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Stan Henry papers, 1966-2002

Overview of the Collection

Creator
Henry, Stan
Title
Stan Henry papers
Dates
1966-2002
Quantity
22.58 cubic feet (24 boxes and 1 folder)
Collection Number
5558
Summary
Papers of an author, AIDS activist, and social worker in Seattle, Washington
Repository
University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections
Special Collections
University of Washington Libraries
Box 352900
Seattle, WA
98195-2900
Telephone: 2065431929
Fax: 2065431931
speccoll@uw.edu
Access Restrictions

Open to all users.

Records are stored off site; advance notice required for use.

Request at UW

Languages
English
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Biographical Note

Stan Henry was born on October 9, 1951 in Angola, Indiana, and spent his childhood and adolescence in that state, graduating from Harrison Hill High School in Fort Wayne. His interest in and talent for writing was displayed at a young age, when several of his poems appeared in nationwide anthologies of poetry written by high school students. Mr. Henry began his undergraduate studies at the University of Evansville, and spent three semesters in England through a study-abroad program, studying at Harlaxton College in the city of Grantham, Lincolnshire. After his return, he transferred to Purdue University, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1975.

Mr. Henry chose to continue at Purdue for his graduate studies, enrolling in a master’s degree program in the area of family studies and counseling. From 1975 to 1977, Stan worked in a variety of capacities on the Purdue campus, culminating in a year spent working in the Office of University Relations as an administrative assistant. During these years, Mr. Henry first made it known that he was homosexual, and criticized the family studies program for its poor coverage of non-traditional families.

After receiving his M.S. from Purdue in 1977, he left Indiana and traveled to Alaska to work at what was then called Alaska Methodist University in Anchorage. Mr. Henry arrived at the university as it reorganized itself: the institution would rename itself Alaska Pacific University in 1978. During his two years at the university, he held a variety of positions, serving as an instructor, as the director of the residence hall, and as acting director of admissions up to his departure in August of 1979. His service to the university brought him into close contact with the new university president, Glenn Olds, and the president’s wife, Eva Olds, both of whom remained friends and correspondents of Mr. Henry’s long after his time at the school.

Mr. Henry chose to leave Alaska Pacific in order to pursue his career as a writer. He hoped to find a job where he could more easily make time for writing, and turned down at least one job offer because it would have taken him to a location where he could not easily get parts for his typewriter. Ultimately, he settled in Seattle in late 1979, the city he would call home for the rest of his life.

His writing career as an adult began in 1980, when Northwest Oasis, a regional literary magazine, published a poem and a piece of short fiction written by him. Mr. Henry continued to submit short stories for publication, as well as excerpts from novels in progress, over the following two decades. His writing often dealt with sexuality and questions of sexual identity, and was often implicitly autobiographical. He preferred to publish under a pseudonym, often using the name "Staszek" as a reference to his Polish ancestry. He began to use this pseudonym in the early 1990s, when he began a period of pen-pal relationships with gay men in Eastern Europe, before the break-up of the Soviet Union. Mr. Henry visited one of these men in Poland, at which time he began to use "Staszek," a Polish diminutive for "Stan" or "Stanley." Mr. Henry also often used the pseudonym "Hanker Stone" as a play on his own name, as "Hanker" or "Hank" is a nickname for Henry, and "Stone" is etymologically related to "Stan." He also liked the poetic implications of both "Hanker" and "Stone."

Mr. Henry's work was published in Seattle Gay News, Paper Radio, Sacred City, Puck, and OUT/LOOK, among other periodicals. Mr. Henry’s involvement in the Esperanto community led him to translate some of his stories for publication in Esperantist periodicals, as well. He assembled a collection of his stories to be published as an anthology by Permeable Press in 1995: Three-Hand Jax and Other Spells was nominated that year for a Lambda Literary Award. Then, in 1998, Mr. Henry published his second book-length work, Wind of Knives, through the small publishing company he had created (Okama Press).

Mr. Henry spent most of his writing career drafting and revising two novels, neither of which were ever published in full, although excerpts from both novels were published as stand-alone pieces of short fiction. He began his first novel in the late 1970s. It was originally titled Hankering (a reference to another of his pseudonyms, "Hanker Stone"), but was retitled Ploonarking (a word invented by Mr. Henry) not long after producing the first draft. He later worked on a much-revised draft of Ploonarking with his friend, the author Bill Schelly: the two were listed as co-authors on the title page of that manuscript. In the late 1980s, his focus shifted to Enkidu, a novel that drew in part from the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

Mr. Henry’s writing also appeared in collaboration with Carl Vaughn Frick, a comic book artist living in San Francisco, in the late 1980s. Their work, entitled Watch Out, was listed as one of the influential gay-themed comics of the 1980s in an article appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008. Mr. Henry had a history of involvement with the community of gay comic book creators, having served as the local distributor for Howard Cruse’s Gay Comix publication in the early 1980s. He had other connections to the San Francisco literary community as well, having organized and promoted Armistead Maupin’s first PR tour to Seattle in the early 1980s.

