It wasn’t the meeting the Leschi Community Council thought it would be.
Council President Ashley Martin stood nervously at the front of the crowded room at Grace United Methodist Church, wringing a copy of the council’s newsletter, The Leschi News, in her hands.
“So to address the elephant in the room…” Martin began, explaining that this was originally planned as a neighborhood Q&A with Seattle Police Department Chief Shon Barnes. “This was also posted as this is a forum to discuss the situation, I’m not even going to try and describe the right word for it, at Denny Blaine Park.”
Martin decided the first half of the meeting would stick to the original agenda and the second half would be devoted to the “situation.”
Just who was here to ask Barnes about the “situation” was visually obvious. The people with the signs and colorful hair wanted to know: Why did three of his officers make a bunch of legally nude people put their clothes on at a queer nude beach on Sunday and kicked out a trans woman who refused to get dressed?
But first, a brief (roughly twenty-minute) introduction. After discussing his history as a teacher turned cop, his wife, who’s a doctor, and three kids still back in the midwest, and his lonely home life in Seattle without them, Barnes took questions. He had just started answering one about the Before the Badge training program when Chavisa Woods, who lives in Leschi and has gone to Denny Blaine with her partner for 12 years, lost patience.
“Half of us are here to talk about Denny Blaine, and you said we’d get time for that,” Woods says.
“You told us about your college major before you got to Denny Blaine,” someone says. “You said we would get to Denny Blaine first.”
“No no,” President Martin says, now seated at a table at the front of the room. “I said we were going to get to the original intent of the meeting first.”
“Respectfully,” Woods says over the babble. “They are cracking down on queer bodies and raiding queer spaces,” Woods says.
After about twenty more minutes of questions, Woods was called on.
“We sat here politely and listened to you talk about how great the police are, but a lot of us have never had that experience,” Woods says. “I would like to know why it’s okay for the police to come to queer spaces and start cracking down on people for public nudity, which is not even illegal in the city of Seattle.”
“Is nudity illegal?” says a man at the back with long grey hair. “That’s the first question.”
“No,” people groan and yell at him.
Barnes finally pipes up. “So being nude is free expression, not illegal,” he says. “Not illegal. Let me explain to you what happened.”
Barnes explained that the officers were receiving complaints about nudity and masturbation, which Barnes (hilariously) called “activity that may shock the conscience.” The officers had been instructed to patrol the park in search of said shocking acts, Barnes says, but “mistakenly they were wrong” when they asked people to put their clothes on. Barnes was explaining that the trans woman was issued a code of conduct violation and told not to come back to the beach for a week when that woman, standing in the back of the room, interrupted him.
“It was a business card!” she says. “That’s what they gave me.”
“And to correct you,” says Colleen Kimseylove, co-leader of the park stewardship group Friends of Denny Blaine. “The officer trespassed the woman for being naked. We have photo evidence, she’s laying down, she’s doing nothing.”
“It is my understanding that that will be rescinded, alright,” Barnes says.
“Am I allowed at the park or not?” says the woman in the back.
“Yes,” Barnes says. People clapped. Later, someone in the crowd asked him to say sorry.
“I did that.”
“I was detained!” the woman says. “That’s not a thing that you apologized for.”
“That’s something you get sued for,” someone quips.
“Well, we don’t comment on pending lawsuits,” Barnes says. (It’s unclear if there is a pending suit, or if Barnes was saying he couldn’t comment on the prospect of being sued. SPD told The Stranger they’re unaware of any pending lawsuits.)
At the end of the meeting, Barnes apologized to anyone who “may have been offended” by his officers misinterpreting the law. “We’re not perfect,” he says.
Sunday’s “mistake” came shortly after a neighbors group, Denny Blaine Park for All, sued the city for allegedly allowing the beach to turn into a den of cum and villainy where public sex and masturbation were supposedly commonplace. Masturbation surely happens at Denny Blaine as it does at our city’s many beautiful parks, as well as on our buses and street corners, but the more than 50 beachgoers who’ve spoken to The Stranger about Denny Blaine in the last year and half say the neighbors’ characterization is overblown. Masturbation is anathema at Denny Blaine, and beachgoers kick people out when they see it. Kimseylove, who is holding an intervention training at the beach on May 18, says they suspect neighbors are reporting masturbation in places like the parking lot where beachgoers aren’t even aware it’s happening.
But the suit isn’t just going after illegal public masturbation, it alleges that legal nudity violates the Parks Department’s code of conduct because it’s depriving them enjoyment of the beach.
