Hanna Brooks Olsen's Book on Seattle Madam Lou Graham Was Almost Never Published

For stories about women and People of Color, that's too often what happens.

by Megan Burbank

If you've heard about Lou Graham, a fixture of early Seattle history whose story is often reduced to its most scandalous parts, you probably only know that she was a madam. But her story is more complex than that, and it ties into a broader conversation about the role immigrants, sex workers, and other early Seattleites from marginalized communities played in the history of the Northwest — and how little we actually know about them.

So when I found out writer Hanna Brooks Olsen was at work on a book about Graham, I was intrigued. I first met Hanna years ago — the Northwest journalism community is small — when she was at Seattlish, a GIF-heavy blog devoted to sharp analysis and refreshingly bratty insights into the city's wonkiest policy weeds. As a 26-year-old reading her words from a short-lived, chaotic nonprofit job in the limbo before my journalism career really took off, I felt grateful for Seattlish, which made legible a city often too addled by its own devotion to relentless process to make much meaningful or lasting social change.

Hanna writes with rare clarity and a strong voice. She always has, and she's simply one of my favorite local writers, full stop, but she faced a number of challenges getting Lou Graham's story out into the world, ultimately opting to self-publish Notoriously Bad Character: The True Story of Lou Graham and the Immigrants and Sex Workers Who Built Seattle, which documents the life of Lou Graham to the extent that it's possible, and also raises some important questions about how marginalized voices get left out of traditional histories — and how that might be rectified. Here's what Hanna had to say about Lou Graham, the limitations of the publishing world, and what we can learn from a woman who was so much more than the shock value often tied to her story.

Megan Burbank: Reading what you've written about Lou Graham, it seems fairly obvious that there would be a lot of interest in her story and her contributions to Seattle history. She was a cinematic character with an outsized influence during Seattle's outlaw era. I can see the limited-series pitch now. Why was it so hard to place this story with a traditional publisher? What is it about marginalized people's stories that traditional publishers get squirrely about?

Hanna Brooks Olsen: This is a question I've been asking myself a lot. Lou Graham feels like a character who should have already been on a period piece. She was flashy and strange and highly involved in so many different aspects of city life. And it's not just her — there are so many characters (John Considine, impresario who shot and killed a former chief of police in a drugstore, and Emma Taylor, the police matron, are two that come to mind) that would be so fun to write into a historical fiction of sorts. But what I ran into was really twofold. First was just the overall gatekeeping that's endemic to publishing. It's an industry that's had a hard time figuring out how to keep up with demand — people do read a lot! They just read in a lot of different ways — while also failing to keep up with the needs of writers and editors. As a result, I think that a lot of the decision-makers are just not in touch with the rest of the world. Like, if a career path (like publishing and, honestly, journalism) requires people to work for poverty wages for years on the promise of some kind of prestige, then you're going to have an industry that's mostly full of people who can afford that life through other means. Which means that it's just really hard to get working-class stories told, because the people who decide what's interesting or marketable don't necessarily understand or identify with those stories. And that's the second issue I ran into, which was that the expectations of whose story is "enough" have long been determined by a very specific group of people with a very specific mindset.

At first, I was told that there wasn't enough material to write a book about Lou Graham, which is technically true in that there are too many gaps for a traditional biography. But it's also true that if that's how we limit whose stories we tell, we will only ever be telling and retelling the histories of the same people. If you need letters and journals and lots of primary resources to tell a story, then you're only going to be telling the stories of people who had the time, education, lineage, and resources to write those things, to keep them, and then to ensure their safe passage to the next generation.

And that's just not realistic, especially with someone like Graham. I was able to trace her family back through Germany and, unsurprisingly, I hit a lot of dead ends (and a lot of deceased relatives) between 1910 and 1950. One of her relative's death certificates is stamped with the wax seal of the Third Reich. So, like, yeah, a lot of those potential primary sources are gone — but I don't think that means it's a story that no one cares about, especially since a whole lot of people seem to care about it.

Also, there just wasn't really that much really rich Seattle historical writing in the last few decades. That's changing now as the face of who writes about history changes, though, which I love. I think there's more Northwest-centered historical writing now than there has been in a long time.

Seattle history is full of men whose names we know, but they were often more integrated into the historical record to begin with, for obvious reasons. As someone linked up with underground economies, how much do we actually know about Lou Graham? What documentation exists? And how did you separate out the myths while you were writing her story? What were some of the weirdest lies you encountered about her?

One of the issues that my original publisher had with this book was the absence of letters and journals. That just meant I needed to look at the kind of peripheral footprint a person might lead. Obviously, newspapers played a huge role. There are a lot of newspaper archives that are available. And while she did operate in the sex work industry, basically everything was cash or trade at that point in Seattle, so there's not such a huge difference in how the transactions are recorded. She had a lot of cash and she liked to spend it.

