ordinance stayed on the books.
Being out
“The more people who are out, the more likely we are to get some degree of acceptance in mainstream society,” McCluskey said in 2000. “Sure, there are some negative aspects, but I found that dealing with those was a lot easier than pretending to be somebody else all the time.”
The visibility of McCluskey and Henry’s relationship set an example to younger LGBTQ people as well as to the mainstream.
“The length of John and Rudy’s relationship is probably one of the things that did a lot to help voters see that their partnership wasn’t that much different than any heterosexual couple’s relationship,” Jinkins said.
It wasn’t McCluskey’s desire to live apart from the mainstream community. He and Henry had done that in the 1950s and 1960s in San Francisco’s Castro District when it was becoming a gay enclave.
“I sort of like the flavor of Tacoma,” he told The News Tribune in 2004. “I don’t want to live in a gay ghetto.”
Tacoma Pride Festival
Pride organizers are working with the Tacoma Police Department to keep the event safe, Christensen said.
Along with entertainment, political speeches and vendors, the event will feature a makers market.
When: Noon-6 p.m.
Where: Pacific Avenue at South 9th Street and Fireman’s Park, Tacoma.
Admission: Free
Information: tacomapride.org/