The beachgoers just see it as the latest scheme to kick them out. Before the suit, an anonymous donor (later unmasked by the millionaire owner of University Village and next door neighbor to Denny Blaine Park Stuart Sloan, also part of the group that filed the suit) hatched a $1 million plan to build a children’s playground at the beach.
Before that plan went public in the fall 2023, Sloan vented his frustrations about nudity in text messages to Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s private cell phone. He sent the Mayor photos of naked people on the beach, which he called “DISGUSTING.” Harrell promised Sloan that deputy Mayor (now SDOT Director) Adiam Emery would help him. Emery and Seattle Parks Department employees met with Sloan for months, even reviewing plans for the park. After a lively and loud public meeting in December 2023, where dozens said the beach was a place of freedom and safety, Parks cancelled the playground.
Public records show Harrell met with Sloan twice, including the day after the city announced the plan was dead, but maintained he never knew the donor’s identity. In the first few months of 2024, beachgoers and neighbors tried to hash out a solution to end the conflict for good, but nothing really came of the talks.
Lately though, the city has paid Denny Blaine extra attention. As The Stranger reported Monday, in March, Seattle Park Rangers told a nude sunbather to either get dressed or move closer to the water where he couldn’t be seen from the street. In April, police showed up at least two times as part of the patrols Barnes mentioned last night. Blake Waddell, a beach regular there both times, says one officer told him higher ups were directing the patrols. A sergeant told Kimseylove the same thing at the beach Sunday. (In all these cases, no lewd behavior was found). Waddell, who was also at the beach Sunday, says he filed a complaint with a sergeant on the spot.
In an email, Harrell’s office denied directing SPD to change its approach at Denny Blaine. The Seattle Parks Department says Park Rangers have routinely stopped by Denny Blaine since March 2024 and that there’s been no change to policy.
According to the lawsuit, neighbors met with City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth three times last year. Two months ago, after Hollingsworth talked about the meetings on the podcast Seattle Nice, she told The Stranger neighbors had asked park rangers to look out for masturbation, but that there was no plan for that. Hollingsworth told The Stranger by text Monday night that she had no comment on the Sunday incident, but then posted to X that she and her staff were monitoring the “situation” and were in active communication with SPD, the Parks Department, and the Mayor’s Office about what happened. Barnes says he’s working with Hollingsworth to set up meetings between SPD and the city’s queer community. Hollingsworth also recently met with Friends of Denny Blaine.
“My ongoing hope—and priority—is that we can collaboratively develop a solution that respects the park’s unique heritage while ensuring the safety, dignity, and well-being of everyone who visits,” Hollingsworth wrote.
At last night’s meeting, Barnes said the “directed patrols” at Denny Blaine would end and that he’d bring in Park Rangers to figure out when it was appropriate to call the cops. Though, when The Stranger asked Parks about the rangers who told a man to put on his clothes, Parks said police would take the lead on complaints of lewd behavior from then on.
One woman at the meeting said the cops hadn’t been of much help to beachgoers so far. She said beachgoers used to regularly call about a “predator” harassing women at the beach. When the cops came, they’d allegedly tell the women the man was harassing to put their clothes on. That man eventually pushed someone down the stairs, nearly killing them, she says. Barnes said he wanted to follow up on that.
A man with a coif of dark hair named Michael asked Barnes if his officers would now know nudity was legal in the park and would “never again harass someone for simply being in the buff.”
“I will make sure that everyone understands that nudity is legal,” Barnes says. “But I will not, I could not commit to saying never about anything. I don’t know why they may be there. They may be there for something totally unrelated and it gets attributed to that.”
“That’s, that’s not the question,” someone says.
“Well, then that’s the answer,” Barnes says. “Next question.”
When a woman asked what she should do the next time a police officer told her to get dressed at Denny Blaine, Barnes said she could remind them nudity is “free expression” in the city of Seattle, the exact thing beachgoers did Sunday.
“Can we say that you told us it was okay?” she asked. If he answered, laughter and applause drowned it out.
“We are committed to working with you,” Barnes says, after shooting down Kimseylove’s request for another half hour of questions. “I don’t want anyone to walk out of here, number one, thinking you have a police department that doesn’t support who you are … Lastly, let me say this, this conversation is not over.”
Kimseylove wasn’t thrilled with Barnes.
“I think that was a show of nonsense,” Kimseylove says, frustrated that Barnes did not make more time for questions and left open the ambiguous possibility of future enforcement. “If there is an incident, you are the one with the data, the resources, the money, the information to figure out a way to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The only variable we are asking you to control, Seattle Police Department, is your own employees.”