There are also court records, property information, and civic materials. One of the richest sources of information, though, was her estate records. Her estate records had an enormous number of receipts, bills, letters, and notes that really demonstrate her daily life. Looking at what she got laundered — a lot of sheets, no surprise there — and how much food or ice she got delivered is kind of an intimate way to fill in the details. I even found a receipt from the doctor who treated her when she died. And there was an accounting of everything she owned after she died, which was really informative; I'll never get over the "wine cellar" that is listed as having only a few wine glasses but, like, more than a dozen highball glasses. Details like that are so personal to me.

Graham was also such a character that I found her in numerous books and records. Her brothel was kitty-corner from a Catholic church. I went to the Catholic diocese to look through their archives to see if I could find any mention, and I learned a lot about the priest, Father Prefontaine, who seemed like the kind of man she would've definitely been neighborly with. Judge J.T. Ronald, a pretty famous Washington attorney, represented her for some time. He mentions her (without naming her) in his autobiography, so that was helpful. And she pops up in a handful of fictional accounts which actually seem to be pretty accurate depictions. So there are a lot of little pieces, but I relied on what I could nail down, like shipping manifests that show her coming and going from Seattle. I found that a lot of the myths came down to a handful of people who wanted a good story — but one thing I learned as a journalist is that nothing is too good to check.

What do you wish people knew about Lou Graham, or the immigrants and sex workers who contributed to the city's early history?

Mostly, I found myself wishing that people could have a little more empathy for the life situations people were in. It didn't occur to me until I was researching Asa Mercer and his bridal procurement plan that many of the women on the East Coast toward the end of the Victorian period were struggling to figure out what life was going to look like in the wake of the Civil War. This horrible, bloody war was fought on their land, in front of their eyes or very nearby, and in the end, their economies were left in tatters. The Union wasn't buying uniforms by the trainload anymore, which meant a lot of women who'd had jobs sewing on buttons while they waited for their spouses to return were out of work — and, often, out of a husband. And that's just one example of the bigger context. But, like, imagine moving out West because it has to be better than the stinking, muddy, horrible place that you live — and realizing that you can make twice as much money in a bed house than you can as a housekeeper. These are not salacious circumstances — they're economic.

I also think that it's always really important within historical research to remember who's not in the story. Indigenous people who were literally banned from the Seattle business district — from their own land — unless they had someone that colonizers needed. The Chinese Americans who operated a lot of the businesses around the Pioneer Square area and who ultimately lost their savings and their land during Chinese Exclusion or later, during the Second World War. Obviously, it's impossible to talk about sex work without talking about racism and colonialism — but even that's hard because there's just so much we don't know. We know that Graham employed girls of all backgrounds — we can see it in their arrest records, in the reports from the police and the news about who was there, etc. — but really often, they didn't even have last names, or at least those names weren't captured. So their stories are really hard to tell, as well. And I think that's important — when people are tittering about "seamstresses," or gushing over the perception that Lou was a queer icon, I think something gets lost. Yes, by all accounts she was a good boss — better than a lot of the men, to be sure — and yes, the women did earn a good living. But many of them weren't in this line of work because they wanted to be. We're still talking about a time when it was very difficult for women, especially Women of Color, to support themselves.

Anything else that feels important to you?

There's also a huge amount of this research that has reminded me of how important media literacy is. I see these huge viral videos on TikTok all the time where it's just someone reading a historical figure's Wikipedia page and all of the comments are like "SO COOL, I HAD NO IDEA" but like, they still don't have any idea, because that information isn't necessarily accurate or contextualized. But because someone else has presented it to them, it must be true. That's the game of information telephone that spreads false information around — when the real info is honestly very cool!

But people want these stories. People want history. They just don't want it to be so dry and, like, singular in origin. I wish that we had more people contributing to this conversation and this work and actually doing it. It seems very clear to me that when we hold up just one or two arbiters of the story that we end up with a kind of univocal understanding of the past. And that's no good for anyone. I want our cities and states to put more money into digitizing the archives. I want more resources for folks who want to do the research but maybe don't know how. So maybe I just want public schools to be amply funded so that kids can do this kind of investigation.

I do not want to be the sole keeper of Lou's story. I want someone to challenge my findings and do their own reading. I want someone to uncover the letters she wrote to her family back in Germany or the link to San Francisco. I have helped a number of people get started on this research and I am very happy to do so. It's not about being the first person or even the best person to turn all of this up — for me, it's about how important it is to surface the stories of people who have typically been left out, especially those that have been purposefully omitted due to these exact structural issues. If we decide whose story is "worth" telling based on what written or photographic materials they left behind, then we're making a really specific choice about who matters, generally. The gatekeeping in historical research and storytelling has created a perception of what our collective past might have looked like. I hope that, more than anything, this encourages people to be critical of the stories they hear and to do their own deep historical research — visit those archives! Use your library card to read old newspapers! Look at sources. Double-check citations. Just because you see a TikTok that tells a "historical" story doesn't mean it's correct. Just because a Wikipedia page says something doesn't mean it's fully vetted.

And more than anything, I want readers to really value these real stories of real people. The facts are so much more fun than the falsified versions, and they're surprisingly easy to access.

📸 Featured Image: "Notoriously Bad Character" book cover. (Photo courtesy of Hanna Brooks Olsen)