The secret behind Seattle’s gay bowling leagues? Community and competition

Some of Seattle’s most exclusive gay spaces are the Thursday and Sunday night bowling leagues headquartered at West Seattle Bowl. For more than 20 years, the two leagues have been at or near capacity. 

Today, they are still growing. 

Seattle has one of the oldest and largest LGBTQ+ bowling communities in North America. There are almost 300 bowlers occupying 60 lanes over the course of two nights. Starting in the fall, that will increase to 64 lanes — the first time the Thursday night Century 21 League and the Sunday night Pride League will be maxed out. The league’s leaders are considering asking the bowling alley to add a third night.

This is a feat. In recent decades, the sport has contracted so much it became a famous sociological case study of the idea we were all growing more distant from each other — the phrase “bowling alone” became a political shorthand for the death of community engagement.

I’m no sociologist, but I am a gay bowler and so here is my theory on the league’s popularity after one season: The Pride League offers a safe space to hang out with friends, make new ones and flirt. People in their 20s are shoulder-to-shoulder with people in their 70s. It’s explicitly welcoming to people of color, transgender people and even straight people. 

And even in a major LGBTQ+ hub like Seattle, having all those things together is a rarity.

A place to compete

For the Big Lezbowskis, the most important aspect of the league is that it is competitive.

“We’re just jocks,” said Big Lezbowskis bowler Pat Owen. “We want to be the best.”

To me, they already won the best team name in the Pride bowling league. 

There is stiff competition for this title, because puns are as integral to bowling as the thunder of balls rolling down polished lanes, the crack of pins, the smack of high-fives after a strike.

On Sunday and Thursday nights at West Seattle Bowl, there are also often costumes, club hits on the playlist and the specific kind of mullet worn not by the straight blue-collar types you might picture at bowling alleys, but the queer, probably also blue-collar, types you see at bars on Capitol Hill. 

Seattle was one of the first cities to join the International Gay Bowling Organization at its inception in 1980. The city held the country’s fourth annual gay bowling tournament in 1984 and the organization was officially incorporated as a Washington nonprofit in 1985.

Now, the organization holds multiple tournaments a year, with leagues throughout the U.S. and Canada. People travel for these tournaments — sometimes more than half of the teams at Seattle tournaments are from all 50 states and countries as far as Australia.

There appear to be two main ways to find the gay bowling leagues — a cute person invites you or you feel too old to continue playing higher-intensity sports. 

The Big Lezbowskis formed from the latter.

“You want a Slippery Nipple?” Suzanne Ross asked Owen as she unpacked her ball before a Tuesday night summer league game. She and her Lezbowskis teammate Michele Swartz bowl year-round for fun and to keep their averages up. 

The Lezbowskis know each other’s drink orders because some of them have been playing sports together for 40 years. 

When Owen, 72, and Swartz, 69, moved to Seattle as a couple in their early 30s, they almost immediately joined the Emerald City Softball Association, an LGBTQ+ league. Although they broke up a few years in, they kept playing together, accumulating best friends from teammates and opponents. As softball became too hard on their bodies, they expanded to bowling and golf. 

“There’s such a comfort level,” Swartz said of LGBTQ+ sports leagues, after rolling her second strike of the first game.

Beating the trend

If you don’t already have a team, it is helpful to join the other way — invited by a potential date or friend. 

League president Nick Jasper, 49, found the Century 21 League this way in 2004. There, he met his future husband, Bill McNeill, who had been invited by a neighbor in their apartment building’s laundry room. 

They then expanded to the Sunday league around 2010. Now, they spend two nights a week hanging out with friends. At this point, their scores are almost secondary.

“It’s actually how we generate plans for the weekend,” Jasper said.

Both nights had started to decline in attendance before the pandemic. Sunday went from 26 lanes down to 20. The Thursday night league, somehow always more of a weekend vibe than Sunday’s, wasn’t at the 32-lane capacity of West Seattle for the first time in recent memory.

In July 2014, The Seattle Times reported only 15 bowling centers remained in Greater Seattle, a third of what existed 50 years ago. 

