Seattle Gay News, Pink Umbrellas Love Rainydaze
Seattle Gay News’ Andrew Hamlin interviews Zola McDaniel
Booze. Drugs. Sweat. Blood. Chaos. Madness. And through all of it, music. That’s the ’90s grunge essence of Pink Umbrellas Love Rainydaze, Seattle author Zola McDaniel’s new book of short stories of life in the day-to-day trenches, with alliances, attitudes, and even identities rapidly in flux: life the way she lived it.
“When I wrote for The Rocket, I knew a lot of people in bands who were Gay, or Bi, or Transitioning into a new way of being,” McDaniel told the SGN, adding how she discovered her own Queer identity at an early age. “Most had to keep it on the DL. There was pressure from fans, family, and record companies to have a certain kind of ‘checkable-box’ image. Not to mention how dangerous it can be to be out. I wrote this for them. The characters are composite, because outing people is bad karma.”
McDaniel grew up in Seattle’s Mount Baker Park community during the 1960s. Later, at Roosevelt High School, she said she felt like a ghost.
“I cut class more than I attended in 1977. I hung out with kids under the Ravenna Park Bridge and went to the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Neptune Theatre every weekend for a year,” she recalled.
One inspiration for McDaniel’s wild tales was the late, brave Wilum Pugmire, who was a goth, a queen, and a punk during a time when those things weren’t cool and could get your ass kicked for it.
“Wilum and I became acquainted through a story I wrote about Trans human rights, and the difficulties Trans people were facing ‘actualizing,’” McDaniels said. “I interviewed my roommate, who was enduring a yearlong trial period before she would be allowed to undergo surgery. It was ridiculous how the international medical community adhered to the ‘Benjamin Standards of Care’ and forced adults to live in drag for a year before being ‘allowed’ to have surgery.”
Wilum saw the article, wrote McDaniels a letter, and they later met up. She said she always admired his brave fashion choices, wit, and encyclopedic knowledge.
“He was a punk poet. He was openly Jewish and Mormon, and an author of many weird, Lovecraft-inspired books. He wrote punk rock cover stories for The Rocket. He wrote plays, did theater, and gave poetry readings. During Halloween, he performed as a haunted house ghoul in Georgetown for many years. He’d leap out of a coffin and scare the crap out of people for fun.
She’s grateful for the help of two seasoned authors: the late Charles R. Cross, Editor in Chief of Seattle’s Rocket music magazine, who wrote bestselling rock biographies, and who helped McDaniel edit her manuscript in 2024 then passed away prior to finishing; and Gillian G. Gaar, a longtime local rock scribe who has written twenty books. Gaar was a Senior Editor at The Rocket. She edited Pink Umbrellas Love Rainydaze in 2025, and kept original PNW ‘zine style intact. McDaniel was a freelance writer for The Rocket during the 1990s.
McDaniel hopes readers will takeaway a feeling of unity.
“The measure of a true Seattleite isn’t the amount of time they’ve spent here, or where they live now,” McDaniel said. “It’s not written in stone—or on a headstone. A true Seattle person loves the city and is kind to strangers. A true Seattleite understands compassion and inclusion to be the unspoken membership dues of our pay-it-forwarding community.”
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