Mr. Henry also wrote works for the theatre. He wrote two short plays, Make Me and Somebody...Please, that were produced in Seattle in 1986 and 1990, respectively. His most ambitious work was a full-length musical based on the lives of two brothers, George and Michael Harris, who were active as actors and performers in the 1970s and 1980s. The musical, which was entitled Hibiscus (George Harris’s stage name), focused on George’s ground-breaking work as a drag performer and as the founder of the Cockettes, and on how Michael was affected by George’s death in 1982 of AIDS. The musical, which Mr. Henry (writing as "Rebecca Stone") co-authored with Michael Harris, was performed at the Pilgrim Center for the Arts in Seattle in 1990.

Mr. Henry became involved in the response to the AIDS crisis shortly after the first diagnosis of AIDS in Washington State was announced in 1982. In the spring of 1983, he co-founded the Seattle AIDS Support Group (SASG) with Josh Joshua and Ann McCaffray, and began working as a group facilitator immediately. He went on to train other facilitators, and remained active in SASG for many years. When it became obvious that there were few local resources for heterosexuals with AIDS, Mr. Henry took the initiative to create a support group specifically for that population, and acted as its facilitator. Mr. Henry was an active supporter of many other local AIDS advocacy groups, including the Seattle Gay Clinic, the Northwest AIDS Foundation, and the Chicken Soup Brigade (he assisted substantially in the creation of the latter two organizations). Mr. Henry’s career also kept him in close contact with people suffering from AIDS and other serious health conditions: he worked at Virginia Mason Medical Center starting in 1980, and moved on to the Pike Market Medical Clinic in 1983 (where he was voted one of the two "Pike Market Sweethearts" in 1987), followed by the Department of Social Work at the University of Washington in 1988. After leaving the Department of Social Work in 1990 to pursue his writing full-time, he accepted a position as a patient advocate in the Social Work Group at Harborview Medical Center in 1991. The strain of this advocacy work, when combined with the deaths of many of Mr. Henry’s friends and support group members during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and early 1990s, proved too difficult for him, and he left Harborview in the summer of 1993.

He stepped away from the arenas of health care and social work entirely, and worked as a freelance technical writer for his own company, WAREwithal, before taking a job at Adobe Systems. At Adobe, Mr. Henry rose through the ranks in the Technical Support team quickly, and became the manager of their Web production team and Technical Support team in 1999. Stan Henry died in December of 2003.

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Content Description

The papers of Stan Henry consist of incoming and outgoing correspondence, literary manuscripts by Mr. Henry and others, publications, ephemera, clippings, photographs, audio and video recordings and other material. The papers primarily document his activities as an author and publisher, as an activist on behalf of people with AIDS, and as a social worker. They focus particularly on Mr. Henry’s work in these communities as a resident of Seattle from 1979 to 2003. The collection also contains extensive correspondence with friends and family that depicts Mr. Henry’s lifelong exploration of his identity as a homosexual and his connections to the international gay community.

Mr. Henry’s correspondence has been divided into distinct sections which reflect the organization of the collection as it was received from the donor. Mr. Henry’s correspondence from the late 1970s to the late 1980s has been organized by year in a series titled "General correspondence." The correspondence of several individuals was stored separately from the main body of correspondence by Mr. Henry: these documents have been kept in a separate series title "Correspondence arranged by correspondent." Mr. Henry stored some correspondence (almost entirely from the late 1980s to the early 2000s) alongside ephemera, publications, manuscripts, and other documents, sorted roughly by date. These documents have been retained in their original relationship to each other in a series titled "Chronological files".

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Use of the Collection

Restrictions on Use

The creators' literary rights have not been transferred to the University of Washington Libraries.

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Administrative Information

Arrangement

Organized into 3 accessions.

  • Accession No. 5558-001, Stan Henry papers, 1966-2002
  • Accession No. 5558-002, Stan Henry papers, circa 1980s-2000
  • Accession No. 5558-003, Stan Henry papers, 1991-1997

Preservation Note

Records are stored off site; advance notice required for use.

Custodial History

A portion of the manuscript materials included in this collection were transferred by Stan Henry to Wendy Lustbader for safe-keeping during his lifetime. These materials were included in the donation of Stan Henry's papers to the University of Washington Libraries, and were reincorporated into the collection during processing.

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Detailed Description of the Collection

 

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Subject Terms

  • AIDS (Disease)--Patients--Services for--Washington (State)--Seattle
  • AIDS (Disease)--Washington (State)--Seattle
  • Gay authors--Washington (State)-- Seattle--Archives
  • Gay men--Washington (State)--Seattle--Archives
  • Gay social workers--Washington (State)--Seattle--Archives
  • Homosexuality--Social aspects
  • Patient representatives--Washington (State)--Seattle--Archives
  • Personal Papers/Corporate Records (University of Washington)

Personal Names

  • Cruse, Howard--Correspondence
  • Frick, Vaughn--Correspondence
  • Harris, Walter Michael, 1951- --Correspondence
  • Henry, Stan--Archives
  • Olds family--Correspondence
  • Olds, Eva B.--Correspondence
  • Olds, Glenn A. (Glenn Alvero), 1921-2006--Correspondence
  • Olds, Linda E.--Correspondence
  • Schelly, William, 1951---Correspondence

Geographical Names

  • Seattle (Wash.)--Social conditions--20th century


2011 (Last modified: 11/17/2020)

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