That much he could have committed to, Kimseylove says. Four others who spoke with The Stranger weren’t confident this was truly over either.
The Stranger’s own reporting on Denny Blaine showed there have been problems there for years: “… voyeurs and pervs seem to have colonized Denny Blaine, so wear shoes if you don’t want to get sperm between your toes.” (https://www.thestranger.com/horrors/2019/07/22/40831261/welcome-to-summer-dont-drink-the-water) Now that the Chief has helpfully reminded the SPD that nudity is legal in Seattle, the problems recently reported by beachgoers with cops at the park should end. If they don’t, then the City Council should start asking just how hard Mayor Harrell leaned on the SPD, on behalf of his rich friend who lives near the park.
(Also, neither Denny Blaine Park, nor any other park in Seattle, has a “queer” beach, because Seattle doesn’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation; there’s no “nude” beach in Seattle, either, because nudity is legal everywhere in Seattle.)
It really wasn’t hard to find out it was Stuart Sloan. In my case, I just looked at the King County Parcel Viewer to see which homes had direct views of the beach, and there he was.
Despite The Stranger’s cartoonish narrative, Sloan’s not all bad. He and his wife Molly gave Fred Hutch 78 million for an advanced oncology center. That’s the biggest donation in the institute’s history.
My biggest gripe with him is inflicting the new University Village on us.
Also, anyone who is shocked that money=access in city government needs to get out more. It’s been that way since the Denny Party landed at Alki.
But I’ll also say that Seattle is probably a bit cleaner in that regard than lots of other cities.
Which is correct?
A:
“… at a queer nude beach on Sunday and kicked out a trans woman who refused to get dressed?”
B:
“… at a nude beach on Sunday and kicked out a woman who refused to get dressed?”
@4 Personally, I consider it a nude beach. I’m gay but that’s not the reason I go there. I go there to be naked in the sun and I honestly have no idea what the sexuality is of anyone else there, nor do I care.
I’d also argue that the gender or sexuality of the person who got kicked out doesn’t matter in this case either. I’d say they were “a nude person who refused to get dressed.”
A guy named “Stuart Sloan” being a rich asshole is pretty much nominative determinism.
@6: What if it was Doug Sloan?
Tenny you’re an idiot.
Any place or thing is bound to have something shitty happen at some point or another, it’s life. You can’t take an issue that happened in the past but is not indicative of the norm and say “it’s been happening for years”. That is an idiotic approach.
This would be like saying, well ya Germany has been killing Jews and gays for years, then referencing an article about the holocaust. That might sound like an extreme example but it’s literally what you did in your comment.
Stop being a shitty person and get over yourself.
Catalina, just being you give a ton of money to a good cause does not mean you’re a good person.
That kind of money is a drop in the bucket to many of these rich people and likely also helps them in the long run with taxes and shit when they donate those amounts. Giving doesn’t mean shit, look at what someone does.
@8, @9: Start with name-calling, and end with claiming a charitable donation simply doesn’t matter, because giving somehow can’t mean doing — even when the gift is a huge amount of money for medical research. (And yet, you still believe yourself qualified to criticize others. Because of course you do!)
Meanwhile, here are just a few of the many important questions you’ve miserably failed to ask about the Stranger’s ‘coverage’ of Denny Blaine Park:
Why does the Stranger persistently ignore its own previous reporting on the condition of Denny Blaine Park?
Why does the Stranger constantly claim the beach at Denny Blaine Park is a “nude Beach,” when nudity is legal everywhere in Seattle?
Why does the Stranger constantly claim the beach at Denny Blaine Park is a “queer beach,” when, again, queers can use any beach (and historically, have congregated elsewhere)?
Why has the Stranger insinuated, without providing any supporting evidence, that Stuart Sloan’s actual goal is to drive queer persons out of Denny Blaine Park?
Those are just for starters. After they’ve kicked your ass long enough, I’ll give you the answers. (I warn you in advance, they’re not pretty.)
Bmelon dear, I never said he was a good person. I disagree with his position on the park, but that doesn’t mean that I hate him, or think everything about him is bad. After all, the only thing I know about him is that he started QFC and his in-laws were Sam and Althea Stroum, the Seattle Philanthropists who owned Shuck’s Auto Supply and Pay ‘n Pak.
I trust that if you are unfortunate enough to be stricken with cancer (and I sincerely hope that doesn’t happen), you will refuse to go to Fred Hutch, because they accepted a donation from the Sloans, and you feel that Stuart and Molly Sloan only donated that money for tax purposes.
