Celebrating Pride and Innovation: The Ric Weiland Collection at MOHAI

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One of the stars of the display is the Weiland’s “Pegasus” costume, designed and worn for Halloween in 1983.

The costume consists of a foam horse head built on top of a construction helmet, a brown leather harness, white faux fur for the lower arms and legs, and white tights. Originally, it included a pair of white wings, but they did not survive the past few decades. The costume was designed to be body revealing, so seeing it on a mannequin doesn’t quite do it justice.

Weiland included a photo of himself in the costume in his Christmas card that year and kept a newspaper clipping from the Washington Cascade Voice that featured the costume. Perhaps most delightful about this costume and several others donated is the clear “do-it-yourself” element to them. As an early Microsoft employee, Weiland had more than enough money to commission something professionally made but making it himself was part of the fun.

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Many of the parties Weiland attended were hosted by the Tacky Tourist Clubs of America. The nonprofit organization was founded in Seattle in the early 1980s and sponsored parties and events to raise money for LGBTQ causes.

Pictured here is an invitation for their upcoming New Year’s Eve party, which raised money for the Chicken Soup Brigade, an organization that assisted people with illnesses including HIV/AIDs; Sound Impressions, a lesbian and gay mixed chorus; and Team Seattle, Seattle’s contingent of athletes heading to Gay Games III in 1990.

“Gay Nineties” historically referred to the 1890s and the previous use of “gay” to mean happy or merry. Here it is reclaimed as a hopeful slogan for the upcoming decade, reading, “The Gay Nineties will bring new challenges for all of us, testing our ability and commitment to work for truth, justice, peace and environmental sanity, while maintaining a sense of humor. The decade of victimization is behind us. The approaching one shall be a decade of determining our own destiny.”

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Weiland was part of Team Seattle’s contingent at the third Gay Games in Vancouver, BC. The Gay Games are an Olympics-like event that promotes athletes who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, sexually-fluid or gender-variant. The first event was held in 1982 in San Francisco and the next is planned for València, Spain in 2026. For the Vancouver games, Seattle was the third largest team represented. At the opening ceremonies, athletes were asked to wear the official Team Seattle T-shirt and jacket, with their own white shoes and white pants, shorts, or skirt.

Explore more Ric Weiland artifacts online in the MOHAI Collection.

Learn more about donating to MOHAI’s Collection.