A decade later, and there are eight dedicated bowling alleys. 

So when West Seattle Bowl reopened to the public in 2021 and the Pride League restarted with only 13 teams, Jasper and crew started to actively recruit for the first time. 

Rather than relying on word-of-mouth, they set up tables and handed out flyers at Seattle or White Center Prides. Or bars. 

“No one knew there was such a thing as LGBTQ bowling in Seattle and it’s not just for good bowlers, it’s for everybody,” Jasper said.

Building an inclusive league

Jasper and his fellow organizers really mean “everybody.”

They tweaked conventional registration rules so Century 21 and Pride League bowlers don’t have to choose a gender. Everybody competes against each other, so nonbinary players are on the same footing. Women also end up winning more awards this way, which is nice, because awards mean money.

The lights are bright, you don’t have to drink, and bowling shoes are decidedly not sexy, so there is no pressure to treat league nights as a meat market the way you might a night at The Cuff or the Wildrose, which brings in LGBTQ+ folks who avoid the bars. 

And every week, teams are matched in a rotation, forcing people of all ages, walks of life and skill levels to bond over a communal activity.

While the leagues still tend to be mostly white, they have a long partnership with the Black bowling group, The National Bowling Association, to support each others’ missions to create more safe places to bowl for people who were previously blocked from bowling alleys, and to diversify both organizations’ memberships.

Like many in the league, I bowled when I was young, grew up to be gay and eventually decided to put the two together. But I grew up in small-town bowling alleys where I wasn’t sure I’d want to bring a girlfriend.

In 2016, I joined a league in Portland with friends and found it to be the joy of my week and one of the most interesting communities I participated in. When I moved to Seattle, I Googled “gay bowling Seattle” and found the Pride League. But the season had already started and I was too nervous to sign up on my own. 

So when my partner’s queer softball league teammates wanted to form a bowling team a few years later, I jumped at the chance.

Our team, the Shady Pin(e)s, was not the best, but we were proud to see we weren’t always the worst either. We imagined a happy hour vibe when we signed up, then watched multiple people bowl a perfect 300 or a few pins shy of it. 

And there is something special about seeing versions of our newcomers’ stories reflected in those of people who have been there since nearly the beginning.

Decades spent bowling 

Nick Collins, 57, worked at bowling alleys in the 1980s and ’90s and had heard of the gay bowling leagues but never seen them. 

Collins grew up bowling. He loved going with his mom and stepdad to Rainier Lanes — now, long closed — down the hill from where they lived on Beacon Hill.

“We’d pull up to that familiar, great big neon bowling pin that would be flashing and I knew where I was,” Collins said.

In 1991, Collins was invited by a guy he met at a gay roller skating party to join him at a gay bowling tournament. Collins didn’t bowl his first night — just watched. It was definitely different from the straight bowling leagues he was in.

Those leagues didn’t have a team called the Lipsticks donning drag or energy quite as raucous.

He decided he would substitute for friends’ teams, and basically never left.

Collins has become well-known in the league for his longevity, as well as his mighty backswing that looks like he might crack his shoulder. 

He says he is there for fun. He used to try to be the best — and has, in fact, been the best, winning multiple championships — but has backed off. His team’s name says as much: Kiss My Average. 

Still, I believe him when he says the fun is more important.

Everyone cheers for strikes and spares, even if that’s 10 points against us. Everyone commiserates over each gutter ball because we all have rough nights.

At the end of every season, there is a potluck and our best stats are honored and money is handed out. Someone always reads a list of names of bowlers who have died since 1980, many from AIDS or HIV. 

This fact is inevitable in any gay community that has existed that long. Collins was diagnosed with HIV in 1989 and has watched so many friends leave the league well before they should have had to give it up. 

Collins points out that now, most former teammates and rivals are dying from aging instead. But the ritual stands, followed by cheers to celebrate their lives.

“Some people would probably sit back and go, ‘Why are we doing this?’” Collins said. “But it does kind of help for people to see where we came from and where we’re going.”