Principles are principles, after all.
Tenny, you posted an article fro 6 years ago by someone who has not worked there for years. The Stranger does not need to reference every single they have posted ever, that’s ridiculous.
@11: A superb reply. Well done.
Denny Blaine is considered a queer beach by those who frequent it, who a large portion are queer. Other people who go there may not be queer and don’t consider it a queer beach themselves maybe but that does not negate the fact that a large amount of people who go there frequently are queer and consider it to be – additionally they are not being exclusive about it either.
Consider the CD. It is known as a Black neighborhood. Do other people live there that are not Black and have no connection to the Black community and therefore to them it is just their neighborhood? Yes. But this does not mean that it can’t be called a Black neighborhood.
Nudity is legal everywhere in Seattle. Denny Blaine Park has a beach. Due to its seclusion and therefore feeling of safety, it is the most common beach to be nude at in Seattle. Therefore, most people consider a nude beach. It’s not the Stranger deeming it so, it is the overall community of Seattle.
This is a daily quick news & culture blog. You are not only demanding too much of it but also are trolling for troll’s-sake. Get a life and move on.
Catalina,
you said he is not all bad and then used his donation as your evidence. My comment was that doesn’t mean shit about being a good person when very rich people donate money. Nor did I say that I don’t support Fred Hutch because they took his money – I don’t care who they got it from or whether the guy is good or bad – I was in no way declaring a principle on the issue. I simply said that giving money doesn’t make you a good person, especially for the rich.
@14: “queer” has become such a malleable (and hence meaningless) term that it no longer is exclusively homosexual. Straights and trans can be “queer” too.
“queer” is a term used by adolescent girls who are overweight and have not yet captured a boyfriend.
@12: Since you missed it again, the Stranger persistently ignores its own previous reporting because that reporting supports the park’s neighbors. Those neighbors do not want disgustingly lawless behaviors to remain at (or return to) the park. The Stranger wants to portray the park’s neighbors not as persons who simply want the park usable by all, but as anti-gay, prudish NIMBYs, who want to prevent lawful uses of the park. So, the Stranger’s own previous reporting must go down the Memory Hole, so that it cannot support the neighbors’ concerns about behavior which may still be happening.
No tenny I did not. If you read your article mentioned, it’s a single sentence about Denny Blaine in an article about water pollution.
You clearly googled or searched within the slog for “Denny Blaine” and looked through the results for negative content to then reference bc you have no life. Tell me that’s not true, how do else would you have a 6 year old article at the ready.
As the actual story states, the people who frequent the beach are a community and protect it, so any issues happening in 2019 supposedly have been addressed. Does some outsider issues still happen? Yes that’s life. And again the community deals with it. You’re not winning this you fucking troll.
feebs, if you can’t understand it, just ignore it.
@20: ‘You clearly googled or searched within the slog for “Denny Blaine” and looked through the results for negative content to then reference bc you have no life.’
You’re giving me far too much credit. I believe commenter hbb was the first to notice that story:
‘Here’s how the Stranger used to characterize Denny Blaine:
“voyeurs and pervs seem to have colonized Denny Blaine, so wear shoes if you don’t want to get sperm between your toes”
‘When did this morph into merely “enjoying a legally protected right to nudity?”
‘*https://www.thestranger.com/horrors/2019/07/22/40831261/welcome-to-summer-dont-drink-the-water’
(https://www.thestranger.com/news/2024/07/26/79620996/the-photos-denny-blaine-donor-stuart-sloan-sent-to-seattle-mayor-bruce-harrell/comments/23)
“Tell me that’s not true, how do else would you have a 6 year old article at the ready.”
Because the Stranger has been flogging this “issue” since at least 2023, and so there have been many headline posts and discussion threads about it here — one of which contained hbb’s comment, above. Please do try to keep up.
“… Denny Blaine in an article about water pollution.”
If you’re trying to say the condition of the park wasn’t anything for neighbors to have concerns about, then that’s a really strange way to make your point, but you just gotta do you, I guess.
“…any issues happening in 2019 supposedly have been addressed.”
That’s actually the point the people who live near the park have disputed. As the Stranger’s “journalism” consists of taking one side’s word as gospel truth, and the “community” of persons is that side in this never-ending, vitally-important story, the Stranger simply reports their assertions as fact. In service of that “fact,” the Stranger has repeatedly ignored its own previous reporting on the story, which could have told you something about whether to believe that assertion or not. But it didn’t. Again, you just gotta do you:
“You’re not winning this you fucking troll.”
You’re not racking up much in the way of valid statements here, are you?
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